Loss

I have never witnessed a birth, but I’m sure Callum’s was as messy and beautiful as any.  He was not extraordinary in any particular way, and in many respects fell short of average, but he was my brother, and I loved him.  As such I feel best equipped to tell you the tales he told to me, and that I otherwise garnered from his few friends and acquaintances.

            We had little family left after, our dear parents long since mortally uncoiled.  Mother and father respectively departed to cancer and heart attack over a decade before.  He was young, and it angers me that I am left alone to bear the burden of his memory.

            Callum was troublesome as a character, argumentative, lazy, and at times downright hostile.  His extensive ambition never matched up to his achievements, which would be forgivable were not his efforts so much wanting.  As I say, I never witnessed a birth, his or any others.  I am barren, and as a result our genetic line is a cul-de-sac.  There will be no more Keillor lineage, second-cousins and other unknowns excepted.  I live with my partner in permanent fear of marriage and a more distant and frightening fear of separation that somehow maintains a quiet steadiness that my single friends covet and despise.  Perhaps we will be granted a child, by some biological miracle, and perhaps he will go on to reach the heights that Callum felt were his birthright, and the denial of which drove him to his shabby end.

            He came home that day swaddled and with the ruddy glow associated with the slap of existence.  There is a puke stain formed on his arrival upon the Persian rug that Mother prized so dearly.  I always thought it resembled a bird in flight.  Milky possets, Mother called them, a twee name for vomitus. 

            Bracketed by days at school, I watched him grow.  I heard his first word, watched his first lumbering steps.  I watched him in his bouncer as cartoons played on telly.  I played at word blocks with him, spelling out words like tree, bath, and smile.  I saw him graduate from teat to bottle, saw him through epochs of hand-me-downs.  I was dressed boyishly for a girl, but the clothes looked feminine on him.  Floral print baby-grows looked hilarious as he pushed toy cars off the sofa.

            I was just arriving in secondary school when he went to nursery.  There were seven years between us, a real distance at that age.  We did not argue, even as he grew, and we kept in touch up until his disappearance.  Latterly, he wrote in letters, some of which I still have.  The handwriting changed with his shift in situation, and was one of the first signs something was wrong.

            He liked to swim.  I saw him learn, and he really took to it.  He had a towel emblazoned with badges for five metres, ten metres, fifty metres.  All by the time he was nine.  He started swimming at the municipal on Saturdays, doing timed lengths to a sweeping second clock.  He had a wiry muscularity that only really started to disappear in the last few years under a growing layer of lethargy induced fat.

            He had a friend when he was young.  A girl called Amy who lived up the road.  She would call on and they would play in the garden, climbing trees or pouring imaginary tea depending on who took the reins.  They seemed to alternate, both enjoying the other’s favourite pursuits.  One day she moved away and he was heartbroken.  I’m sure there was a childish love there, and it set the pattern for his life, a sweetness that was always severed by departure.  I remember answering the door to her, the family waiting in a car loaded up with what didn’t fit in the removal van.  She asked for Callum with a lump in her throat cracking her voice.  I left them to say goodbye.

            He stayed in his room all weekend, drawing in watersoluble pencils that smudged with his tears.  He had a letter from her that I’m sure he kept.  She left him her teddy bear as well, a rumpled and battered brown creature.  He kept that teddy all these years, and had him in his bed, a sad smile eternally stitched into its fluffy face.

            Time went on, and the wounds healed.  He began to laugh again, and the renewal of joy highlighted its previous absence.  But you forget.  School began and after the initial anxiety he flourished, as much with drawing as maths.  New friends gathered for birthday parties where chocolate was cut with gloved hands in playful races.  Where knees were muddied or grazed but laughter reigned once more. 

            As he aged he grew serious.  Dedicated to study he progressed well at school but didn’t take to adolescence well.  He was awkward and detached, difficult and brooding.  The light went in his eyes, dimmed to a distant glimmer that rarely awakened.  He slept in at weekends, stayed up until late.  Gradually, as meaning dissolved, even the studying tailed off.  His hopes for being a doctor were dashed by bad grades at the end.  He felt his initial efforts had been for nothing and left home to travel alone. 

            Little was ever said about his travels.  I heard of solitary adventures, of evenings spent in Senegalese compounds under the corrugate shelter of giving families, or nights in stilted houses in Thailand.  I saw photos of crystal lakes surrounded by conquered mountains, of unspoilt beaches where the sand shone brightly.  Something happened that he didn’t talk about, and the distant glimmer became a gaping void with a furnace at its centre.

            Callum didn’t adjust well to life at home.  On return he fell into a routine of barwork and slumber with little in the way of recreation.  I think he planned to go away again, but never did, just holding together enough for making rent and feeding his drink habit.  I think it was just drink but I was never sure.  Perhaps there was more to it.

            He was unravelling.  He neglected his few friends and they drifted, as can happen.  He was left alone, and sat in dismal vigil staring at a television that angered and bored him, for lack of anything better to do.  Exercise ceased, except for nocturnal press-ups that eased the boredom of insomnia.  In a last dashed attempt at grabbing meaning he went for a job at the local paper but did not get it.  He started attending a Cognitive Behavioural Therapy group but soon left, irritated with other people’s problems.  He was not unsympathetic as such, but had a low tolerance for self-pity.  Never did he complain.  If you asked how he was he always said he was fine.  But something was eating him.

            This is how I found him.  I had a key to his flat, I had been helping him keep on top of the dishes and the hovering.  Left to his own devices he let everything pile up until it was hopelessly messy.  I went in on Thursday, as was my habit.  He did not answer the door, so thinking he was out for milk or something I let myself in.  The room had a heavy presence, the dust hanging in the light that glimmered through the crack in the curtains.  I walked with a certain trepidation into the living room.  What confronted me haunts me to this day.  Callum was slumped in the armchair in his best suit, vomit down the front.  As I walked round I saw a pool of blood steeped in the carpet, viscous and nearly black in the dim light.  His eyes were rolled back and a razor lay beside him.  I didn’t know what to do.  I thought of phoning an ambulance but it was too late.  Tears came, and guttural banshee shrieking.  I fell to my knees, holding him round the shins, beating the floor while the crimson blood soaked into my blouse.  I had always suspected something like this but prayed it never came.  May the fifth would be marked in my life forever, a dark day printed in blood and streaked with pain.  The day I lost my brother.  The day I was left alone, looking for something in every face that was forever gone to dust.