Home and Away

Nechama Basserabie

The little pads of his fingers left imprints on Abdul’s skin as they pressed down, but that was all they were: temporary indentations, turning pink again as quickly as they had marbled his skin to white.
Nothing left a mark: not the gentle but deliberate strokes with which they washed his unmoving body, not the plaintive appeals that their mother carried on her breath, not the concerned prodding of the doctor whose whiskers, Farid had noticed, glinted in the light. No, Abdul was not dead, but he no longer moved or spoke or opened his eyes and the distinction no longer seemed important to Farid. He may as well have been in the world after this one. In art class at his primary school Farid had been shown a photo of a shark preserved in a giant tank of luminous blue formaldehyde. (“This is an artwork!” their teacher had told them. “Someone bought it for millions of dollars. If you don’t believe me, Google it.”) Google was a word Farid rolled around on his tongue like a lolly.
Abdul’s body was limp and pallid on the bed; he could be preserved in formaldehyde and sold for a million dollars. With a million dollars Farid could fix the sad dripping tap in the kitchen and give his father money for the cigarettes that his eyes still told him he craved, and maybe even take them to see their grandparents in the dusty country they had left behind. (Although, as his mother kept complaining, dust seemed to follow them everywhere). But their mother probably wouldn’t like it. She still thought Abdul was going to come back.

* * *

These days Abdul sat in a hulking armchair in the middle of the living room and Farid went to the selective boys’ high school, learning about metaphors and aphorisms so that he could come home and translate letters from the electricity company to his parents. Having Abdul stationed in the living room like that, as though on pylons, was like having a huge block of ice in the house that refused to melt.
Drip drip. No, that was only the sad dripping tap in the kitchen.

Uppgivenhetssyndrom. If you said it out loud it sounded like “I’m giving up”. It was an illness that had only existed in Sweden until it began to spread to other places like an ink blot, its spidery tendrils moving outwards and gripping in its clutches little boys who had the misfortune to stand in its path. Abdul, who had always been a bit slow, a bit dreamy, he had just stood there and watched it come towards him.
The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living. That was it, that was the name of the tiger shark suspended in blue formaldehyde with its terrifying mouth open so wide you could see into its cavernous stomach. Abdul was the shark, lurking in their living room, the physical reality of death in the minds of people halfliving.

* * *

“They did not tell us yet if Ross had died. But Charlie he step forward to make the – the-,” “-the eulogy?” “Yes, the eulogy, and now we know the funeral is for Ross because he makes the speech about him. Morag she has also come back for the funeral, but she is not happy to see Robertson there and at the meal afterward she tell him he must leave. I don’t know. I thought is very respectful of Robertson to come pay his respects? Tsk. Maybe is something I don’t understand. Anyway, Morag she don’t stay long either because she has to go get the bail application for Alf. You remember I told you what Alf has done?”
Farid laughed. “I remember, Mum. He’s trouble, Alf, isn’t he?”
Farid’s mother nodded slowly, ruefully. “He is trouble.” Then she tousled his hair and the lines of her face were redrawn. “You’re not trouble, my darling. You are so good. Are you going to tell your father about your Physics test tonight?”
“Of course I am. Are you going to be watching Home and Away again tonight? What time is it, seven?”
“Of course. At seven I have my appointment with Home and Away.”
“Don’t miss it. You know I’ll be wanting my summary tomorrow.”
Farid’s mother chuckled. “Silly boy, if you watched it with me I wouldn’t have to tell you the story what happened tomorrow.”
Farid shrugged in good-natured agreement but they both knew that would defeat the purpose of the exercise. He went into his room, the muscles of his forearm rippling under the skin as he gripped the doorframe.
Eulogy. His mother turned the word over in her mouth like a lozenge.

* * *

Farid had fallen in love with a beautiful girl at school. Well, it was difficult to tell which girls were beautiful and which were not when your mother looked one way and the girls in the street looked another. But Farid had decided to trust his instincts and no doubt this girl was beautiful: it was in the lift of her chin, in the soft down of her arms that the sun turned the colour of burnt honey. In the afternoon they waited together in the bus line, Farid’s ears straining to hear that magical number – 487. Students for the 487, please get your bus passes out.
The route taken by the 487 in the afternoon was the second most important journey Farid had made in his life. Miley sat a few rows in front of him; Farid could see the arrow of light hairs at the nape of her neck and the dark patches under the armpits of her blue pinafore.
Farid had imagined bringing Miley home: the click of the front door, their steps in the hallway carrying the perceptible tread of fear and longing. But then from his parents’ room would come his mother’s eternal whimper and Miley would turn to him with a questioning look and the moment would be ruined, and as he saw her out with blustered apologies she might even catch a glimpse of Abdul in the living room, his husk of a brother, and the moment though already lost would then be shattered beyond recognition.
You only had one shot with a girl like that. J. Cole had taught him as much, as had the other men who imparted their hard-won wisdom to him… “most of all I’m prayin, ‘God don’t let me bust quick’… I’m hopin’ that she won’t notice it’s my first time”.

* * *

Farid’s mother sensed their steps in the hallway before she heard them. She had for some time now been adept at judging the heaviness of the house. From their dance into the bedroom your mind’s eye could see many things: probably this girl looked like the ones Farid’s mother watched on TV, on Home and Away. Her limbs would be taut and fleshy from breathless mornings spent at Nippers; there would be little flicks of eyeliner at the corners of her eyes. From Farid’s side-on perspective lying next to her in the bed they might look like tear drops, arrested permanently in the moment before they slid down her cheeks. And the girl would have dusty-coloured hair. They all laughed at her when she complained about it but she was right: the dust followed them everywhere.
Would Abdul ever touch a girl? Would he know what it was like to have a woman trace the inside of his arm, drawing curlicues on his skin with her finger? He did open his eyes now and his lips parted when it was time to be fed but the long hours their mother spent with him in the living room when time seemed to ooze forward like viscous liquid reminded her of the suction cups on the tentacles of limp octopi she saw at the fish shop near their house: all reflex, all feeling, but with no real feeling at all.

* * *

Farid’s phone buzzed in the middle of the night, happily unaware of the import of the message it carried. It was Miley, reaching out her hand across the darkness.
U awake?
Yeah. U?
Haha. FaceTime me?
Can’t. Mum and Dad will hear.
Just for a minute Farid! I wanna see your face.
Haha. Go to sleep.
And then one more message impulsively sent, left on ‘read’ – an unanswered question hanging in the air, begging plaintively for an answer.
Love you.
Farid could sense, with the intuition of brothers, the weight of Abdul’s body lying parallel to him on the other side of the bedroom wall. Their parents had also bought Abdul an iPhone but he mostly used it to play Candy Crush. The sides of his mouth would turn up imperceptibly as he dragged his finger across the screen.

* * *

Final exam the next morning. Then, Farid and his friends would catch the bus to the beach and strip off as they ran down the sand, letting the ocean exfoliate the last seven-odd years of academic toil from their skin. When they were dry they would traipse into the pub and shout each other rounds and drink their still-buzzing nerves into submission, and when the girls arrived (late, always, but pretty) he would kiss Miley, they would thread their arms around each other’s waists, they would slink off home and tiptoe down his hallway and lie in bed talking with their hands about the summer they were about to have before they went to uni.
Final exam the next morning; Abdul would not sit it. High school had passed him by like a train missing a station. Farid’s parents had wheeled Abdul to Farid’s graduation, one of the only times he had recently been outside. Though he was younger than Farid by three minutes he somehow seemed older than all the boys and girls in the graduating class, slumped in his chair and wearing an expression that said, oh I have seen things. But who could tell what Abdul had seen on the insides of his eyelids during those long, long-ago months?
“My beautiful boys,” their mother exclaimed through her tears (joyful tears) but Farid knew that she had long ago stopped thinking of them as two people because to think of them only as one meant no longer admitting that one had ever been lost. It meant no longer rehearsing imagined eulogies, with lines unconsciously stolen from Charlie on Home and Away. The art of losing; it was not difficult to master.
For only the slightest moment as Farid sat the Maths exam the next day, his pen looping little circles over the correct answer, his hand hovered over the page as he thought of his brother in the living room. In his mind the image bled at the edges and for a second he was Abdul and Abdul was he, and their mother had only one son and their father had only one heir to carry on the family name and their house had only one room.
Then he pushed on, biting his lip and circling answers, because staying still and suspended was a thing he had stopped knowing how to do.