ORY, MY BROTHER
by Kate Walker
First published in ‘Changes and other stores’
by Omnibus Books, Australia 1995
Copyright Kate Walker 1995
ISBN: 9781301121045
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Table of Contents
Beginning
Midpoint
About the Author
Cover Details
______ ~ ______
Rory, My Brother
by Kate Walker
My brother was sick for ages, then all of a sudden it happened. He died. I suppose it wasn’t sudden for him. He’d been in hospital five weeks that time. I know he wanted to die at home, but you don’t always get what you want.
Mum phoned me at university, at the on-campus college where I live, and said, ‘Paul,’ and I knew what was coming next, ‘your brother’s gone.’
I almost asked, ‘Did he roll up his bed sheet and skip?’ He’d often talked about doing that – running away. Or hiding in the linen basket and making his escape in the hospital laundry van. He hated hospitals, and the rotten things they did to him – sticking tubes in him and making him swallow stuff he’d only throw up.
And didn’t he gripe about it!
Rory was no saint. Though most people outside the family thought he was. He looked like one. He was frail as matchsticks, his skin was like white powder, and I swear every time I saw him his eyes got bigger and bigger.
In fact, this last time when I came home for the semester break, he looked like an honest-to-God angel sitting up in bed watching TV with those big luminous eyes of his. All the life draining out of his body seemed to go into his eyes.
He had regular counselling sessions that filled him up with platitudes, so he could sound like a regular little philosopher when people came to see him. I mean so that he could talk about dying like it didn’t scare him. He didn’t fool me, but then with me he never tried. With me he was just himself – a foul-mouthed little trollop, shit-scared and angry. If he wanted to throw pillows at some one, he threw them at me.
Mum said, ‘I thought you’d want to come and say goodbye to him.’
I said, ‘Yeah.’
I could hear her voice on the pay phone echoing away, right down the corridor. At least that’s how it sounded, like she wasn’t really there talking to me but far away with Rory, going those first few steps with him. And if she wasn’t there and he wasn’t there, what was the point? Couldn’t I say goodbye to him just as well at home, from his bedroom door? Or from the lounge room that he took over with all his medical stuff, and where he usually hung out?
But there are some things even cowards can’t squeak out of.
‘Thanks, Mum.’ I asked her if she was OK. She said she was. ‘I won’t be long,’ I said.
Rory died early in the morning, so I had to drive through peak hour traffic to get to the hospital on the other side of town. Mum and Dad were already there. They’d gone in the station wagon the night before. I had the little blue Datsun, the car bought specially for Mum so she could zap back and forth to the hospital whenever Rory was admitted, which was pretty often.
And if I happened to mangle the car on the way and never actually got there, everyone would understand I was upset about my brother! And I hadn’t had my license long. And no one was going to cry over one dead Datsun. I reckon Mum’d be glad to be rid of it, with its plastic St Christopher glued to the dash … by a previous owner, of course. We weren’t religious. In fact, there were scratch marks on the dash where she’d tried to get it off. But she hadn’t succeeded.
I parked the car neatly in the car park and entered the hospital through one of its secret side doors, known only to the initiated who came as regularly as we did. The place was open for business. There were dozens of Pink Ladies with blue hair scooting about giving the impression hospital was holiday camp. And busy nurses in flat squeaky shoes, all with lashed-back hair-do’s and big bums.
I don’t go for nurses, but Rory liked them. He said if you were really sick and they really liked you, or you were a special case, they’d play with you a bit when they washed you. Even jerk you off! Now, I ask you, are those the words of a saint? Or your average sixteen-year-old with his mind in the gutter?
Mum and Dad were in A Ward waiting room when I got there, with lots of people around them. Mum’s nose was red and her lips were swollen like someone had punched her. She held a scrunched up tissue but she wasn’t crying. She’s an old hand at being brave. Dad was having a harder time of it, trying to match his feelings to the image of his business suit.
Mum smiled at me. Grimaced really, showing all the gaps between her teeth. Everything gets distorted at times like these. Her hair was flat and her face was grey, and she was talking non-stop in this crowded room, with morning creeping in through the windows. Talking to nurses and doctors and friends. Talking non-stop but calm, because even though there’s nothing you can say, it’s murder if everyone’s silent. So she talked, and everyone looked sympathetic.
‘Do you want me to come with you,’ she asked me, ‘to say goodbye to him?’
‘Nah, I’d rather see him on my own,’ I said. Only because I didn’t know how I’d behave and if I went on my own, no one would know what I did. Or didn’t do. Whether I only got as far as the door, and backed out again. Whether or not I kissed him. I know brothers don’t usually kiss, but with Rory and me I always kissed him goodbye when I went back to school ... or university. I never knew if I’d see him again.
‘Oh, Paul, they’ve moved him!’ Mum called after me. ‘To room 104.’
I knew that. Fancy getting the wrong room, I thought, and walking in on someone who was still alive. What a shock!
The tiles in the corridor were so cushioned I couldn’t hear my own footsteps on the floor. So who’s the angel now, I thought, not Rory but me – floating along.
The door to room 104 had a glass window and I could look through first and prepare myself to see him propped up on pillows. My brother always had pillows around him. And he did this time too. Not so many as usual.
There was only one light on in the room, a frosty fluro tube above the hand basin, and the light didn’t quite fill the room. Like Rory never quite filled up a bed. There wasn’t that much of him, just a few bumps under the sheets. Two for his knees and two for his feet, and that seemed to be about all.
I was used to coming into his room and him not moving, or cheering up like he did for most people. With me, he never put on any acts.
There was an electric clock above the door, big enough to run trains by, and its heavy hand clacked past every second it took me to cross from the door to the foot of his bed. His face was white again, making him a better colour than Mum! Towards the end, with all the stuff they pumped into him, he went a yellowy blue.
But he was white again now, just like he’d always been, just like I remembered him. His big dark eyes were closed, thank God. He didn’t make me face that one. I didn’t have to see the life gone out of his eyes, just out of the rest of him. He looked like a little old man in his striped pyjamas, the bed sheets and everything tidy around him.
He died of leukaemia, if you’re wondering. A lot of people thought he had AIDS, and he got a buzz out of that.
‘They’ll think I’ve been up to it!’ he said.
See what I mean? There was nothing sweet about Rory. He wasn’t nice.
He liked being different.
He liked to big-note. And God, wasn’t he conceited? He asked the Argentinian soccer team to visit him. And they did! Whatever big name rock group happened to be in town, he’d put the word out they could come and visit him, like he was the main attraction, not them.
He lived for attention. He could be as sick as a dog until some celebrity walked in. You should have seen the show he put on for that Princess chick who visited Camperdown Children’s Hospital. She couldn’t shake him off.
Everyone in the Health Department knew Rory, mainly because they were using him as a guinea pig. When he was wheeled into a new clinic, the staff just about lined the corridors to cheer him in. He had a reputation for being plucky, and a character. And he was. Though mostly his courage was bloody good acting. I know. I saw him out of make-up – most people didn’t.
The drip had been turned off beside his bed, so that didn’t click any more. Glucose and morphine. He used to say he got a buzz out of that too. The little saint wasn’t above telling whopping great lies.
Later, at the funeral, the minister talked about how much Rory was loved and how he would live on, because of the inspiration he’d been to others. And I can remember sitting there thinking, ‘Mate, if you don’t stop bull-shitting about him, I’m gunna deck you.’ Dad grabbed my arm. We were in the front row. Everyone saw.
What was wrong with the truth? That Rory stank from being so sick. He had no hair. He got cranky. He was conceited. He grabbed at life and stole as much of it as he could, from anyone at all.
He stole stacks of my life. He took my Mum and Dad. He took my home. For my own good, I was sent to boarding school for years, then on-campus college, and no way was I going to pick up that lost time. It was gone – snatched by Rory.
He wasn’t perfect. He wasn’t easy to love. He wasn’t easy to kiss either, laying there with his skin tight across his cheeks and almost no warmth left in his hands, almost all of it gone. A lot of times I hated him. There’s nothing particularly perfect about me either. But God, I miss him. God, it hurts. The little arse-hole, why did he have to die?
THE END … but please read on.
MORE FICTION BY KATE WALKER
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A mother, jack-knifed out of reality by the pending death of her son, begins to see the world very differently.
FOR TEACHERS, HOME SCHOOLERS & ASPIRING YOUNG WRITERS
Step By Step Stories
A unique approach to teaching & learning story craft & writing.
Writing Enrichment
How to actually WRITE! The few, very do-able basic techniques.
For more about Kate Walker & her books please visit:
https://www.katewalkeraustralia.com
https://www.katewalkerwriter4children.com
https://www.creativewritingclassroom.com
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Kate Walker is the author of many books for Children and Young Adults, and now writes for adults as well. She lives in Australia, in a pretty little town by the sea.
PUBLISHED WORKS BY KATE WALKER
PICTURE BOOKS
Marty Moves to the Country ~ The Frog Who Would Be King
King Joe of Bogpeat Castle ~ The First Easter Rabbit
Our Excursion ~ The Flying Pieman ~ A Pride of Noses
JUNIOR BOOKS
The Alien Challenger ~ The Letters of Rosie O’Brien
Suzie and the Pencil-case Genie ~ Tales from the Good Land
Burying Aunt Renie ~ The Dragon of Mith ~ I Hate Books
Elephant’s Lunch ~ Sticky Stuff ~ The Cranky Old Magician
Finicky Fish ~ Lighthouse Lucy ~ The Beautiful Spurs
YOUNG ADULT BOOKS
Peter ~ Changes & other stories ~ Mitch 2 Sue
NON-FICTION
Series: Spies & Spying ~ Series: Recycle, Reuse, Reduce, Rethink
Series: Recycling ~ Series: Investigating Earth
COVER IMAGES
Main Portrait Copyright Julia Tsokur
Sleeping Boy Copyright Elena Rostunova
Sourced from Dreamstime.com