Chapter Seventeen: Come Back George, My Stinking Brother!

Three hundred and seventy eight yawned. Nothing was happening. In fact there was a line drawn underneath nothing and this line represented ‘minus nothing’ and that was what was happening right now. Some eggs no longer had the energy to even muster up a yawn (and of course these were purely metaphorical yawns–they didn’t have mouths, gums or teeth but IF ONLY SOMEONE WOULD GIVE THEM A CHANCE!). Now they only moved every four or five days, just so they could test they were still half-alive. Still patiently waiting for the other half, the ghost-tails and then there’d be mouths, gums, teeth, arms, legs and faces and they’d be able to get out of their stultifying-ly, dull home and out into the world where they’d dance and bite down on crunchy apples and feel the final rays of sun filtering through the trees on an Autumn day and ride bicycles with the wind blowing through their hair and laugh when old Les Dawson clips came on the TV and he pretended to play the piano really badly. But none of this was going to happen. Word was, the plan had been called off. Now it was just about waiting for another egg to pass on to the big white minus four zillion and nothing that went on for eternity.

For the first two days, none of us were that worried about George. At least we were pretending that we weren’t but inside probably all had the heebie-jeebies. When something bad has happened, no one wants to be the first person to confront it. So instead we spent our time explaining to one another how George was probably staying in a Bed & Breakfast somewhere near the sea and was no doubt savoring his last few weeks of freedom and that perhaps he’d decided to visit a relative, perhaps someone we’d completely forgotten ever existed. We laughed when we said these things. We said it was probably a case of cold feet - he was becoming a Dad for the first time and he was only nineteen. Then Carla and Mum spent the day tidying his room and making space for all the baby things but you only had to look at George’s book collection (the entire Harry Potter saga, a well thumbed copy of a Jackie Collins book which he’d no doubt borrowed of Mum to read the dirty bits and a hundred assorted Manga magazines) to realise he was still a kid. And sometimes kids run away but they usually return once they’ve realised they’ll never survive on a pack of Dairylea Dunkers and a can of Fanta. And George would do the same.

But after two days of ringing his mates (who claimed they hadn’t seen him in months - in fact not since he’d taken up with Carla) and leafing though the family phone book, scanning for relatives that we hadn’t been in touch with since the 1980s, things dissolved into panic. We each eased ourselves into the panic in our own, individual way. Mum went into ratatouille overdrive until all the plates were stained red and none of us could contemplate ingesting another, sloppy, oil-drenched aubergine. And Carla reverted back to being a ‘pessimist extraordinaire’ and if George hadn’t been missing, I would have positively welcomed her flat, unresponsive tone; the tone that truly made Carla the woman I knew and held at arms length. Except in this situation, the last thing we needed was her terrible, ‘truth serum’. She immediately pointed out all the things that neither Mum nor I dared to say out loud. She’d push a piece of fat-soaked, courgette around her plate, just aimlessly chasing it with her fork, hoping it would fall onto the floor so she didn’t have to eat it and then she’d announce; ‘He’s killed himself. I know he has.’ And Mum and I wouldn’t say anything because we were both thinking exactly the same thing (even though George had been in high spirits recently and had in fact stopped stuffing himself with taramasalata and staying up till all hours playing Doom Quest VIII). So then Mum would clear her throat and stir the dreaded stew and we’d wait till Carla dragged yet another dark thought from the depths of our collective subconscious. I could tell Mum was trying to subdue Carla with her telepathy. But Carla had had too much practice being negative. Her negativity was a force field that no mortal would ever penetrate (apart from George and where was George when you needed him?)

‘I keep trying to think through all the places he might have gone. It just doesn’t make sense. I thought he was happy,’ Mum said contemplating the full pack of taramasalata that sat on the table between us.

I didn’t even bother getting a pitta bread. I just dipped my hand in and then shoved the pink goo into my mouth and swallowed. How was my panic playing itself out you may ask? I was eating. And drinking. And smoking. I was doing all three. I was like a pig with its mouth jammed in the swill bucket trying to forget that a trip to the abattoir was the next thing on the agenda. Mum saw this and moved the tub away from my grasp.

‘Why don’t you eat that? I’ve got mountains of the stuff,’ she said pointing to the pressure cooker which was the size of a small man’s swimming pool.
I considered finally telling her how much I hated her crisis food but the expression on her face told me she didn’t need any more bad news right now.
‘I remember that poem - it was so lovely,’ Mum said wistfully as Carla waddled into the kitchen.
She looked like she was taking part in some sort of terrible experiment and had been abducted by aliens who’d impregnated her with a baby ten times the normal size. She had to hold onto the band of tight skin under her stomach to stop the thing tearing right through her and dropping screaming onto the kitchen floor.
‘What poem?’ I said licking my fingers.
Perhaps George had disappeared into my body and was making me stuff myself. Next thing, I’d be watching Youporn.com all day.
‘Carla,’ Mum said, ‘Did George tell you about the note he left last time he disappeared? ‘There is a light and it never goes out,’ - isn’t that beautiful?’
Carla nodded her head about half a millimetre. A nod of assent that could only be measured by custom-made scientific instruments.
‘Well, we all die,’ she said lowering herself onto a chair.
As she sat down, her T-shirt rode up and the skin on her stomach was stretched so tight, you could actually see the outline of the baby’s spine. And if you looked close enough you could count how many hairs it had on its head. Perhaps it was a blessing not to be pregnant and have your offspring’s features literally stencilled into your internal organs. But I quickly felt a wave of longing and had to look away again.

‘It’s a Smiths song, ‘ I said. ‘George didn’t make it up. And it wasn’t even his cultural reference to steal in the first place. I hate the way kids just pick and mix whatever music they fancy these days.’
I lit a cigarette.
‘You can’t smoke in here!’ Mum said gesturing wildly at Carla.
Carla didn’t react. People got cancer. People died. Bad things were followed by more bad. I went into the garden and shut the French doors behind me. A cat was sitting on the bottom step that led up to the garden. I didn’t recognise this cat and it seemed like a messenger and perhaps it was bringing me news from another psychic plane. It was going to tell me where my brother was. Then it was going to tell me not to give up on having a baby. I sucked on the cigarette and waited. The cat stared impassively back at me, like cats do. Then it dug a small hole, worked its rear end into the dirt, peed and sloped off.

Where are you my brother with feet that stink of cheese? Where are you my brother with hair that grows in a hundred different directions? I looked up at the stars and closed my eyes, waiting for the smoke from my cigarette to spell out a message. If Mum was so damned telepathic, how come she didn’t know where George was? Did she have the same useless, psychic skills as me? Had I just imagined it when she’d read my mind and told me I was lovesick or hung-over or just about to get a cold or staying up too late? But then she’d never guessed the baby stuff and that had been going on forever. I felt vaguely disappointed about this - like finding out that your Mum isn’t really Barbara Streisand and she’s a pub singer from Bolton instead.

Then as I stood there, the vague aroma of cat piss rising up from the damp earth, a thought popped into my head. Perhaps George was in the one place, none of us had even considered. Perhaps he was right under our noses. Perhaps he was somewhere where there were hardly any people and there was peace and quiet unless a celebrity signing was underway. Perhaps George was in the bookstore!

I ran into the kitchen and stubbed my fag out in the sink.

‘He’s in the shop!’ I announced.
‘No he’s killed himself,’ Carla said groaning, ‘ I know it.’
‘No I know where he is. He’s in the stock room downstairs. It’s the perfect hiding place!’
Carla didn’t react and I realised I’d given the game away. The downstairs stock room was my special place- a place I very rarely visited but somewhere Carla would never find me. But the sacrifice was worth it. Something good was going to happen. The cat piss had spelled it out in the earth.
‘Well, we haven’t got anything else to do,’ Mum said, ‘It’s almost midnight and none of us is going to sleep tonight.’
I only hoped we’d find George before Carla turned us all suicidal.

When we got to the shopping centre, it was dark aside from an eerie green glow, which made it look like we were being filmed by night vision cameras. The security guard didn’t pay much attention and just looked relieved that Carla wasn’t in labour. And he quickly went back to watching TV. Carla let us inside and typed the password into the alarm system. Once we were in, it was clear that there wasn’t anyone about. But I tried to stay optimistic. The ‘three for the price of ones’ were stacked up against the stock room door and a life size model of a soap actress was next to the till clutching her new hardback - ‘Diary of a Glamour Puss.’ Carla sat down on a stool and stared at the luminous, yellow numbers burnt into the computer screen. All her features slipping downwards like a melted candle. It made me nostalgic for the days when she used to march around the store menacing us with her monotone chants - telling us not to slouch on top of the bean bags or ignore the customers who were queuing up to get Jamie Oliver’s latest culinary opus.

I passed through the stock room relatively quickly and of course there was no sign of George anywhere but then I opened the trap door that led downstairs. This was where we kept all the really good books, the ones that nobody bought. It had that proper library smell like stewed paper and mildew. An old fluorescent light flickered on automatically and you could see the shelves full of classics, most of them left untouched for years. Sometimes we’d come down here at Christmas and get a few armfuls because there’d be a few youngsters who’d buy them for their Mum (they were only £1.99 after all) and then if one of them was an A’ level text then they’d fly off the shelves for a month. But it wasn’t just the good stuff down here. I mean, is there any good reason you’d want a book entitled - ‘Microwave Cooking with a Bang’? or - ‘Wincey Willis’s Easy to Knit Mohair’?

I’d only been down here one or two times over the years. It wasn’t easy to get away with it what with Carla being on our backs all the time. I wasn’t even sure Simon remembered it existed. But I’d always planned to come down here more often. It gave you a real sense of perspective and made you realise that one day you’d be just as relevant to the world as a broiled microwave chicken in an over-sized mohair knit.

‘I’m off to check the toilets!’ Mum shouted from upstairs.
A terrible vision crept into my head- George hanging lifeless from the back of the door. But there was no sound from above and I proceeded to check the rest of the room. In-between two piles of books, stacked up to about six feet high, I spotted a dog-eaten blanket and an empty mug with leftover bits of Cup of Soup stuck to the inside. I bent down and sniffed the blanket, literally running the woollen edge under my nostrils and there was the same characteristic stink of next of kin. And then I reached for the books lying next to the stinky blanket and yes there was a Harry Potter and a Manga and underneath a Maths exercise book. When I opened it, it was covered in George’s characteristic, lazy scrawl (kids can’t write long-hand anymore, even their handwriting is half-baked). And I wanted to put the book down. I really did. I knew it was private and there is a rule that you should never read anything that belongs to someone else. Yet I also felt I had every right to read it because George had made us all terribly worried and we had to find out what he’d been up to and suddenly ‘I’ had become ‘we’ and WE were perfectly justified in making a decision collectively on behalf of the greater good of everyone.

‘What’s that?’ Mum said shining a torch onto my guilty face.
‘George’s bed,’ I said, hiding the book under my cardigan.
‘I thought I could smell him. THANK GOD!’
And Mum pulled the torch beam from my face so I could feel guilty in private. I heard her breathing heavily as she pulled herself back up the dusty staircase.

I opened the book and scanned the contents. My heart was thumping. Your heart thumps when you do bad things. It’s an easy enough warning system and you should try and listen to it. But I couldn’t. I had to find out what was going on inside my poor brain-damaged brother’s mind. At first the writing was impenetrable - some capitals, some ends of words that just trailed off and then became doodles of snails and bats and crows. Some cartoons which depicted crows swooping down on stick men who seemed to be dripping in taramasalata and then bombs being dropped on top of the crows and a giant ‘Master Crow’ (wearing a necklace with the name George inscribed on it) was pissing all over the men and the bombs.

It was if someone had screwed open my brother’s brain and all the bumbling confusion had tumbled out onto the page. And I’d thought George was okay! He should have been over the moon! Here was me with my rotten basket of eggs and there was George, all fresh and energetic and poised to be a Dad and yet these scribbling revealed a troubled psyche. An Etch a Sketch had run riot inside his head and it was scratching black doodles of panic and confusion.

Carla locked up the shop and re-set the alarm.
‘I didn’t even tell him the password, he must have watched me and written it down,’ she said.
She didn’t seem relieved to have discovered George’s hiding place. It had simply made her focus on a new set of worries. Many women are like that. Once you’ve swept one worry out the way, another one presents itself like a big hole unravelling in your new Wincey Willis jumper. We walked out to the car. It was one in the morning and the moon shone bright against a sky of inky black.

‘He’s having an affair,’ Carla said as she lowered herself into the front seat, her belly squashed up against the dashboard.
‘Don’t be silly,’ Mum said, starting the car.
‘I always thought he’d have an affair. He’s obviously been taking women down there. You have to be prepared for these things,’ Carla said grimacing as the car lurched forward and her baby’s spine grated against the hard plastic.
‘Shall we wait for him to come back?’ Mum said turning around to face me.
The guilt was now illuminated by moonlight. She frowned and then turned back to face the steering wheel.
‘We could be here all night.,’ I said, ‘Probably not a good idea in Carla’s condition.’
Mum nodded and we drove away. If we found George then I’d have to surrender the book and I needed the book in order to read his mind. WE were perfectly justified! It was for the COMMON GOOD AFTER ALL!

I didn’t tell Carla or Mum about the book. I felt bad for having taken it and it was too late to put it back. Once in bed, I opened up the back page and that’s when I saw it. A letter. George had written a letter. At first I thought it was some hate mail or something. There’d been a time when George had been in his early teens that he’d slipped a variety of terrible notes underneath my door and they’d usually say things like ‘I hate you’ or ‘You suck’. He handed one to Mum once that read, ‘You are not my real Mum,’ and she’d been really upset when she discovered it. He wasn’t quite so poetic back then. He was prone to fits of ill temper and the delusion that he was related to someone famous (or had that been me?) Except this letter wasn’t addressed to me, Mum or even Carla. And then I turned to the next page and there was another one, and another. And when I looked at the dates, they all started about the time that Carla got pregnant.

And the letters were all addressed to Dad.

But I didn’t cry. I was finding it increasingly difficult to cry anyway. You only get a certain quota of tears every year and I’d used mine all up blubbing over my decaying eggs.

Instead of crying, I thought about my brother (instead of just pretending to think about him). I thought about him properly. I travelled up into the sky; I whooshed past the moon and hovered over the shopping centre. I flew through the glass double doors and past the security guard (who was watching an infomercial about an exciting new product called a ‘Chin - Exerciser’) and then once inside the bookshop, I lowered myself down the steep staircase. There he was, scratching the hard, Cup of Soup powder out of his mug with the nib of his pencil. He stank of cheap cider and had obviously been down The Cartoon Club (one of his haunts from his past life as a grumpy teenager). Then I saw him resting his Manga book up against his chest and sliding down and bringing the blanket up round his neck. It was cold as a grave. Then he reached for his exercise book but of course it wasn’t there. And for a moment he was full of hope, like that moment when you think you’ve just seen a flying saucer but it’s actually a satellite. He thought my Dad had taken it. He thought time had somehow reversed and the cancer hadn’t happened and Dad was fit enough to clamber down into the stock room. You could even smell his pipe smoke still hanging in the air. And then I watched as slowly he realised that it wasn’t Dad, it couldn’t be Dad and it was like the sadness was coming up to hit him for the first time. Like when we’d just been called into the room and Dad’s face was all white and his eyes had sunken in and he was dead already even though the machine still forced his chest up and down.

I carried on watching George as the room filled up with sadness and all the good books and the not so good books were sad with him and the pages breathed in and out, in and out - the sadness creeping inside every page and out again until George nuzzled down into the blanket that stank of his cheesy self and fell asleep.

And who knew?
I had telepathic powers all of my own.