Boy on the Wire (12 page)

The story that was out there could never be retold and never untold. The barbed wire, the dogs, the blankness on my father’s face – these things pressed the story down, pressed them into me. Always there.

The man put his hand on the boy’s back then, and walked him past his father. It was a tender touch but that made it worse – that it came from him, a man I did not know, or at least was not the man at the sink. I did not, could not, look at my father as I walked past, and I know my father did not look at me again. Not in a way that mattered. Though he did not know. He did not and would never know.

11

There is a drawing by Escher of a group of men – or one man, I cannot remember. One or many, they are dressed like monks, or soldiers. They walk up the stairs. Another group walks down the stairs, which surround a courtyard. They are trapped. One group forever going up, the other forever going down the stairs. As a boy, when I first saw it, I wondered what these men said to each other for the hundredth, the millionth time they saw each other. Perhaps they were too embarrassed. Perhaps they could not break the cycle they found themselves in because they were too afraid to stop.

I will break this cycle.

Perhaps not one or many, perhaps one and many. One man, many times.

I have not slept for days. I write it and I know it is a lie. I have woken up – come to – in places aware of what has gone before but not able to remember falling asleep. Does one ever remember falling asleep? The awareness of it depends on the absence of something to be aware of. I wake, too, in places I don’t remember being in before I slept.

I am being watched, like I have been my whole life. I go into the house next door. I walk quickly and quietly to the bungalow, but I know I can be seen. It is no use trying to surprise the watcher. Two North Magnetic Poles. I know this.

I place the discs in the laptop, watch what has been recorded, watch for hours. I wait for him to come to me here, but he never does.

I watch the disc for signs of Peter. That is what I call him still, this doppelgänger. And I do see him. He creeps – that is the word – through the house. A few times I shout at him, call on him to come out, come and have this out, settle it once and for all, as if this was the Wild West.

Then he changes into me, or that is how it seems. Peter leaves one room, I appear in the next. He never comes close enough to come into contact, always careful enough to stay just out of my sight. I see myself running from room to room. I know what I am doing. If I am fast enough, sooner or later I will catch him.

And when I go next door to the larger house to sleep, he comes and stands over me while I do – I know it is not a dream. I see it the next day in the cameras. A man standing in the dark. I cannot make out what is in the bed, but I know I am there. I remember being there.

I know what I have to do.

The next night, I lie in bed and wait until I hear his footsteps come to the door and can feel him in the room, can feel the heat from him: flesh and blood.

I wait until he leaves the bedroom and then I get out of bed and walk to the corridor. I look down at the ground, not directly at him, for he would disappear if I did. I wait as he comes to the doorway of another room and stares down the passage at me. I picture his face. Fear, it may be fear. I stand there and lift my arm and tap at the wooden doorframe. A dramatic moment. I want him to feel this, to not pass through this moment with the indifference he has displayed all his life. I want him to know what’s coming. I want him to know me, to know all he has done, all he has created.

In the light I walk through each room. I sniff the air. I can smell him, the stench of him. The smell in each room is strong. He has just been there. What you leave behind betrays you.

I wait again. I wait and the moonlight shifts over my form. I can see myself as if I stand in the doorway looking back at myself. The moonlight picks over my bones.

He comes to me. Killer. Liar. Shape-shifter.

He retreats down the corridor and disappears into the dark of the attic, but I don’t follow him. I go downstairs and I throw a glass on the ground. I beat my fists against the walls. I run headlong into the windows in the lounge. I do this several times. My forehead hits the window frames and I am cut. My eyes are open all the time. I look out into the dark and wait for their approach, wait for them to come back to the window, to come inside. Do they know? Of course they know. They have known all along. They know what he did. What I did. Though it was never spoken of. Of course they knew. It was in my father’s letter. They sensed it. My mother especially, I realise now. Just a child, they would have thought.

It was in my brother’s letter too. The words that dragged me here in the first place. I did not believe them. I wanted to set him right, once and for all. I had blocked everything, changed the man that I am.

My family do not come. Now, it is me and the liar in the attic, we alone.

I wait downstairs. I stand at the foot of the stairwell and have to blink as the blood runs into my eyes. The blood stops and I stand, looking up, waiting for him to appear, but he does not. He stays hidden.

I lift the weight from my foot, as if to place it on the first stair, but I do not place it and I stay where I am and I do not go to him. I cannot do that, cannot confront him and all it means just yet.

He does not come back. He does not come back. Through all this time, I know he will come back. I know him as if he were myself.

The fourth night he comes back.

I wait for him, staring at the space next to where he is. I walk at him. He retreats. I walk at him and he retreats, and I force him back into the attic. As he steps inside, it goes quiet. Quiet again.

I look at him now, look straight at him for just a second, the light at the right angle, and a feeling of great weakness comes over me at the sight.

What do I do with him – the man in the eaves? I have no plan. What do I do? I will keep him here, the madman in the attic. I will keep him here and keep him here and keep him here, and so it will go on. He will starve; he will not hang himself or end it sooner. He will starve and in time his flesh will dry out. The tiles of the roof will fall off, the lining will go and he will be left to the wind, as he wanted. He will be scattered over these parts, to remain here forever with Mom, Dad, Paul – and with Peter. The boy on the wire will have his wish.

I see it all now and still I go through with it. I owe it to myself. I owe it to them.

12

John Hyde is on the floor of the attic room. It is cold. He shivers. The blood from the wounds on his head has crusted over and he feels if he moves he will tear his skull open.

He does not move. He lies there listening to the throbbing in his head. There are other noises too.

He hears movements in the house. He hears creaks, bangs. Some of the noises he thinks are human. Others he cannot tell what they are: the noises of the house settling, mice in the rafters, the wind through the cracks.

He hears a noise in the room behind him and stiffens. He does not get up. He cannot, in fact. It is as if he is glued to the floor. He hears the door open, and on his back, which faces the door, feels a breeze. He waits for a touch.

A footstep – just one – on the concrete.

He wonders how long it will take – for the noises to stop altogether; for him to be able to close his eyes and sleep peacefully.

Like a fish he opens and closes his mouth. His tongue sticks to the roof of his mouth and to his teeth. He tastes something. Metal. The head of a hammer in his mouth. He tries to spit, but there is nothing to spit. He tries to swallow, but there is nothing to swallow.

He shouts sometimes. There is no reply. He knows there will be no reply.

Through the night he drifts in and out of sleep. It grows lighter in the room as dawn comes. He waits for noise from the house. He tries to remember if he has heard anything since he woke up.

He feels he might be asleep again. He sees the boy, John. Standing under the eaves in the shadows, a boy, aged eight. He is dead, this boy, though not in the sense usually meant. The boy stands under the eaves in the shadows. Hyde cannot see his face, though the boy is turned to him. His face vanishes in the looking at it.

He wants to go away, this boy, he wants to leave here because he has made the place all that it is, all that it lacks. And he did. He went away for a long time. He went away a boy and returned a man and what he found is desert. Now he walks through where he remembers people, streets and buildings. Instead he finds sand dunes. Here and there a chimney pokes through. He uncovers a car. He skims the sand from the windscreen and peers in. Once his eyes get used to the gloom, he makes out a family. The father in the front seat, the mother next to him, three children further back in the gloom. He bangs on the windscreen. He wants to wake them up. He reaches in to them, but the sand begins to run through their mouths, their eyes, leaving just white bone. Hourglass people.

Hyde feels something coming from this boy – the coldness of years. The man on the floor retches.

Later he turns to the camera above the door. He laughs, mouths something at it. He pictures a man in front of the screen in the other house. He can only see himself.

Paul’s death – he thinks he can remember it now. Everything that was buried, everything that changed over the years. That is why he is here, after all. To fill in the gaps. Perhaps once it was to hear his brother say ‘Yes, John, you were right. I did it. Not you.’ That is all he has ever wanted to hear, whether he knew it or not.

Dimly he imagines there might be more, more that he has not remembered. There is a moment missing. A hand on a child’s back, the memory of the thought before the hand on the back. But he has seen enough.

He still feels he is being watched. He can feel eyes on him. He knows now it is the way he has felt for thirty years.

He lies awake through the night and into the day.

He breathes. Beneath his sweat-and-blood-stained shirt his chest rises and falls. Around him the house ticks in the heat of the sun. It is quiet here. A quiet place in the country.

He leans against the wall now. He sits on the floor and his eyes are closed, but he does not sleep. He hears the outer door open.

Footsteps. They click over the concrete floor. Like the nails of a dog.

He opens his eyes and looks across the room. Opposite him, a man slouches against the wall. They stare at each other. When one moves, so does the other. Hyde looks at this figure, the greying hair, the sweat, the stubble, the drooped shoulders. He knows it now. The sight, sound, the presence of this man, the smell of him in this room, this man who killed Paul and has never paid for what he has done, not only in the killing but in the telling, in the not telling of it. He sits there, back against the wall, in the presence of the man who has brought the edifice of his life crashing down around him, and he cannot move. He has given up, given over to this, this realisation. He is beaten.

He hears crashes against the door. Blow after blow. They are coming. They are coming.

Hyde whispers to the man opposite, the sound almost drowned by the banging, ‘What do you want?’ It sounds mundane when he says it, the first words he has said for days. He watches the lips of the other move. He regrets talking.

‘You.’ The voice is so soft it might as well be in his head.

It is soft but it cuts through him – the sound of it, the lilt, the guttural South African voice underpinning a softer English accent. He knows every inch of this man. In every inch he sees himself, sees what has been, what might have been. He sees, staring back at him, a doppelgänger. He imagines this figure crawling up the wall and across the ceiling to hang, dripping, above him.

It runs out of him. Everything that he has, everything that he is, runs out of him, liquid, over the floor of an abandoned house in a forgotten corner of the world.

13

If there was a moment she knew she had made a mistake, an error of judgement, it was when she met John’s brother in the park.

He said ‘Hello’ and she was still looking down at her laptop. It happened sometimes. A woman sitting alone attracts attention. But when she looked up at him, ready to smile and say thanks but no thanks, her mouth opened ready to speak and nothing came out.

It was her husband, but not him. There were only a few slight differences. The face was a few years older, more suntanned, though underneath the colour there was something missing. He was ill, though it was only much later she would realise this. He had a few more grey hairs than John, the jawline slightly different, the accent too. Though it was just one word he had said, it had a thicker South African tone to it. Her husband’s accent was much less distinct. He had been in England many years and most people couldn’t tell where he was from. Another disguise. She remembers now this thought she had at the time the man appeared in front of her.

She forgets how much time passed while she stared at him. It could not have been more than a few seconds.

He sat down. ‘My name is Peter Hyde. I did not think you would have been told about me, and I can see I was right.’

The mistake was in not probing John’s silence more than she did. She felt he would eventually tell her everything. It was too late for that now.

She does not remember saying more than a few words to her husband’s brother. Though she knew there were holes in John’s story, and knew she should have expected something like this, especially with all that had been going on, with John’s obsession with the man, the ghost, she sometimes thought, watching their flat from the park, she remembers struggling to hear this man called Peter – what an ordinary name for someone like this – struggling to hear his story, focusing instead on the unreal vision in front of her.

He did not tell her everything. He introduced himself and explained that he and John had not seen or spoken to each other for eighteen years. He said something about it being because of an incident that got out of hand, that grew and grew because neither made a move to put a stop to it, and then it grew so much it could not be stopped. The power of a story – he used that phrase.

He was holding an envelope that she had not noticed before and now he slid it across the table. ‘I would like you to give this to John. I am leaving now.’ He got up from the table.

‘You can give it to him yourself. He will be home soon. Please wait.’

‘It can’t be me. I have a plane to catch, and besides, I wanted to meet you. You seem to have made him happy.’ He turned and walked off up the path.

‘Wait.’ There was so much she wanted to ask but her legs wouldn’t move.

She looked at the envelope. It had John’s name on it and their address.

Her husband was home early, a few seconds after her. For a moment she wondered if he had seen her in the park with Peter. He acted strangely as he walked through the door, did not say hello.

She gave him the letter, said something to him, but she can’t remember what it was. She gave him the letter and went into the bedroom to pack a bag. She stayed in a hotel that night. He did not phone and she would not phone him. The next day she went to stay with her parents at their house near Amersham. After four days she sent him a text. There was no reply. Then she phoned him, but his phone was switched off.

A week later, she went back to the flat. He was not there. She knew he was not at work, though it was a weekday afternoon. One of the other suitcases had gone and his passport too. In the kitchen she recognised the same dirty plates from the day she’d walked out. He had left on the same day she had or very soon after.

She did not know where he had gone. Somehow she knew he had gone after his brother, but had no idea where. There were stories of a childhood in Port Elizabeth, South Africa, but she had no address and did not even know if Peter would be in the same city, or even the same country.

It would not have been impossible to find out. She had a name, a birth date, a city. There are people who could find things out. For a moment she wondered if John had made other things up too: his surname, his date of birth.

But she knew she would not contact a detective. As much as she hated what had happened and the stories he had told, and as much as she wanted him to herself, she knew there was another story he had to unravel. This is how she thought of it. A story to unpick.

She finds the letter in her flat a few months later. One day the cleaner does not arrive and Rachel decides to clean the flat herself. In the bedroom she moves the bedside table to vacuum and sees the envelope between the table and the bed.

There are two letters in the envelope. She reads both. The longer one she reads three times. She returns the letters to the envelope and places the envelope in the drawer. She sits for a while. Just sits, does not move.

It is dark outside and a cold wind is blowing. She wraps her scarf around her. Battersea Park is closed but she climbs over the fence. There is no one around. From under the trees, she looks up at the flat. From here she can see the windows of two of the bedrooms and the lounge. This is where Peter stood, where he watched.

She has left the lights on. She waits, half expecting to see a shadow crossing the window panes, half expecting to see her husband move the blinds and peer out. There is nothing.

She closes her eyes and conjures up a memory of her husband. She sees his hands. She remembers him putting his hand on her thigh. They were sitting on the couch together. She reached out and put hers on top of his. It was a fraction of the size. She moved her fingers up towards his wrist, over the ridges of veins. She remembers the warmth of his hand under hers, the warmth on her leg. He had long fingers, always brown, no matter the time of year. Strong wrists. She liked holding his wrists, kissing the inside of them. She remembers the scar on his left, from the ring on his finger up to the middle of his hand. She remembers the streak of white on the brown hand. She traces a line on her own finger.

She asked him where he got it, that and the scars on his knee and chin. She asked many times. His answer was always the same. ‘I fell when I was eight.’ Just that.

Later, Rachel sits in front of her computer, an empty bottle of wine on the table. There is a credit card in her left hand and on the screen is an airline site. She leans back in the chair and looks out of the window. Rain and the branches of a tree beat against the window. There are no lights on in the room. The only light is from the screen and it makes her look grey. She has her hair pulled back. The light deepens the lines on her face. She looks out of the window at the rain, the leaves wiping against the glass.

She knows that if she got up from her chair, walked over to the window, put her face to it, she would see him. She would see him out there, standing beneath a tree, his collar pulled up against the rain. She would not be able to see his face but it would be him. John. He would be waiting for her to come down to join him.

And she knows she needs to find out. She knows she needs to find him again. She chose him after all. There is an ache in her. It is him, she knows this. She fights against the weakness she feels this represents, but she longs for the part of him she does not know.

The flight is full and she is wedged between two men. She sits with her arms folded for most of the journey and eats and drinks little. In a few hours she will land in Johannesburg, then will take a plane to Port Elizabeth. She has an address – the address written on one of the letters – and a satnav. But she has not spoken to John, does not know how to get hold of him and knows he might not be there, or even in the country. She begins to regret her decision to fly to South Africa, but there is no going back now.

She wonders what she will find when she gets to the address. She has a vision of him in a large house. Somehow he looks younger, less burdened. There is a pizza box on the floor, a movie on the TV. He is on the couch asleep. She sees a woman opening the door. From between her skirts a child peeps out. Not his, of course, but a family nonetheless. She wonders what she would do if this happened. Walk away. It would be all she could do. She wonders why she can only picture him happy. She knows – is sure – this is not the case.

At the check-in desk, she realises she had booked her flight to Port Elizabeth for late afternoon. The wine, she thinks. She has hours to spare in Johannesburg airport. She sits in a coffee shop, her bag beside her, watching people. She finds she is looking for his face. He might as well be here as anywhere. She thinks about trying to change her flight. It would be easy: a midday, mid-week flight to Port Elizabeth, a place she knows is not a major centre, would not be full. But she waits. She thinks again about turning back.

When she found the letters, she wondered why he hadn’t taken them with him. But, she reasoned, it was a difficult time. He probably packed in a hurry and the letters slipped down the side of the bed. Perhaps, she feels, he wanted her to find them, wanted her to know, unable to tell her himself.

She has brought the letters with her. She opens the first, dated March 2011, and reads it again.

1 March 2011

John

It may surprise you to hear from me after all this time. It may surprise you to realise I know your address, know where you live. You should not be surprised. You can get any sort of information if you pay the right people: your address, your place of work, your wife’s name.

That may sound sinister. It is not meant to be. I do not wish to alarm you.

What I want is for you to come to Port Elizabeth. I am living in the house. You may know it was left to me when Dad died. I know you know about that too.

I realise we have not spoken since 1993. There is this thing between us. I would like to talk about it – once and for all. Clear the air. You, no doubt, will be curious.

You do not have to reply to this. Just turn up. There will be a room waiting for you.

The truth is, John, and I debated whether or not to write this, I miss you. I miss both of you. You, though, most of all, because you are still alive.

Peter

Innisfree, Kragga Kamma Road, Port Elizabeth

She had not seen this letter, had not seen it arrive. Perhaps it had been sent to John’s work. He did not tell her about it. She wonders what he had been thinking at the time; how he behaved the day he received the letter. She searches her memory for signs but there are none.

She takes out the second.

28 August 2011

Dear John

I will ask your wife to give you this letter. Though by the time you read this our meeting will have happened already, I can anticipate her reaction. It will be like she is seeing a ghost. You have not told her about me, have you? About any of us, I imagine.

You need not worry. I will not tell her our story. Of course, she may read this letter in which case your secret is out. Do you trust your wife not to read it, not to pry? The answer is obvious given you haven’t told her about me.

Why is that, John? Why haven’t you told anyone about me? About Paul? Have you lost trust in our story, in your story?

She is beautiful, your wife. Rachel. Perhaps I too could have had a wife like her. There is no time any more. I am past all that.

Dad died of a brain tumour. It was not a heart attack. I believe you were told it was a heart attack for some reason. Sorry to be blunt.

There is a letter from Dad for you in the drawer in the main bedroom. I have not opened it. I have no idea what it says. I was supposed to have posted it to you after his death. I am sure you will understand why I broke my promise to him.

Am I curious what is in the letter? Yes. Afraid? I will leave it to you to judge.

It seems like we have a habit of communicating through others. Dad’s letter that I was supposed to send to you. This letter that I will send through Rachel. That was always the problem, wasn’t it? Turning away from that which troubled us.

We put him through a lot, didn’t we? Dad. It must have been hard for him. The silence between us and him on his own.

I have the same thing as Dad. It can run in families apparently, though they tell me I am unlucky.

Watching him go was horrible. We were never that close but we became closer in the end. Watching someone you love die makes you remember why you love them, what they have done for you.

Have you experienced the death of a loved one? Recently, I mean. I hope not. Why do I ask? I know you haven’t.

He was in a lot of pain. They give you stuff for the pain and the medicine is probably more effective now, a decade later, but I will not go through what he did. It is decided. There is no one to look after me either, so I would be stuck in some shit hospital for ages, waiting to die, knowing that the nurses are waiting for the same thing. They need the bed after all. Other people need to die too, don’t you know. Forgive the gallows humour.

The house will soon be yours, for what it’s worth. Not very much, certainly not in your money. You might not even be able to sell it. The houses on both sides of me are empty and have been for some time. I own one of them, in fact. A bungalow bought as an investment many years ago. What a joke. No one can sell around here.

You might not even go to Port Elizabeth to try. You might decide to arrange it all from your flat in Battersea or your office in the city. An agent gets a call one day, next day a For Sale sign appears.

Battersea. It is a strange name. What does it mean? Do you know? I don’t know what the name of this place means either. Kragga Kamma. It sounds like someone clearing his throat. You would think I would have found out by now, wouldn’t you? It shall remain meaningless.

You could give it away. Perhaps to a charity – a home for runaways, for lost souls. They might not want it, of course, once they know the history. One family. One child dead at a young age. Two suicides. A son who has cut off all contact and who still believes (I wonder, do you? Did you ever?) his brother is a killer.

They might think it is cursed. And who is to say otherwise? The house is not right, John. Not right at all. You will feel it when you come, if you come. A place can get overwhelmed by what went on there. Like Auschwitz, I imagine. I do not mean ghosts. Memories. The memories linger, even after there is no one to remember. No peace there.

I have some photographs of us. I will leave them in the house for you too. A photo taken of the three of us on the day Paul died, one from a few days later, a few others too.

I have cleared everything out of the house already. Most of it, anyway. But these things I will leave.

One of the photographs is of me. It is a bad photograph. It shows me in the bush, a tiny figure. It is old now so you can barely see me. The shadows are on my back and I have my back to the camera. It is dark. Whether that is just the photograph not developing properly or whether it was dusk, I forget. Perhaps the shadows are from the moon. Funny how you remember some things and not others.

I do not remember the time of day but I remember what happened. We had just returned from hospital. The four of us in a silent journey. I walked across the lawn and into the bush and sat down and I know you followed me after a while. You took a photograph. Why, I don’t know, but that’s not what’s important.

I asked you a question then. I should never have asked it. Do you remember?

I waited for you to give me the answer I wanted. An unreasonable ask, perhaps. You were only eight. I was just twelve, though. Still a child. You could have said anything, anything at all. Anything other than what you did say.

I could not remember what happened. For years I could not remember anything of it. It is not uncommon apparently. I could not remember, but I had a sense that the full story had not been told. They said we fell from a ledge and Paul hit his head. I was lucky. But that was not all there was to it. I knew there was more but I could not remember, and then you said what you said and that was the truth I had for most of the rest of my life.

I saw you. That is what you said. I saw you push him. The worst thing you could have said. The words made me retch. You made me believe you.

I was afraid of you. That was new. Afraid of my little brother. You held such power and I did not realise it.

Afraid you might tell. Afraid you were right. I had doubts, even then, about your story, but to hear you say it, well, you were my brother. You wouldn’t lie, would you? Not about that.

Why didn’t you tell? Sometimes I wish … not sometimes – I wish you had told. It would have been easier with your story in the open, your story exposed to the sun to either grow strong or wither and die.

For it is just that, isn’t it? A story.

I will go through the story – let’s call it that for now. Maybe it will help you. You have never let on that you do not believe your own story, not in the years we had together and not since, not to Rachel, not in an email or text sent while drunk, or in a careless conversation in a pub.

You see, I have been remembering. At least, I will admit, other stories have been sprouting in my thoughts – like weeds. That is what it is like.

I always start with the days before. I start with you and Paul and me. I tally things up. We found a dog on the road and poked it with a stick and made you get close to it and then gave you a fright by pretending it was moving. You cried your eyes out. In fact we were almost scared at how much you cried. In the car Paul threw your scorecard out the window. Were there other events? And then, on the day, on the way down to the river, I punched you. Just on the arm. You had fallen and cried out. I punched you on the arm. I was annoyed. I could relate to Paul. He was less than two years younger than me and strong for his age. We played together all the time, and, I am sorry to say it, but we felt you got in the way sometimes.

You slipped. I heard you cry. I came back for you. I saw that you had fallen but there was barely a scratch on you and you had held me up. Paul was going to get there before me now. I gave you a punch on the arm and then started to run down the path.

I heard you scream. You screamed at me, your frustrations of the previous few days overflowing (I imagine). I will kill you. Are those the right words? I do not remember them. Perhaps they were something else. Perhaps I am imagining all of this. Or, it is the cancer altering memories, deleting old ones, inserting new ones. How do I tell what is memory and what fiction? How do I tell if what has come back is the truth? You would know. Unless, by some big coincidence, you have what I have, you would know for certain. No matter what you’ve repressed, what you have changed, retelling yourself the story over and again, I believe you know, will know, will come to remember.

Paul was standing on the ledge. I pushed him to one side – a little. Before I saw how high we were. He did not fall.

We stood there for a moment and looked into the water. It was a long way down. The water was that deep brown you get in the mountains, but clear. There were rocks below us, but beyond that the water was deep. We fancied we could see the bottom.

We were daring each other to jump. We knew we would have to jump far out and land feet first in the water. Perhaps even take a running jump. We took a step or two back.

We stood still, shoulders touching. There was a time in which we, and everything around us, were utterly quiet.

I heard something then, something rushing down a slope, or running, I didn’t know what. An animal. Later, yes, I worked it out, worked out that it was you. But not then, not for years.

I do not remember how close you were. You might have been far back, not much closer than where I left you. Or you could have been right behind us, your breath at our necks.

The official version: Paul and I slipped and fell into the pool. I landed on my back and the fall stunned me. Our father, hearing a cry, came running. I was unconscious for just a minute. Paul, though, hit his head on a rock. The angle and the length of the fall meant that he died instantly. An accident. There was no blame, no guilt in it. A domestic tragedy.

Another vision has come to me recently. I call it a vision. I do not know whether it is more than that. You will know. I am falling. I am falling, my back to the water. I look up and the sun blinds me, but I can see Paul. He is above me. He is falling after me. One leg is still on the ledge but most of him is over the side. His chest scrapes against the rock on the way down and I see his skull crash into the rock and him get flipped over from the impact. A split second. And there on the ledge, through the sun, I see a head looking down at us. Yours. I saw you. The sun is behind your head, like you are an angel.

I thought I had killed him.

Perhaps I did. Perhaps I did not. If I killed him, why was I falling before him?

Your story undid me. It crept into me. I started remembering pushing him. I could picture the scene, could structure the scene. Each time I restructured the scene, more would appear. I remembered pushing him because you made me remember.

The years of silence when you said nothing to me. Was there a point at which you wanted to say something? A point at which you wanted to take it back?

Perhaps. (I give you credit.) But perhaps by then it would have been too late for us. This thing between us. It was no longer the story that was important, no longer the facts, but the telling of it, the having told it, the lingering whisper of a story that changed everything the moment it was uttered. The silence after the story that could not be broken.

There were times in my childhood I believed you had lied, times I believed I had done nothing. Do you remember a time in the shed? I called you a liar, a murderer even. I spoke very softly, as if trying the words out. And then, later, I switched again. I might as well have done it.

I kept my distance from you. I avoided you, avoided speaking to you whenever possible. Then you left home. It was a relief. You were, I believed, keeping my secret, doing me a service. But I feared you for it. I wanted you gone. And then you left, and I thought, briefly, it might be over, but of course it was not over. You were more present in those years than ever, you might as well have been peering over my shoulder.

I do not know what really happened. I suspect the truth, but I will never know. There. It is out. You are safe. Perhaps if I lived longer, these images would form themselves into something I could identify as the truth. They have not. But I no longer believe I killed Paul. Did we slip as we jumped? Or was it you? I hope it was not. Did you run down that slope and push me and in the pushing knock Paul off balance too? Were you angry at me or did you think pushing me would be a joke? I do not know.

There is one thing I remember clearly. I will tell you. I will tell you though it will hurt. If there is anything left in you, it will hurt. Perhaps that is why I tell you. If you hurt, you are not lost.

The night Mom left, I overheard her talking to Dad. Their door was ajar, which was why I could hear. They probably did not mean to leave it open.

Mom said – I remember each word – ‘We lost all of them that day. They hate each other. They never speak.’ She was crying. Dad said nothing.

There was more. She said that you knew what had happened. That you would have seen and so why would you not say anything and where did you get those cuts from anyway and what does your silence mean? I think she had tried to get you to talk to her. All those stories she read to you, putting you in situations where you could decide to tell the truth, decide to speak up. I suppose she could not just come out and ask. It would have broken her, broken her sooner.

She left that night.

That was what your story did, John. Though it was never told, other than to me, it still had that power. It changed us completely.

I wanted to go in there. Tell her not to worry. She didn’t lose us, we’re right here, right here in front of you. What are you talking about, we’re here. We just need time. I wanted to tell her everything, tell her why we didn’t speak. But then I remembered that I had murdered my brother and I did not have the courage to own up to it, and my other devoted brother was keeping a terrible secret for me, and so who was I to stand there in front of her, to be there at all. I murdered her boy. Who was I?

Do you believe me, John? Do you believe this story? Of course you do. You were there too, you heard everything. As I walked past Paul’s room, I saw you in there. You were staring out into the garden, your back to me, just staring into the black. Like some devil, John. Like some little fucking devil.

I think she knew the truth. Somehow, she knew what happened, even though she was not there. She knew what her sons were, what they were not. Dad, I am not sure about. He cast about. A good man but unable to see what was in front of him. But her – she knew.