CHAPTER 13
Keith's younger brother came in to visit him after school. Keith watched him walk across the ward, looking from one bed to another in search of him. The admissions staff were never sure whether to put Keith in an adult ward or the children's ward; he was fourteen but the size of a child half his age. Most people thought he was seven or eight - nine at most - until they looked into his eyes, which were wise and old. This time they had put him in an adult orthopaedic ward, because the place allocated to him in the children's ward had been taken at the last minute by a baby.
Keith wondered what it did to Andrew to see his brother, only one year older than himself, in a ward full of middleaged and elderly people with broken bones. He thought it must be like walking past a breaker's yard and suddenly seeing your own car, dumped in the midst of a pile of rusted and twisted metal.
Andrew had said once to Keith, ‘I don't see you as any different from me - till I see you with other people.’ When Andrew caught sight of him now, would it be with an outsider's appraising gaze, seeing the disabilities, or would he see straight through the disguise, to Keith?
‘Oh, there you are!’ Andrew's face registered nothing but relief. ‘I thought I'd got the wrong ward.’ He punched him on the shoulder, throwing the punch from a distance, like a boxer: a violent movement that landed on Keith's thin body as a feather-light touch. From an early age, Andrew had learnt to treat his brother with restraint. He settled himself on the bed. ‘I got myself some crisps: want one?’
‘What flavour?’
‘Smoky bacon - what other flavour is there, man?’
Keith laughed. It was a long-standing joke. Andrew liked cheese and onion; Keith liked smoky bacon, but they would pretend it was the other way around. When their father took them to the pub and left Andrew keeping an eye on Keith in the garden while he went to the bar for their order, he would say, ‘What kind of crisps, boys?’ and Andrew would say, ‘Well, I would like smoky bacon but just for Keith's sake I'll have a bag of those disgusting cheese and onion ones that he likes, just so he can have one of mine and not throw up all over the place.’
And Keith would say, ‘Well, cheese and onion are my real favourite of all time but I'm doing penance, so get me a pack of those horrible smoky bacon.’ And their Dad would come back with the smoky bacon for Keith and the cheese and onion for Andrew and give them the packs the wrong way round and pretend to be surprised when they complained. ‘Come on, lads; it's Saturday - no sacrifices! I got you both what you really like! Let me see you eat them up and enjoy them!’
The fact that Andrew had brought smoky bacon meant that he had bought them for Keith, though he'd end up eating most of them himself, as he always did on Saturdays, because Keith could only eat very little, very slowly. It took him a long time to chew and a long time to swallow.
Andrew had taken two crisps out of the packet and was breaking them into morsels in the palm of his hand. He took Keith's hand off the control panel on the arm of his wheelchair, formed a grip between Keith's finger and thumb, and inserted a morsel of crisp between them.
Keith didn't like to be fed; he always wanted to feed himself, though the journey his hand had to make from armrest to mouth would be slow and the effort would leave him short of breath. In the meantime, Andrew would pop bits of crisp into his brother's mouth. Keith allowed that, as long as he was also allowed to feed himself.
It was a compromise they had worked out one day when, after Keith's return home from his twenty-eighth hospital stay, they found his arm movements had weakened considerably but he was still insisting on feeding himself. Their mother, who had decorated the house with streamers and balloons and made a cake to celebrate his homecoming, as she always did, broke down and ran from the room in tears. When Andrew had run after her, she said, ‘He won't get anything, at this rate! He'll starve to death!’
‘He won't,’ said Andrew.
He had come back to Keith, who was white as a sheet, not far from tears either, but stubbornly determined to do everything himself.
‘This is the way we'll do it,’ said Andrew. He was eleven at the time; Keith was twelve and a bit. That was when he had devised the method of forming Keith's hand into a pincer-like grip round a piece of food. Keith accepted it. Then Andrew had tried to raise Keith's hand to his mouth. ‘No,’ said Keith. ‘I can do it.’ Andrew let him. It took ages. Andrew waited. Keith's face was rigid, daring him to make any comment. Andrew said nothing. Finally the small piece of celebration cake reached his mouth. Keith chewed. Andrew still waited.
When Keith had finished, he looked at Andrew. Andrew didn't move. Keith looked down at his finger and thumb and back at Andrew, waiting for his brother to repeat the manoeuvre.
‘That mouthful was for you,’ said Andrew. ‘This one is for Mum.’
He picked up another few crumbs of cake and held them to Keith's mouth. Keith kept his mouth closed. They stared at one another - a battle of wills. Keith, wordlessly, looked down again at his finger and thumb. Andrew waited till he looked back at him. Then Andrew, wordlessly, looked around the room: the streamers, the balloons, the banners on which their mother had painted Welcome Home, Keith! and, We love you!
Keith opened his mouth and Andrew put in the food. As Keith chewed, tears rolled out of his eyes and down his face. When they reached his chin, Andrew wiped them.
He had finished the slice of cake, small piece by small piece, chewing more and more slowly every time. Their mother stood in the doorway, watching them. When the plate was empty, Keith looked at her with eyes that were red and swollen and said, ‘The cake was lovely. Thanks.’ Then he looked up at Andrew and said, ‘Thank you, Andrew.’ His mother flew across the room and hugged him. Andrew walked out of the room with a thunderous expression on his face, shut himself in the garden shed and, throwing himself down on a bag of peat, cried.
That day, the relationship between the brothers had changed. It was as though Andrew took on the role of elder brother and Keith became the younger. Of all the things Keith had ever had to let go, that was the hardest. For both of them, it seemed to herald the day when Andrew would not be the younger brother any longer, nor the older brother, but the only child of a heartbroken family.