Terry couldn’t avoid me forever. It was about time we were properly introduced. Soon after everyone had lost interest in congratulating me on waking up, he came into the room and sat on his bed, bouncing rhythmically, hands pressed down on his knees as if to keep them from flying away.
I lay back in bed gazing at the ceiling and pulled the covers over me. I could hear my brother breathing. I could hear myself breathing too- so could anyone; the air whistled noisily through my throat. I felt awkward and ridiculous. I thought: He’ll speak when he’s ready. My eyelids weighed a ton, but I wouldn’t allow them the satisfaction of closing. I was afraid the coma was waiting.
It took an hour for Terry to bridge the distance between us.
“You had a good sleep,” he said.
I nodded but couldn’t think of anything to say. The sight of my brother was overpowering. I felt impossibly tender and wanted a hug, but decided it was better to remain aloof. More than anything, I just couldn’t get over how unrelated we looked. I know we had different fathers, but it was as if our mother hadn’t a single dominant gene in her whole body. While I had an oily yellow complexion, a pointed chin, brown hair, slightly protruding teeth, and ears pressed flat against my head like they were waiting for someone to pass, Terry had thick blond hair and blue eyes and a smile like a dental postcard and fair skin dotted with adorable orange freckles; his features had a perfect symmetry to them, like a child mannequin’s.
“Do you want to see my hole?” he said suddenly. “I dug a hole in the backyard.”
“Later on, mate. I’m a bit tired.”
“Go on,” my father said, scowling. He was standing at the door glaring at me. “You need fresh air.”
“I can’t now,” I said. “I feel too weak.”
Disappointed, Terry slapped my atrophied leg and ran outside to play. I watched him from the window, a little ball of energy trampling on flower beds, a little streak of fire jumping in and out of the hole he’d dug. While I watched him, my father remained hovering at the bedroom door, with burning eyes and fatherly sneers.
Here’s the thing: I had peered over the abyss, stared into the yellow eyes of death, and now that I was back in the land of the living, did I want sunshine? Did I want to kiss flowers? Did I want to run and play and shout, “To be alive! To be alive!” Actually, no. I wanted to stay in bed. It’s difficult to explain why. All I know is a powerful laziness seeped into me during my coma, a laziness that ran through my blood and solidified into my core.
It was only six weeks after my groggy reawakening when- even though the pain it caused me to walk was reshaping my body to resemble a eucalypt twisted by fire- my parents and doctors decided it was time for me to return to school. The boy who had slept through a sizable chunk of his childhood was expected to slip unnoticed into society. At first the children greeted me with curiosity: “Did you dream?” “Could you hear people talking to you?” “Show us your bedsores! Show us your bedsores!” But the one thing a coma doesn’t teach you is how to blend into your surroundings (unless everyone around you is sleeping). I had only a few days to work it out. Obviously, I failed miserably, because it wasn’t two weeks later when the attacks started. The pushing, the beating, the intimidation, the insults, the jeers, the wedgies, the tongue poking, and, worst of all, the agonizing silence: there were almost two hundred students at our school, and they gave me four hundred cold shoulders. It was the kind of cold that burned like fire.
I longed for school to be over so I could go to bed. I wanted to spend all my time there. I loved lying down, the reading lamp shining, just a sheet over me, the blankets bunched up at the bottom of the bed like fat rolls. My father was unemployed then (the prison was completed and had its grand opening while I was in the coma), and he burst into my room at all hours and screamed, “GET OUT OF BED! CHRIST! IT’S A BEAUTIFUL DAY OUTSIDE!” His fury multiplied tenfold when directed at Terry, who would lie in bed too. You see, it might be difficult for anyone to believe now, but somehow, juvenile invalid though I was, I still managed to be a hero to Terry. He adored me. He idolized me. When I lay all day in bed, Terry lay all day in bed. When I threw up, Terry plunged his fingers down his own throat. I’d be under the sheets curled up into a ball, shivering uncontrollably with fever, and Terry would be curled and shivering too. It was sweet.
My father was scared stiff for him, for his actual son, and he concentrated all his mental forces into predicting terrible futures, all because of me.
One day he had an idea, and for a parent, it wasn’t a bad one. If your child has an unhealthy obsession, the only way to wean him off it is to replace it with a healthy one. The obsession my father chose to lure Terry away from wanting to be an invalid was as Australian as a funnel-web spider bite on the kneecap.
Sport.
It was Christmas. Terry was given a football. My father said to him, “Well, let’s you and me go throw the ball around, eh?” Terry didn’t want to go because he knew I would stay inside. My father put his foot down and dragged him kicking and screaming out into the sunshine. I watched them through the window. Terry put on a fake limp. Whenever my father threw the ball, Terry hobbled miserably across the field to catch it.
“Now stop that limping!”
“I can’t help it!”
“There’s nothing wrong with your leg!”
“Yes there is!”
My father spat with revulsion and grumbled his way back into the house, plotting and scheming the way fathers do, out of love. He decided that for a spell he needed to keep his unhealthy stepson away from his healthy actual son; he saw disease as a combination of laziness and weakness, as an inclination, and in our house you couldn’t so much as cough without him seeing it as a reflection of your disgusting interior. He wasn’t normally an unsympathetic man, and he had his fair share of struggle, but he was one of those people who had never been sick a day in his life (only in his unpaid-bill-induced nausea) and had never even known anybody who had been sick. Even his own parents died without protracted illness (bus crash). I know I’ve said it before: if my childhood taught me one thing, it’s that the differences between the rich and the poor are nothing. It’s the chasm between the healthy and the sick that you just can’t breach.
The next morning, with my father dragging two suitcases and Terry dragging his leg, they climbed into the family car and disappeared in wild swirls of dust. Two months later, when they returned, Terry told me that they had followed the local football team around the state, going to all the games. After a couple of weeks the team began to notice them, and, touched by the devotion of an apparently lame child, they elected my little limping brother their unofficial mascot. At the first opportunity, my father unburdened his troubles to the players, told them all about me and the insidious influence I had on Terry, and begged them to help him restore the hearty Australian spirit that had left his younger son’s left leg. The whole team rose to the occasion and answered the call proudly. They carried Terry onto the unblemished green of the field and in the hot breath of sunshine coached him in the finer elements of the game, inspiring him to limp less and less in his desire to impress them. After two months on the road, he was limpless and a true little sportsman. My father was no dummy. Terry had caught the bug.