The River is Everywhere

The moment before he disappeared my brother was going to tell me something.

He was still all bandaged up, so I’d been reading him The Enchanted Wood. Mum used to read it us when we were little. Perhaps I was trying to turn him back to the boy he’d been or remind him of our connection, or maybe I was just trying to do something nice.

I don’t know, and I guess it doesn’t matter, but for the hour directly preceding his disappearance, I had lain at the end of his bed, my head propped on cushions from the settee, reading as best as I could.

For Silky, I used the same accent I did for Nanny impressions: a high-pitched, nasal voice. Moon-face had a French accent, naturellemente. And Jo, Bessie and Fanny – which was an actual name when the book was written – well, they all sounded pretty much like me.

He didn’t look at me as I read – not even when the happenings were amusing, like when Dame Washalot ran out of dirty laundry and began washing the trees leaves instead – and that’s when I realised that he didn’t really look at people any more. And though I kept on reading, this thought began to bother me.

Looking at people had become a thing of the past for my brother, and why was that the case? When did it happen? Moon-face’s accent became so French I could barely understand myself, but still Johnny stared at the swirling Artex ceiling.

With every second that he didn’t look at me, I felt an itch, like another ant had marched into my ear cavity.

And it occurred to me that this was the root of his problems, this refusal to connect, and the itchy feeling built up, the ants climbing over each other, scratchy legs rubbing mandibles, and then, I was no longer reading, I was flinging the book at him and asking who the hell he thought he was.

“Are you even listening to this?” I said.

This was probably ninety seconds before the knock on the door, which was a very rhythmically knock it’s worth noting. The kind of knock that a person who hits a lot of doors might find themselves luxuriating in.

Ninety seconds to go, and my brother was lying on top of the tartan covers of his single bed, staring at the likely Asbestosed ceiling and I was sitting on the end of his bed, breathing in his deodorant, and hormones, and underneath it, that general brother-y smell which might be the same as saying the last breath of an almost forgotten fart.

“Not even smiling when Dame Washalot tries to wash the leaves!” I said, but Johnny didn’t say anything. I hated him for making me feel like this, for making me say ‘Dame Washalot’ in my own voice, outside of the safety of the story.

The words refused to be absorbed into the soft furnishings, repeating themselves instead around us, as present to me as the recurring rose pattern on the wallpaper.

“You know, you could just tell me what happened,” I said, and there was something so wheedling about my voice, something so like Mum’s, that it set the ants writhing again.

I wanted to grab his arms and throw them round my neck and squeeze him, and telli him none of it mattered and it wasn’t too late, and he wasn’t a tough guy, he was my brother, and we could stay in here like this forever, but I couldn’t do it.

“I’m alright, Kit. Just had a bit of a shock,” he said, and finally, finally he looked at me. His brow wrinkled as it always was, his jaw straight and hard.

“It’s just…” he began to fiddle with his bandages, and I waited, ready for the rest of the words, ready to forgive him for anything he might have done.

And that was when the knock came. The rhythmical, playful, luxuriant knock.

When we were on the cusp of connection like that, returning to siblinghood, preparing for epiphany.

And Johnny leapt from the bed, to the corner of the room, out the way of the window. Pressing my head to the glass, I saw PC Wrenn on the doorstep.

“I’m not in,” he said, when I told him.

Our words were whispered now, because the window was open. We could hear her mutterings on the doorstep – she was one of those people who talked to themselves – and the birds overhead warning each other about her.

“We’re not done talking,” I said, holding my head at an angle, so he understood we were making a deal.

There was sweat on his top lip, like he’d been working out, though he hadn’t moved for days, and he pulled his t-shirt and jumper from where they’d been draped on the headboard.

“I’ll say you’re not in, but you have to tell me what’s gone on,” I whispered, and he wiped his mouth.

The knock came again, and his promise came with it, and so I headed down the stairs.

PC Wrenn talked about a fire and fingerprints and someone in hospital with third degree burns, and thought I was lying when I said my brother wasn’t in. I didn’t hear the noises of him getting his things together or finding his shoes or making his way out of the house.

PC Wrenn told of my brother’s trip to the hospital, and the urgency she felt about talking to him, and I thought I was lying, perverting the course of justice, and I felt guilty. I swallowed too much and couldn’t remember how to breathe properly.

And when I closed the door, I was angry, because Johnny had said the bandages were from fighting, but I was relieved too, because anyway, she’d gone, and my brother was here, and ready to talk.

But when I got upstairs, his bed was empty.

His trainers were gone.

I walked outside and reached for the top of our creosoted fence, pulled myself up, and peered over into the never-resting nothing-muchness of out there. At first I thought he was hiding, but then too much time passed.

The whole scene seemed ruffled, as if it had witnessed an escape.

The grass, trees, birds were complicit and I examined them for clues.

What was I hoping for? A broken white line marking his trajectory across the grass, or one of those flashing, swaying checkpoints from Sonic?

I guess when you do something like that: barefoot peer over a fence for thirty minutes for visible tracks of your brother, you’re already beginning to get desperate.

My name is Kit, and I’m fourteen years old.

I live on the Bleaklowe Estate, which you may have heard of, because it was one of the places worst hit by The Floods. Mum’s grubby red Fiat was the one seen floating past the roof of the village hall again and again on Sky News.

Over the four days of rain, our house filled up like a boot, water draining out the windows like they were holes for shoelaces. You could have dived from the top of the stairs, swam under the ceiling and looped the light fixture like carp loop round the fountain in China Dragon.

It’s a nice picture I’m painting isn’t it? All that talk of carp and fountains. But the truth is, I wasn’t there to see it happen. And I haven’t seen it since. Not in real life. There’s no way in, you see, apart from diving and I just haven’t been in the mood.

Can you imagine it? That moment when the water rushed in, lifting the armchairs and freeing the angelfish. The house transformed into a fish reservation. It’s in my dreams now, as clearly as if I saw it myself.

But like I said, I wasn’t there to see it happen. When the river burst its banks, I was out in the forest, searching for my brother.

When the river burst its banks, I was by the river.