Broken Soup Read Free

good-bye, like our conversation never happened.
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    Our house was still a shrine then. Jack was everywhere, smiling out of rooms, watching on the stairs, aged nine and eleven and fourteen, his hair combed and parted, his ears sticking out, grown-up teeth in a kid’s mouth. Mum talked to the pictures when she thought she was alone. I heard her. Like one side of an ordinary phone call, like he wasn’t dead at all, just moved out and on the other end of the line. The kind of phone call he’d have probably got from her every week the whole of his life. You’d think death could have spared him that.
    I never knew what she found to talk about. I was right there and she hardly spoke to me.
    Home was quiet like a shrine too. Like the insideof a church, all hushed tones and low lighting and grave faces. There wasn’t any Jack noise anymore. No loud music, no shouting, no playing the drums on the kitchen table at breakfast, no nothing.
    My room had been a landing. When Stroma was born and we needed the space, Dad blocked it off with a new wall and stuck a door in it, but it was too cold for a baby so Stroma got my old room and I moved in. It was tiny, given that it was really just a turning space for somebody using the stairs. There was no radiator and the power came in on an extension from the kitchen, so I was usually cold and I could never lock my door.
    Jack’s room was on the same floor as Mum’s and Stroma’s, next to the bathroom. It had two windows and tall bookshelves and an old wooden desk. The walls were a warm gray color called Elephant’s Breath. It was the saddest place in the house—the living, breathing mother ship of everybody’s grief. If you thought you were getting over Jack and things were nearly back to normal, you’d only have to go in that room and you’d start missing him from the beginning all over again.
    Now and then that was just how I wanted to feel.
    Sometimes I’d put on some of his music. Sometimes I’d pick up his guitar, but I can still only play the first six notes of “Scarborough Fair” so that never lasted long. I don’t even like that song. Usually I’d stretch outon his bed and look at the sky through his windows. That night I sat with my back against the wall and my chin on my knees and I turned the negative over and over between my fingers. I thought about what Bee had said, about what I was going to do next.
    Nothing, I thought, and I aimed it into the garbage bin from where I was sitting and went back to thinking about my brother.
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    I wasn’t sure if Stroma missed Jack, not really. She stuck him at the end of her prayers with Grandad Clark and Great-auntie Helen (who she’d met, like, twice), but I reckoned she forgot him almost as soon as he was gone. She hardly ever saw him anyway; maybe at breakfast when he wasn’t really awake, or in the car when he’d have headphones on and act like she wasn’t there. Jack did loads of nice stuff with Stroma, like taking her to the park or teaching her how to make paper airplanes, but I think she was too young to remember. She didn’t know him at all. I wonder how she added it up for herself, this stranger in her family dying and turning her family into strangers.
    It was me that had to tell Stroma because nobody else had done it. It was the morning after they told me. She had no idea Jack was dead. Everything around her was altered and she was trying so hard not to notice.
    She looked up at me and said, “What’s the matterwith Mummy?” and I said she was sad.
    She asked me what Mum was sad about and I said, “Jack’s gone,” and Stroma carried on humming this little tune and pouring nothing out of a tiny china teapot.
    Then she said, “Where?” and I said I didn’t know. She picked up a cup and saucer and handed it to me. She said, “Blow on it, it’s really hot.”
    I said, “He’s dead,