The boy in the tie-dye shirt bounces on the couch.

"Get down from there," his grandmother says.

The boy keeps jumping. What are they going to do? he wonders. What are they likely to do to the boy whose brother has just died. What can they possibly say?

His grandmother arranges plates and cloth napkins and cutlery on the table. The boy's aunt rattles dishes in the kitchen. His mother brings a tray into the room and unloads it. The shadows under her eyes are like bruises.

"Can I have Luke's room?" the boy asks.

His mother sets down a jar of jam and a metal bowl of sugar. She arranges a loaf and a knife on a round wooden board. She brushes something invisible from the tablecloth.

The house smells of burned bread.

The boy remembers the thick hush as his brother's casket moved along its track, moved behind curtains, into the dark place that seized it and devoured it until there was less of Luke than of the loaf his grandmother burned last night.

All night the boy could smell scorched bread and flesh. He imagined the roar and lick and gulp of flames. The boy bounces. "Can I?"

His mother sighs. She holds the empty tray across her chest. She looks at the boy who is standing on the couch.

He leans against its padded back, panting, watching her.

"Do I have to decide now?" She doesn't wait for an answer. She looks once at the table and walks out.

How can she say 'no' to the boy who discovered the body of his own dead brother hanging in a shed in the dark? The boy bounces.

His grandmother's cat does not like the house full of people and has hidden between a chair and fireplace. The tip of her tail twitches in the narrow shadow. "Sally. Sally. Sal. Here kitty," the boy says to the cat who will not come.

When he was small, he and his brother stayed overnight in the back bedroom of his grandmother's house, in the wide bed with its deep feather mattress.The cat slept between them. She stayed all night in the warm hollow near their feet but if they tried to hold her she slipped from under the covers and darted away.

"Sally. Sally. Puss, puss, puss," says the boy as he bounced on the couch. The boy is not looking at the cat. He's staring through the window. He can't see if his father is coming along the sidewalk, through the gate, up the pathway. His father is off somewhere with the other men who seem to have doubled in size and silence in the past few days.

The boy looks over the valley, across the playing field where he and his brother pushed each other on the rusted, groaning merry go round. Pushing harder and harder until they were spinning and giddy.

The boy is wearing his brother's underpants, his brother's socks, and his brother's shirt. He would have worn his jeans as well, but they were too long, so he took a pair of scissors and ripped a jagged gash across one knee of his own. Through the tear, when he sits and bends his leg, he can see ahuge scab which he got when he skidded his bike into the ditch a few days ago.

When he and his brother went out with their parents, their mother made them wear school clothes, grey dress pants, white shirts with v-necked sweaters. Lately his mother has not mentioned his clothes. The boy has been wearing the same ones for three days.

He's leaving the scab on his knee until it's dry and rigid. Then he'll pick it off and admire the sight of bright pink healing flesh. The boy bounces on the couch.

A picture behind him lists to the right. He raises his arm and sends it skittering down the wall. It falls to the floor, drops behind the couch with a thud.

In his grandmother's kitchen is a picture of his brother that appeared in a newspaper when he was awarded a prize in a local music contest. The news cutting is starting to yellow, the picture fading and retreating.

During the funeral service, the boy sat next to his grandmother, feeling her warmth against his arm. He listened to the music playing over the speaker. He tried to imagine that somewhere amongst the recorded strings and piano stood his brother, his bow arm moving back and forth, his ear turned against his violin, listening to his own music.

When his brother practised his violin, nothing the boy did or said could distract him.

Now the violin lies in a shattered pile under his brother's bed.

His aunt edges the door open and frowns, then retreats. The boy bouncesharder on the couch.

He wonders how long the springs will hold up, how long the stuffing will last. He wishes he hadn't taken off his shoes.

He knew, on the way home in the quiet car, pressed between his mother and his aunt, watching the back of his father's head, his rigid pink neck, watching the landscape sail away behind him, that when he got to his grandmother's house he would jump on the couch.

He's never done it before. A thirteen year-old boy is too old to bounce on the couch.

But a thirteen year-old boy is old enough to open the shed door in the neardark and smell wood shavings and rat piss and see a shadow, long and limp ina place where no shadows should be, and push on it once, because there seemed nothing else to do, then grab the shadow's feet, pull them towards him, hold them and lean against them and shriek into the dark.

The boy knows he will soon have to stop bouncing on the couch. He'll have to stop, but doesn't know how. He doesn't know what he'll do then.

The boy's grandmother stands in the doorway holding a tea towel, twisiting it in the way she wrings out the wet laundry before she carries it outside to the line. She looks at the table. She looks at the boy. "Where's Sally?"

"How should I know?"

"You can stop that, now," his grandmother says.

The boy is tired. His knees are no longer bone. They're jelly, they're soft bread, no longer connected to his calves or his thighs. It's only pure chance that they're still holding him up.

"Get down," says the boy's grandmother.

"Tell Mum I want Luke's room. Please Gran."

"You'll have it soon enough."

The first time they came to the house after his brother died, the boy got out of the car and looked up at the window of this room. His grandmother was staring out, the pale disc of her face not facing towards him, or his parents. She was looking away, so far away that he didn't turn to follow the line of her gaze. The boy knows now that his grandmother could just as easily have been bouncing on the couch.

His grandmother is looking at him in a way no one has looked at him for days.

No one has looked at him because he was the one who found his brother after he'd hung himself with his school tie in the garden shed while his father read the newspaper and the boy did his homework and his mother was out at a school meeting.

The boy wears his brother's clothes and will move into his brother's room and when he gets home he plans to strip the new brakes from his brother's bike and put them on his own.

"I want you to stop that, Jonathan" his grandmother tells him. "That's enough for now," she says. "You come here."

The boy bounces.

"It's not your fault. We don't know why Luke did it. But it's not your fault," she says.

Now the boy uses his shoulders and his elbows and his hips and his feet to drive his body into the couch. He wants to make everything fall away. He wants to fly, to fly across the room, high, high, wants to land on the table set for tea and feel dishes crash and jam scramble and the crusty loaf break apart and tear open like burned flesh.

The boy closes his eyes as the room sweeps by and the air falls away.

The boy knows his grandmother is watching him, waiting with her arms open wide to catch him.

He is too old to be jumping on the couch. The boy doesn't know what will happen next, but he knows he has to stop.

---

Return to CONTENTS