Free Boy on the Wire by Alastair Bruce Page A

him at the morgue, standing over the body. He wants to reach down to his boy. Take his heart in his hand and squeeze. Maybe, just maybe.
    I embellish. The photograph is fading, the boy in it disappearing. I cannot see any of this.
    It comes back to me. My father at the pool, Peter in his lap, Paul at his feet. On the rocks above, perched like a vulture, another child, too frightened to cry.

6
    I am in the bungalow. I wake up here. At least, I come to consciousness here. I do not remember walking over.
    I am in the chair in front of the screen. There is a disc in the laptop and I am watching it. There are hours of footage of me. I paint, sleep, eat.
    I get to my feet and walk through the smaller house, going into each room. I press my palms against the walls, knock on them with my fists, listening for an echo.
    Later, I return to the cemetery, taking flowers as promised. When I get there, I realise I should have bought more than one bunch. I split the bunch and separate the flowers between the graves, as if doling out sweets to children.
    Peter’s grave is undisturbed. I do not know what I was expecting but still I find myself thinking this.
    The day of Paul’s funeral was windy. It is always windy here. A normal day. The wind blew sand into my mouth. It stuck to the wetness on my cheek and dried there. I felt encrusted with dirt.
    Opposite me, a woman in black and white – a nun. She was looking at me too. She had her hands clasped together and held out in front of her, praying. I have never been religious, though we went to church every week as a family before Paul died. She smiled at me. I did not smile back. I wanted her gone. Not just away from this place – I wanted her to disappear completely. Who was she to smile at me like that? Doesn’t she know what happened? Doesn’t she know, this messenger of God?
    To my left, Peter, and to his left, our father and mother. I stand apart from Peter, as far away as I could get. He knows what happened, what I saw. Peter, in turn, stands apart from our parents. The gap between me and them a chasm.
    There was plastic grass around the grave.
    I did not want to stand near them. I was angry with them. With Peter, with my parents too, though I did not know why. What I had seen: Peter, skipping away down the rocks, faster than I could go, me struggling, slipping down the rocks. How could they leave me back there? Why did they run off? I did not know where I was and could see nothing. If they had not left me, things would have been different. Thoughts I had – or have. I cannot tell whether they came to me on the day Paul died, the day of his funeral, or now, standing here, reliving it.
    There was a cut on my leg and there was pus and it was leaking into my sock. Standing at the grave, I could feel it hardening.
    I still have a scar on my knee from that day at the river. Another on my chin.
    I force myself to try to remember the details. Of the death, I mean. It is of the utmost importance. It is of the utmost importance, it seems to me, to remember everything, every detail. If I can, then this feeling that has been with me since I got Paul’s letter in London might go away. The feeling that something is not right.
    I have not thought about it. I’ve tried not to think about it for so long it is difficult now. I will probably not be able to remember all the details, all the facts. The older I get, the further away from the truth I recede. Perhaps. Things are changing, shifting. I remember details but I ask myself if they are made up, or some of them at least, and the question doesn’t go away. I want to and, if I am honest with myself, have wanted to for some time, bang my head against a wall, over and over again, until it all comes back, until it comes back or goes away, forever.
    I go through it – methodically is the word that comes to mind.
    The setting is a series of pools in a mountain river near Barrydale, a town in the Karoo.
    It is as if it is different people.
    These