My Brother in the Attic

1

Listen to this. Can you hear that? It’s the sound of floorboards creaking overhead. The eek and aww of a young man pacing in the middle of the night. I don’t know what it is that’s troubling him—if there’s something troubling him at all—but it’s always the same. The back and forth of steady steps circling the attic, starting just as the rest of us have gone to bed. He’s nocturnal—our resident live-in ghost—and in between these long contemplative walks, which shudder through our slim, terraced house like a chill, he makes his way down to the kitchen to make himself a cup of tea or a piece of toast. We don’t talk about these journeys he makes to the underside of the house. We all ignore the flick of the light switch, the groan of the stairs, and the rattle of the teaspoon against his cup. We wake up in the morning to find furniture moved or bites taken out of an unfinished birthday cake in the fridge, but none of us says anything about it. It’s like a family secret, an oath of silence none of us ever actually took.

His name is Thomas Stockstill and he’s my brother. In the rare instances that I’ve glimpsed him as he’s stumbled through the house, he’s had short but unkempt hair which he’s cut himself with kitchen scissors and his clothes have been baggy over his shrunken torso. But whenever I imagine the person walking above us each night, it’s still the brother I once knew that I see up there. Thomas when his rich black hair was parted over to one side and when his arms were strong enough to put me on his shoulders and make giddy-up noises around the house.

He was the brother who for as long as I can remember was the only person in my family who justified the description: related. We all look alike, that is true; all of us (myself, my two brothers, and our mother) have the same dark black hair and the same colourless complexions, and when entering a room, the first thing anyone asks us is: what’s the weather like up there? But it was only Thomas—when we were at a family gathering or whenever we were subjected to the torture of a wedding—who was able to look at me and give me the small, shrunken smile of understanding. The one that told me it was alright if I did not feel comfortable around these other people. The one that reassured me that it was alright to feel like I didn’t belong.

What he does up there now, I don’t know. He reads, I think, the novels and books that he used to introduce to me now stored up there like prisoners, and every now and then if you listen hard enough, you can hear the cackling of a studio audience or the crossfire of an action movie. These sounds come from the television our mother bought him for his room the year he was accepted into The Academy. An exclusive school for exceptional students, The Academy’s existence included the requirement that a percentage of its intake be from an underprivileged background.

Thomas has always been the brains of the family—we were always made to marvel at his ability to say something in a non-English language or witness how he’d been able to take the radio apart in the kitchen and then put it back together again so that it still played the breakfast show—but after his admission to The Academy, things were different. It was here that we started getting hints of the hermit my brother would one day become. He was tired all the time and started to keep to himself. The school stood in for my brother’s sixth form, but after finishing, Thomas didn’t go to university. He was instead given an internship at a communications company with the promise of a starting salary that made our father, Raymond, nearly pass out when he heard it.

This was meant to be it. My brother was transcending the circumstances of his birth. He would be independent, financially free of our parents and able to start his life. Maybe start his own family. But in the fifth month of this six-month internship, Thomas came home from work, went up the stairs to his attic room and never came back out again.

That was ten years ago.

“I don’t know how much longer I can take this, Helen.”

This is the sound of our parents. Our mother, Helen, and our father—who we all exclusively call Raymond.

“What does that mean?”

“It means what it sounds like it means: if something doesn’t change soon, I’m going to pop.”

“Pop?”

“Pop! Explode! Go bang!”

Raymond’s voice travels through the house like a bell. Our parents’ bedroom is right next to mine.

There is no question that Thomas can hear what they are saying.

“You’re being ridiculous, Ray,” says our mother.

“I’m not being ridiculous. I’m being perfectly not ridiculous. I can’t take this any longer.”

It is an argument our parents have had many times. It used to fill me with fear and images of the two of them getting divorced, but now I just let it happen. I am lying on my bed, over the covers.

“And what exactly is it that you can’t stand any longer?”

“You know what.”

“And I’m asking you to tell me again.”

“Okay, fine, first off, he doesn’t have a job. He hasn’t had a job since he left that goldmine of a job ten years ago. A goldmine of a job that he quit before he even received a penny, I should add.”

“It was an internship, Ray.”

“Whatever, you know what I mean.”

“Okay. And what else?”

“Huh?”

“What else can’t you stand?”

Raymond is stumped for a moment. If he’s planned out this argument beforehand, he’s forgotten the next line. “Rent!” he says, all at once. “How about that? Hm? He doesn’t pay rent. If he paid rent or if he contributed to this home in some way or another, I might be able to justify him being here, but he doesn’t and so I can’t.”

“Right, so, no job and no rent, is that it?”

Our mother’s voice isn’t as loud as Raymond’s, but it’s sharp.

“No that’s not it, Helen! It’s that he’s just—it’s that he’s just here! All the time! Day or night, he’s in the house. I can feel him, every second I’m home. The negative energy of having him above us all the time…”

“His negative energy?”

“Yes!”

“This is your son, Ray. This is your son you’re talking about.”

“I know it is!”

“Your son who you are saying has negative energy.”

I am wearing the white shirt and grey skirt of my school uniform. A year ago I would have run in from school and immediately changed into normal people clothes. I’d get ready to meet my friends or else I’d get dressed for the summer and sit outside with whatever book Miss Birdie had given us and read until my eyes were sore. But there’s no reason for me to do either of these things anymore.

“This is me exploding, Helen. This is me telling you what I feel. Don’t stand there and tell me you don’t feel the same.”

Our mother doesn’t respond.

“See!”

“It’s just… I don’t know what to do either, Ray. I mean, I tried to make him see a doctor, but he just refused, and then when I went to the medical centre myself, they said he was too old for us to refer him.” Our mother’s voice has lost a lot of its fervour and although it doesn’t sound like she’s crying, I know if I could see her face, it would be red. “And then whenever I try to go up and speak to him, he won’t even look at me. I try to talk to him but… how do you get someone to listen to you when they don’t want to hear you?”

“It’s becoming too much.”

“It’s not just that.”

“Then what is it then, Helen?”

“I don’t like hearing someone attacking him like this.”

“Who’s attacking him?!”

“You are, Ray!” Our mother has rallied. “What’s your problem with him? Why can’t you just put yourself in his shoes for once?”

“His shoes?!” Raymond’s voice rises to meet his wife’s. “You don’t think I ever wanted to give up on life? To throw away my job and just stay in bed all day? I’d love to, Helen—but I have responsibilities! Do you know what my dad would’ve done to me if I told him I was going to spend all day at home?”

“He would tan your hide.”

“He would tan my hide!”

My concentration rises and falls like the ocean against the shore. I am losing track of the argument. Our mother says something about how Thomas is different to Raymond, about how he finds it difficult to be around other people. Raymond responds: who likes being around other people?! I hate other people! They talk about how when our eldest brother David was sixteen, he took a job at the supermarket. This, Raymond claims, taught him the value of money and the importance of a good day’s work. David moved out of the house before I was born and lives with his wife Claire on the other side of the city. When our parents offered Thomas the same deal at the same age, he refused.

“So what are you saying, Ray, that we should’ve forced him?”

“No… I’m just…”

“And anyway, it was then that he got that offer from The Academy. I wasn’t about to stand in the way of that.”

Raymond makes a sound. It is half-snort, half-laugh. He’s been waiting for The Academy to get a mention.

“I’m not so sure if that’s the good thing you think it is.”

“You weren’t there, Ray,” says our mother, “you didn’t hear the way that teacher talked about him. It was like he could walk on water the way she put it! How brilliant he was, how he was the best student she’d ever had.” I was with our mother when Thomas’s teacher called her in to tell her this. She was apprehensive at first and told the teacher she didn’t want her son to turn out odd. She didn’t want Thomas to grow up with the feint, socially stunted air of a home-schooled kid or with the whiff of someone with a private education. But the teacher insisted this was a great opportunity for him and assured our mother that her son would be surrounded by many different students from many different backgrounds. “She said to me that if he accepted the place at the school, he could do anything he wanted.”

“Yeah, and what he wanted to do was sit on his arse all day long.”

I hear our mother bristle at this.

“Do you really think he wants to be up there, Raymond?”

“No,” says Raymond, begrudgingly.

“At least you can admit that.”

“But you understand what I mean, right? You can see my face and you know why it looks like this, don’t you?”

“Of course, I do, Ray! You’re frustrated, you’re angry! You feel impotent!”

“Well, I wouldn’t say…”

“There’s so much I should be doing—trying to do, but I can’t! I know I need to do something about Sally, try to reach out to her, but I never have the time.”

I’m Sally. Sally Stockstill. Pleased to meet you.

“Sally? What’s wrong with Sally?”

“Haven’t you noticed? She’s not been the same since…” Our mother trails off. Maybe she knows I can hear her.

“Since?”

“You forgot?”

“I mean, no, but—it’s like you said, I don’t have time to think about these things…”

“Her friend last year...”

“Oh? Oh!”

“She’s not been right since then. She’s so much like Thomas. But sometimes I feel like I’ve only got the brainpower to be a mum to one of my children at a time.”

“He’s like a sponge. He just soaks up all our energy.”

“Don’t—Ray, don’t say things like that.”

“What? Why?”

“Because it scares me when you say stuff like that.”

“Well, maybe that’s the problem,” says Raymond. “We’re too scared. Too frightened. If we had the guts, we would go right up there and tell him all this ourselves. Maybe if we’d done this before, if we’d been more strict...”

“Ray, please—please stop.”

“…I’m sorry, it’s just… I don’t know how much longer I can take this. It’s like I’m going to explode, and you’re going to have to pick little bits of me out of your coffee.”

“I know.”

“I’ll tell you one thing, though.”

“What’s that?”

“When it comes her turn, we’re not going to let Sally get away with anything like this.”

2

Here I am at school. I spend most of my time wandering the halls or else finding a small, quiet part of the building to be alone. I don’t talk during classes unless the teacher calls on me specifically. On this day, there’s a new kid. His name is Graham, and our tutor group teacher makes him stand at the front of the class to introduce himself.

He’s from Cornwall and has just moved to the city where his dad is a police officer. He looks like he was pudgy once but recently lost the weight, perhaps from a growth spurt. I don’t take all that much notice of him for the rest of the day until I realise that Graham has started to follow me on my lonely walks around the school playground. As a part of my walk, I sometimes like to sit on the small bit of grass just behind the teacher’s car park and read whatever I remembered to pack in my bag that morning, but today, Graham is here as well. I’m reading Emma by Jane Austen, which I’m enjoying but not that much. Graham also has a book. I recognise the cover, it’s Lord of the Flies. It’s the school library edition, the well-worn version that gets loaned out every year. I know this because Lord of the Flies was on the syllabus last year and Louise Millar signed it out when she lost the edition the teacher had assigned her. There’s no reason I can think for Graham to have this book (given that our class is not doing a second go-around on it) and while in any other circumstance, I might’ve given him the benefit of the doubt and said he had signed it out for the good old reason that he just wanted to read it (who knows what they teach on the other side of the bridge into Cornwall, maybe they didn’t have it on the curriculum), I get the feeling that he’s reading Lord of the Flies because it’s the first book he could find in the library and he needed something that made it look like he had a reason to be joining me down here.

He has been doing other things like this. In a class that morning—double science—the teacher told us to get into pairs and Graham got up from his stool and raced across the room to partner with me before he’d even finished her instruction. I always get a sickening feeling whenever the teacher asks us to do anything like this—to partner with another student—and usually, I end up pairing with Emily Rancour, who even during the summer wears long sleeves to cover the cutting marks on her arms, or John Dickenson, the boy who put on three stone last term. The two of us just standing there, nearly silent, until the agony of the practical part of the lesson is over and we can each of us return to the quiet, comforting torture of our own thoughts. But when Graham joins me, it’s clear that he sees this as an opportunity rather than something to be simply endured. He is excited, and his toe is tapping with nervous anxiety as he stands next to me at the desk. It is an onslaught of friendliness. Instead of methodically running through the guidelines of the textbook below us on how to measure diffusion rates, he needles me with questions like What sort of music do I listen to? or What do I like to do with my spare time? It is here that I tell him that I like reading (nothing about what I like reading or what I might have been reading at the moment, just: I like reading, which I say in the same non-committal tone Thomas used to use whenever he was made to entertain people with French turns of phrase), and it is during the lunch that follows that he appears with Lord of the Flies.