Clap Your Hands

I was five years old when my brother was taken, and six-and-a-half when he came back. Despite what my parents may have thought at the time, I was old enough to understand – not everything, but some things – and old enough to lay down strange and confused memories of both nights. Memories that even years afterwards, when they had fitted neatly into place and started making sense, still leaked messily into nightmares and woke me, on the edge of terror, short of breath and staring at the nursery window.

The nursery window is a rectangle made of squares made of orange light through the thin white curtains that don’t quite ever shut. I am five years old and by my bed the kaleidoscope lamp is still twirling slowly, blurred fishies swimming round the lampshade and on the wall next to it in splodges of blue and red and green. I have opened my eyes because there is a catspaw of cold air tickling the back of my neck and I roll over and there is Andrew talking to someone who is sat on the end of the bed. In one of the top squares of the window there is a light and I think that one of the fishies from the light has swum away and got lost and I want to tell Andrew to get it back, but when I try and roll over the plastercast on my arm thunks and hurts and the dry taste in my mouth won’t go away. I am five years old and three sleeps ago I fell off the climbing frame and right from the top where Andrew should have been watching me but he wasn’t and I landed half-off the boingy ground underneath and stood up and my arm felt funny and then it hurt and then it hurt and then it hurt and I had to go to hospital and get a plaster not like a small one but a big wooden arm on my arm and my mouth still tastes a bit like the medicine Mummy gave me before she put me to bed and now Andrew and someone else are standing at the end of my bed and Andrew says no no we’ll come back for him he can’t his arm his arm. And just like that he is gone, and I wake up.

When I asked where Andrew was the next morning my parents wouldn’t tell me. After a while they said he had gone to stay with his friends, like a sleepover, but for longer. I asked them if he had gone to stay Moira and they said yes, he had gone with Moira. But there must have been some problems with the school because they ended up moving me a few weeks after Andrew went. Just like that my big brother had gone and I was in a new school, my plaster cast full of misspelt names that I’d never see again. Staring round the playground in bafflement, wondering if any minute now the whirling anoraks and footballs would move aside and there he would be, running over to me with a handful of TopTrump cards, ready to try explaining the rules to me one last time.

Being an only child wasn’t that bad at first. Once the cast was off and I could run around and join in and swing off the climbing frame (but never again right to the top, I was always a bit nervy of heights after that) I made new friends quick enough. And my parents spoilt me rotten, icecream and chocolates and promising a puppy, and I was still young enough for that kind of thing to work, to distract me, for a while.

I wondered. Of course I wondered. You don’t lose a sister and then a brother without wondering, even if you are only five years old. Well, three and a bit the first time, so I suppose I didn’t wonder so much then. But I could still remember Moira, even if it was a hazy memory of skinny arms lugging me up the stairs, black hair curling over my eyes as she peekabooed. And me and Andrew had always talked about her, late at night, until I thought I remembered some of the things he told me, or said I did, so he would carry on talking to me and not fall asleep. But what you have to understand about my family – about our family – is that they – the parents, the grownups - don’t talk about it. That’s the only way they can cope. If they talked about it, you see, they’d have to think about it. Look closer than the picture they’ve painted for themselves about it. Think about how it might look to someone else. Realise that however much you want them to be, however much they might look like them, the thick clumps and spatters of turpentine and oilpaint aren’t the same thing as pretty flowers and butterflies at all.

It got worse very gradually, and then much worse all of a sudden. They started looking over their shoulders all the time. Or looking over mine. I remember running towards my mother as she stood slightly apart from the other parents at the school gates, a sweater slung around her shoulders, handbag pinned tightly between her elbow and her hip. From ten, eight yards off seeing her beautiful blue eyes suddenly snap into focus as I appeared in front of her, and waiting for her to smile – and then the blue darkening as her eyes unlocked from mine, re-focusing on the middle distance. Scanning, waiting for another hurtling cluster of cagoule and scraped knees and gym bag and homework books to detach itself from the whirling mob behind me, yelling the last words of a game and following me straight into her arms. That she no longer held open like wings but wrapped tightly around herself, even in summer, blinking at me and swallowing and trying to stay warm. To and from school she would have me practise my French lessons, repeating and repeating until I said them just right. When you’re young languages come easier to you. I was top of my class in French. I practised under my breath in the playground all day, so that I would know the right answers to the questions that she would ask me in her lilting foreign voice on the way home.

Christmas that year. The house was filled with cousins and aunts and uncles. After the table had been cleared the cousins were all sent upstairs to play while the grownups drank small glasses of port and talked about politics. We sat in the nursery. Iwasn’t used to there being other people being in there. I had got used to being on my own, lining up the toys in elaborate plans of attack across the carpet. Muttering orders to them to fill the quiet air, repeating my French lessons over and over, in case the words slipped off my tongue with disuse and got lost. So that I would be able to make Mummy smile as the car pulled over. I was one of the only children at the school to get dropped off in a car every morning. I was used to playing games on my own, making up sets of rules, organising things exactly perfect. Now that there were other people in the nursery I was nervous. It looked unfamiliar somehow, everything tidied and put away. The books closed and lined up on the shelf. Even my teddy bear, lying on the pillow waiting for me to come to bed, stared up blankly at the ceiling as if he didn’t recognise me. Michael, who was four years older than me, told me that three years ago, when I was a tiny baby, I had cried all the way through Christmas dinner until Moira had taken me outside in the snow, pulling faces and waving my hands at them all through the dining room window. I did not believe him when he told us this because I did not believe that I had ever been a baby. I remembered my French lessons perfectly, but I did not remember six months, a year ago, when playing with the soldiers had mainly been an endlessly frustrating series of attempts to stand them up, manipulating their spiked, heavy bodies with my fat-padded fingers, watching them fall again and again even though their feet were fixed so firmly to the small lead rectangles of grass. Michael crouched on the nursery floor, his breath smelling of the food we had all eaten, and Leo, his younger brother, fingering my marble collection spread out across the dark green carpet. Leo had heard the story before because when Sam’s voice dropped down into a secret whisper he jerked his head up and watched me, coolly, waiting to see what would happen. Sam told me that after I had stopped crying, Moira had started making a snowman and put me down under a hedge for safekeeping, all bundled up in a too-big snowsuit and blankets. When Sam had come out with the carrot for its nose, he said, my nose had gone blue and they all thought I was dead. The grownups had all assumed that Moira, out of sight where she crouched in the snow beneath the bay window, had brought me back inside long since. They had thawed me out in a bucket of cold water and then a bucket of warm, and Moira had been sent to bed without any pudding. Sam swore on his own mother’s life that the story was true, and Leo watched me with round blue eyes that gave nothing away, softly chinking a handful of glass alleys in his hand like coins. I turned to Jack, my oldest cousin. He was fifteen, and mortified, I suppose, at having to share a bedroom with the little ones, too old for being the one in charge to be any sort of consolation. He was reading a book, lying on Andrew’s bed with his grey-socked feet propped up on the pillow. It was the first time that my mother had changed the sheets and blankets since Andrew had gone. Jack snorted and told us all to shut up and stop being stupid. I watched Leo sliding my king-size alley into his pocket, the red and blue twist through its clear centre like toothpaste. He caught me looking, blue eyes like my mother, and suddenly the alley was back on the carpet with the rest, as if it had never happened, as if I had blinked and the whole thing had been wiped away whilst my own eyes were closed. Later on I heard Jack in the corridor, telling Michael off, for mentioning Moira I suppose, threatening to give him a smack if he didn’t keep his mouth shut from then on. It wasn’t a white Christmas that year. Instead it rained, constantly, for days, a thick misty drizzle that pressed up against the windows as if it wanted to come in.

Nobody else mentioned Moira the whole time. By then they must have realised that when they did my mother tended to leave the room, so they’d stopped, although it was quite usual for them to talk about the others who weren’t there. My cousin Janey -- named after Geegee, my great-grandmother -- was away that Christmas too, and when my mother was upstairs two of my aunts chatted about how difficult it was to order school uniform in advance when you really just couldn’t estimate how they might have grown, both trying so hard to outdo each other with how relaxed they were about the whole thing that they didn’t notice that I was still in the room, carefully carrying round a bowl of nuts. Or that my father was standing by the decanters, staring very hard at the wall and talking to nobody for several minutes.

I did hear my parents talking about Andrew with my Geegee, my great-grandmother, just before she was due to leave -- on Boxing Day or the day after. I can’t remember what she was saying to them in her tiny, whispery voice, so perhaps I did not really hear her at all, but I do remember very clearly my father’s face as we all stood outside in the rain to see her off, and being scared at how angry he looked. The shiny black car pulled away, with Geegee sitting up very straight in the back seat and my father stared after it with his hand gripping my shoulder too hard.

It doesn’t matter that I can’t remember. I know exactly what she was saying. Telling my father that this was no different from any of the other times and that he should think of his position, and of the family, and of the children. Telling him not to be so selfish. Telling my parents, both of them, to pull themselves together. Exactly the same kinds of things that they all told me, years later, when I started asking questions, asking them why they let it happen. Pull yourself together. Hissing at me, eyes rolling. Not really expecting me to ever understand and so determined just to force me into giving in. Pull yourself together.

Which my father did, just like his brothers, and his cousins, and his uncles before him. Dozens upon dozens of them had all gone through this, he must have reassured himself. Dozens of report cards all saying the same thing.

Edward has settled in well, and seems to be adjusting well to the rigours of dormitory life. Thomas is a team player, and a credit to his house. Samuel demonstrates an admirable capacity for leadership, and takes after his brother on the field.

Generations of them, upper-lips stiff and never once turning sissy and crying for their mothers as the cars pulled out of the school gate. Winning their battles on the playing fields of Eton. They had already won theirs, which is why they were able to walk through life with that combination of pluck and insouciance that translates so easily into leadership and success. Persuasive men, adored men. Men whom other men would follow. Men whom would bang their fists on polished wood to decide matters of state importance.

I suppose that in the constant battle to preserve their ritual deceptions and dishonesties, to cling onto their memories and dreams, my family were really no different from any of the other families whose menfolk had come to occupy similar positions of power at the turn of the century. Commisions, positions, speculations; tiny footholds that they could use to drag themselves above the seething hoards of everybody else. Footholds that they were determined never to relinquish, but instead to extend, to reinforce by whatever means for their sons and their grandsons, so that in a few generations people would step onto what had been a tiny ledge and feel secure enough to relax and enjoy the view without even having to think about the scaffolding of bone that underpinned it and the fate of those who had occaisionally been pushed over the edge. The men who never had to drive themselves anywhere, the women whose fate it was to be endlessly described as elegant, even as they crookedly hobbled their way across a room with the aid of two sticks and a grandchild. Children who were beaten long after it had gone out of fashion amongst the lower echelons, but whose every wish stood a reasonable chance of being granted. Who could reach out their hand and touch the stars. Women who watched at windows and learnt how quickly love forgets before they even knew what it was.

And Geegee’s youngest brother, shot for cowardice, although nowadays they would at least have the decency to call it shell-shock. Uncle Toby, already ancient by the time I was born so I was only taken to see him once or twice in his ground-floor room with bars on the windows, straps at the side of his bed, where he’d been since he was twenty-four. Three of his brothers lost in the second War, and one dead four years after he was demobbed. My father’s sister Claire, who sent us strange postcards from a commune in America every few years until the mid-eighties when she went missing. She’s now been declared dead, legally, although they won’t admit it. His brother, drowned during his first term at Trinity. That was the other side of it all, you see. Decimated, we were. One after the other. Michael hasn’t long himself. Only in his forties but by God he looks older. Drink. I went to see him a few years ago, to ask him if he remembered anything about it all but his memory’s shot. He sits in the flat that Geegee left him, drinking and smoking and staring out of the window. Although he never had any children himself.

My father pulled himself together, but in doing so he pulled himself so far inwards that from that Christmas on my childhood memories include him only briefly, an ephemeral flicker at the corner of photographs and a cold stretch of mattress in the bed they had previously shared when I ran to my mother in the night. I would crawl into the covers, trying not to wake her up, but my knees against her stomach would wake her, instantly, and she would suddenly clutch me, sometimes gasping the wrong name before she could reach for the lightswitch. She would carry me back to my own bed straight away, even when I begged to stay with her. She would wrap herself in a blanket and sit down in the chair by the window, promising to wait there until I fell asleep. Or she would crouch down in the valley between the two beds and whisper stories to me, her face level with mine and her eyes following the drifting washes of light from cars outside as they swept across the walls.

Sometimes she would put me straight back into my own bed and walk out, leaving me alone with the fish lamp twirling on, and when I had cried myself out I would think that perhaps I could hear her breathing and whispering in the corridor outside the nursery, hear the boards creaking softly as she leant over to press her ear to the other side of the door.

When I am asleep Mummy will open the window again and it will be cold and one by one the fishies will swim out of it until they are stars. And Daddy will take me fishing with my fishing net and in the net will be Andrew and Moira but tiny. I am six years old now and tommorow morning Mummy will give me a tin of biscuits for the whole class to share. I am six years old and when I am asleep Daddy will come in and tell me a story and in the morning I will tell it back to him and he will be so surprised and then he will come in the car with us and we will all practise our French. Je mappel. Jahbeet. Wee. Non. Jem. Freets. Sieve oo play. Ma sur. Mon frer. Ma Sur. El sappel. Mon frer. Il sappel.

I’m fairly sure that a few weeks before Andrew came back, my mother tried to kill herself. She was in hospital for a few nights and I was told that she had been poorly but that she was fine now. We have never talked aout it since, any of us. I don’t think my father realised – I don’t think either of them ever knew – that I saw them in the bathroom before the ambulance came. I had woken up, branches tapping against the glass and the sodium glare of the streetlights pressing orange fingers down across my eyelids, in the middle of a storm. Walking across the corridor, through the bedroom, the bed with its covers still tucked down smooth. Running my hand across the brocade coverlet, so cold that it almost felt wet under my palm, to the open door of the bathroom where I could hear my mother moaning and the crunch as my father’s shoes skittered on the pieces of brown glass that had smashed on the floor. When I saw her face as it fell back over his shoulder, her legs over his shaking arm, I turned around and walked back. Smoothing my other hand over the cold brocade so that both of my palms would feel the same cold sheen on them, counting the same numbers of steps with each foot.

My father sat in the chair by the window at night until she came home. He didn’t read me stories, he just sat there, looking at his watch every now and then and waiting for me to fall asleep. When she came back she was pale and the dark circles were still under her eyes and I remember wondering why she kept saying that she was better now when she still looked so ill. I suppose whatever they were giving her was keeping her awake, or she wasn’t taking what she was meant to be, because by then she never seemed to sleep at all. I would wake up in the night and hear her in the corridor outside, or she would be sat in the chair again, staring out of the window, wrapped in the blanket that had once been on Moira’s bed.

It’s raining.

It was raining and what woke me up was a drip of water onto my face, so that for a minute I thought I was outside.

I didn’t recognise him. That’s how long it had been. He was standing beside my bed staring at me and I screamed and my parents opened the door straight away, they were wearing their clothes, they must not have been to bed yet. My mother grabbing Andrew by his shoulders and my father at the window, slamming it shut, something in his hand, shouting.

Shouting Moira’s name, and another boy in the room, soaking wet with his hair plastered to his head and shining in the light. Holding a dagger in his hand and lunging towards my father with a shrill scream which cut off suddenly, springing backwards, shock in his eyes and my father’s name hissing in the air.

Where is she what have you done with her why won’t you bring her back you said you would always bring them back!
Shouting Moira shouting and there is Andrew is it Andrew Andrew you are so tall I want to say but Mummy is holding onto him and shaking him and asking him and kissing him. Daddy is shouting at a boy older than me and the boy has a knife but now he is shaking his head and I am scared, scared of the knife, and of the boy. His eyes are hard and and his nails are black when he puts his hand round my wrist.
Come on!
And he pulls me out of bed and his feet aren’t on the floor any more.
Come on!
Don’t you want to have an adventure?
He swings an arm round and prickles the knife into my neck and my Daddy opens his hand and a light falls out. And the boy kicks the window open and Mummy is crying and Andrew is shaking out from her arms.
And the boy smiles at me and his teeth are yellow, and he smells of dead leaves and mud under hedges, of buried things.

My father stood aside from the window the moment the knife was at my neck, his hands falling empty to his sides. I remember trying to hold onto the curtains as he pulled me out, and then I was waking up in hospital.

What I told you about the scars, about my leg, was true, you see, it just wasn’t quite sleepwalking. I wish it had been. I was lucky to be alive. I landed mostly on the hedge, the iron railing only going through my thigh, which after all is a lot of meat and not much bone so if you get it in the right place and miss the arteries you tend to be alright. More common than you might think, too. Lots of burglars, my doctor once joked with me years later, but apparently a lot of kids skipping school, taking shortcuts. Haven’t quite realised, at that age, that he spikes are there for a reason, that a bloody great iron bar through your foot or your chin can do some real damage.

Mummy’s head at the window, she can’t see me down here in the dark. She’s looking up. Calling the wrong name. Saying come back come back and it’s not until she stops that she looks down and sees me, screams, Daddy’s footsteps on the pavement and the stars crawling around in the sky like bugs.

I can remember his eyes. Madness in them. Black under his nails. The smell. I was unconscious for a long time, you know. Not a head injury, just the loss of blood, and the shock I suppose. Nothing. My memories. Nothing really begins to make sense until the morning that Andrew was let in to the hospital to see me. Two weeks later. Lots of dreams.

I never understood why. He wasn’t what they thought. Why they all loved him. Sometimes it’s like I was the only one who ever saw him, even though I was the only one he left behind. Or one. One of the only ones.

Afterwards. My father tried to talk to me about it, when I was nine or ten and they were getting ready to send me to school, but when I told him that I refused to think kindly of someone who had nearly killed me he slapped me across the face. Told me that I would never understand. Told me that there was obviously something wrong with me, that I was the one who had ended it all because otherwise he would never have left me behind. Even my mother, I realised a long time later. She was my father’s second cousin. The same thing had happened to her, once, only once, when she was a little girl. She loved him too. It wasn’t me she had been calling for. It wasn’t Moira.

Moira was meant to be in France all that time, anyway. That’s what they had told people. I have an aunt who lives there. A skiing accident. A fall. High on the mountains. A small family service, and very few photographs of the grieving relatives made it to the press. I don’t know who they buried. Someone else. A favour called in. What choice did they have? They couldn’t have called the police, after three years. She was twelve when she went, fifteen when Andrew came back. She would have been fifteen. And Andrew told my parents that he hadn’t seen her, there, in the other place. Not a sign.

After a while he refused to talk about it at all. He told me some things, after we were meant to be asleep. About games becoming real. Starving children. Dead things rotting under the trees. He told me about magic, too, and flying, and places where fairies had once lived, but by then they were stories I no longer wanted to hear.

He’s nothing but a parasite, the boy. Stealing them, taking what he wants from them and sending them back half-empty. You have to listen to me. You have to believe. I know that you probably think I’m going mad, that all this is something horribly prosaic and to do with my father, that I need to go and see one of those therapist. That it’s just nerves about the baby. But they’re all waiting for you downstairs. They’ll drink your health and the baby’s from their crystal glasses and then they’ll sit you down and explain some things. They’ll tell you what a privilege it is. How you’re not to listen to silly me because honestly, the rest of the family have such marvellous tales to tell. Cabinet ministers, talking about Pirates and Indians. My mother, showing you the bones of a fairy, laid out in a pencil-case coffin that once belonged to a little girl called Wendy. They still believe, you see. That it hasn’t changed. That the picture they’ve painted for themselves, built up over all these years, is real. And they’ll crowd round, with their arrowheads and acorns. Persuading you, enchanting you with thimbles and kisses. Telling you how magical it all is.