Читать книгу Broken Soup - Jenny Valentine - Страница 7

I haven’t mentioned my brother Jack yet, which is odd because he’s the thing most people knew about me then. Wherever I went, being Jack’s sister was my ticket in. It was easy. Everyone loved Jack. I didn’t have to do anything to make them love me too. It was all taken care of.

How would I describe my big brother to someone who doesn’t know him? I could start with nice to look at (my dad’s height, my mum’s skin). Or clever, because learning new stuff just never seemed hard for him. Maybe funny. When you’d been with Jack for a while, I guarantee your stomach muscles would start to ache. And generous, because he’d give anything to his friends if they needed it.

But I don’t want to put anyone off. All of those things are Jack, but not in a smug or annoying way, not so you mind someone else having all the luck. If you ask me, he’s one of those people who make a room more interesting when they’re in it, who make everyone else wilt just a little when they leave.

There’s two years between us and then nearly ten until Stroma, so we were like the first round of kids, the planned ones I suppose.

If I was going to tell someone just one of my Jack stories, it would be his ‘Map of the Universe’. I think it came free with National Geographic. He’d had it for years, stuck on the inside of his wardrobe door, but no one else had ever really looked at it.

One day Mum was ranting about the mess everywhere and how she couldn’t think straight because of everybody’s crap around the house. You could hear her coming up the stairs talking to herself about it. She came into Jack’s room with a pile of clean laundry. He had most of her coffee cups in there, all in various stages of penicillin. His sheets were balled up on the floor and his mattress was propped against the chest of drawers because he’d just been teaching me how to jump-slide down it. The bin was overflowing (and it stank) and the floor was so littered with books and bits of paper and caseless CDs that it was hard to know where to tread.

“Why,” said Mum, “do I bloody bother?” and she looked around, and then down at the ironed clothes she was fool enough to be carrying.

I could feel her slave speech coming on so I tried to blend into the wall.

Jack put his arm around her and said, “Come and look at this, Mum.” He stood her in front of the wardrobe, stood behind her with his hands on her shoulders. He was already way taller than her then. When he opened the doors, everything tumbled out like clothing lava. I think there was fruit peel and crisp packets in there too.

Mum sort of bellowed and made fists and screwed her eyes tight shut, and there was this quiet pause where I thought she was going to properly start. But Jack said, “No! No, that wasn’t it, that’s not what I wanted to show you, honest,” and he was laughing and refusing to let her get angry around him. I was so close to that place where laughing is bad and it’s impossible not to. I couldn’t look at him.

He pointed to the map and said, “This is the KNOWN UNIVERSE,” in a rumbling, half-serious voice like that man who does all the movie trailers.

Mum was still holding the laundry. She rolled her eyes and started to speak, but Jack stopped her. He had the broken aerial of his radio in his hand and he was using it to point at the map like a teacher, like a weather man.

“This tiny dot,” he said, “is PLANET EARTH. And that lives in this cylinder here, which is our SOLAR SYSTEM. That’s the sun and all the planets, right? You knew that.”

Mum’s foot was tapping, double-time, like, “Let’s get this over with”.

“Now this cylinder, our solar system, with the sun and the planets and everything, is this tiny dot in this cylinder which is the NEIGHBOUR GROUP.” He paused for effect, like he was looking at a class of scientists.

“And the neighbour group is now this tiny dot in this next cylinder which is a SUPER CLUSTER. Are you getting this?”

There were five or six cylinders altogether and the last one was the KNOWN UNIVERSE.

“The KNOWN UNIVERSE’ he said to her over and over again. “THE KNOWN.”

Mum said, “What does this have to do with anything?”

“Well,” Jack said with his hands outstretched and this “love me” look on his face. “How important is a tidy room now, in the scheme of things? Where does it register on the map?”

Mum laughed then and so could we. Jack gave her this big bear hug and she said he was far too smart for his own good. She threw his clean clothes on top of everything else on the floor.

And she said, “You still have to tidy up.”

Like I said. One of those people who make a room more interesting when they’re in it.

I’m not saying Jack’s perfect. I’m not pretending he hasn’t wound me up or kicked me too hard or made me eat mud and stuff like that, because of course he has. Maybe all brothers do. It’s just that he also looked after me and made me laugh and told me I was cool and taught me things nobody else but your big brother can.

So I miss him.

We all miss him.

We’ve been missing him for more than two years now. And it’s never going to end.