fun life

My brother stands over me now. He wants to know what I’m looking at, why I’m in my bedroom. Why I say nothing back, and refuse to look at him. He echoes the fears he holds for himself in his sarcasm:

“You’re going to have a fun life.”

He continues to talk, turns on the light, moves away, flits back. A fly, caught in the net of his own making. He's tumbling, swirling in a tornado that's about to blow. I've learnt to recognise the signs.

He finds a dead hornet and throws it into my lap. He calls my name over and over again, as if I am in a trance and he is the hypnotist. He wants to make me promise things, wants to make me his to torture to hate to pleasure to love.

Sometimes, he confuses hatred and love.

I ignore him. I know from experience that he's in the mood for a fight, wants desperately to kick and scream. Anything I say can and will be held against me in the court of his insanity. Particularly by today's judges. So.

Silence is the best policy. When we conceal ourselves within its golden bubble we pretend to feel nothing —speak-no see-no hear-no evil. Walls are going up around me as he continues to speak.

He tells me I am a nasty, nasty little bitch. This my youngest brother, his cheeks still dotted with adolescent acne, just turned eighteen.

Words are neither new nor surprising. Most days my ears ring from his insults. I keep quiet while he calls me from his realm.

I say nothing, stay concentrated on the quiet I am fabricating, struggling to hold onto.

He threatens now, to lock me in, but blames me for previous days, when my parents came to save me because I had started to scream. Have I seen the butterfly he asks? Did you see it did you see it did you see it. It was one of the poisonous kinds. His voice is dark, heavy with the authoritarianism he has forged into his identity. A tyrant, a bully, when he is in this mood, which is most days at the moment.

Yet all of this is a show, a play he and I put on to appease his inner demons. My brother struggles inside his mind, the scraping slipping sloping mud piles of his mind. I hear the demons come out in his deep voice, peek through his eyes.

Every day is a battle, in an ongoing war. Every side involved will lose.

Run run run I tell myself, as I dream of peace and whole days spent in silence.

Instead I run to the innermost chambers of my mind, somewhere even the Minotaur would never dare go. Help me save me hold me, I tell the flaying light. I want to hide under the roots of a tree. But the only protection is company or plane tickets, not easily acquired during a quarantine. When I am with my father and mother, my brother does not scream quite as loud, and his long-nailed fingers stop mid-air.

Twice in the last week, my father has slipped on the hero cape of fury and boiled his face the beetroot red of anger. No one else can make my brother step down from his role as predator.

In these forests, my father is the light, the helpful light which needs to burn bright in order to be heard. Last week, my brother’s accusations pushed me against a wall, and a few days they bruised me under the staircase. When I screamed my father surged and ordered my brother into his room. It was late, gone midnight late, but I cannot go for bathroom breaks unless my brother is asleep.

My father is the only person, now, who can chase my brother into a closed bedroom. My mother hangs her head, worries for her husband’s high pressured heart, which has always pumped too much blood too fast.

My mother worries, too, for the misrakes she made, for the little boy who destroys his every chance at love, who my grandmother has hit across the face for being abnormal.

“He’s a nasty vicious boy,” she hissed and called my mother to tell her “it’s far more difficult for you, because you’re intelligent and educated, but then, of course, people like him don’t live very long. So sad.”

And my maternal family boil in the hatred of our little boy, while my paternal’s love makes him forget toxicity and relax into their tolerance. In their love he forgets to weep from fear and punch walls with his despair. Fear and sadness are blackthorns in the hearts they pierce, and their poison leaks out of their victims.

The other night, the little boy comes to find me. I brace myself, ready for his lies his cruel twists and turns. There are so many words already, which he has inscribed into my mind and will never be able to take back. But he says, in a voice so full of pain I stop doubting its sincerity.

“I’m so sorry. I’m so sorry. I used to be able to control my strength, to know that I could hit you or Mum once and then stop, but I can’t control it anymore. I don’t even know what I did, how you got that bruise on your arm. I’m so sorry. I’m so sorry.”

“It’s okay, baby,” I whisper softly in the dark night between us.

“No, no it’s not. You know... I can feel my brain getting weaker. My memories, I used to be able to remember things, lots of things, but now I can’t. A lot of what I remember isn’t real. You know, I filmed myself talking, and I thought I had said things, but when I watched it back, it turned out I had only imagined that I had said those things. Sometimes I imagine, too, that things have happened, that haven’t happened. But I can’t tell the difference anymore. My brain is getting weaker, and it’s telling me to do things. Horrible things. I can’t stop any of it. Today, on the mountain, there was a little boy above the cliff, and all I wanted to do was push him. And every day I get more violent, every day my mind is weaker. I’m a monster,” his voice cracks.

“That was why I didn’t want to come on this holiday, why you should never have let me come. Because when I am with you I ruin everything. It would be so much better for all of you if I just died. Last November, I kept thinking maybe I could die in a plane crash, and then you would all be free. But then I didn’t die, and covid came, and I’ve still not died in a plane. You know, I’ve thought about going into the police station to confess everything I’ve done to you and Mum, but I think hospitals are nicer. I’ve thought before, I should just go into the hospital, tell them, please can I have a room, I’m crazy and every day it gets worse. And you know, hospitals really aren’t so bad. They’d stop me when I got bad, maybe in a straightjacket or with electrocutions and they’d give me pills.”

We talk a long time about reality. I tell him we love him, that none of the bad he does can ever equal the good he brings into our lives. He tells me I have always been too kind to him. I ask him to think about things he likes about himself, try to remind him that he can still lead a good life. He does not believe in the good life, is disgusted at the prospect of sealing plastic bags as a job. But he’s a boy with half a mind and too much of a temper, who cannot read or follow orders. I tell him the secret to a good life is being nice and working hard. He snorts derisively.

My darling, broken brother does not keep calm for very long. The love between us is forgotten by the next day, as he flits between voices and personas. He sighs languidly and interrupts every conversation anyone else tries to have about anything that does not concern him, then he screams and bangs against the walls, insists on disturbing the work-paint-living attempts of everyone around him. He comes to find me, again, but this time without any intention of a heart to heart. I see him buzz buzz buzz like a bee desperate for activity, and while I wait, the bumble turns to sting, when he corners me to walls and bends his six-foot-three frame over me.

“Are you going to behave?” he sneers then, before launching his fist in the air between us.