My Brother's Keeper

Chapter 26



APRIL 2005

Sunny

The day Falcon drowned, Mum had the yips really bad. She’d been hanging out for her drugs all day. I hated her when she had her drugs but I hated her even more when she didn’t. It was Falcon’s birthday and I felt sorry for him that he wasn’t having a normal birthday with cakes and party hats and games and other kids. Falcon didn’t have any friends. I had friends, but I knew not to bring anyone home. I knew Mum’s drugs and her yips weren’t what other mothers had and I knew if I said anything about it to anyone, we’d all be in terrible trouble. It was a family secret that was so secret even the family didn’t talk about it. I hated the weekend days because it meant we had to spend the whole time trying to keep out of Mum’s way. Usually Falcon would just do what I said and I could protect him, but something was funny about him that day. Gran had sent him money for his birthday. He’d never had real money of his own before. He kept hassling Mum about taking us to The Warehouse to buy his present. He kept asking Mum if she was sure he had enough money to buy a PlayStation. How did she know how much it cost without ringing up the shop to ask? When were we going to go and get it? That sort of thing, the sort of thing that would really wind Mum up. It didn’t take much to wind her up when she had the yips. And on Falcon’s birthday she had the yips worse than I’d ever seen.

When the car was filling up with water Falcon kept saying ‘I’m scared, I’m scared’, and then he undid the seat belt on his booster seat and put his arms around my neck because I was in the front seat. The car was floating down. It kind of tilted head-first, which made my ears pop like on the plane that I went in once with Dad when we going to see his granddad, or maybe it was his dad.

I told Falcon not to be scared and I sang ‘Somewhere Over the Rainbow’ to him because that was the song he learnt at kindy. It was his favourite, even though Dad said it’s not really a boy’s song. Falcon joined in singing with me but then he started to cry again and put his face in my neck. I told him it was okay. I told him he was going to heaven where it would be his birthday every day forever. A real birthday with presents and a cake and party games, not the shit birthday Mum was giving him. I told him that heaven was a bit like Rainbow’s End, only better, and that he’d be allowed to go on all the rides. He said he wanted to go to The Warehouse with Mum and get his PlayStation but I knew Mum had spent his birthday money on her drugs and she wasn’t going to The Warehouse at all, she had just been saying that to shut him up. And when he cried more, when the water came gushing in from the tops of the windows, I promised him he’d get his very own PlayStation in heaven and it would be far better than any PlayStation Mum could get him. That it was called PlayStation Zillion because it was so flash. I told him we were going to go to heaven together and that I would look after him. And I was — I wanted to. But the man saved me and it ended up that I didn’t go with Falcon. I didn’t want the man to save me. I wanted to go to heaven with Falcon and get away from Mum forever. That’s why I took the handbrake off when she got out of the car to have a cigarette. I knew that when she went into that house with the scary dogs tied up outside and blinds all down, then when she came out again with her eyes looking like the white rabbit in Alice in Wonderland, I knew she had used Falcon’s birthday money to buy her drugs. I knew we weren’t going to The Warehouse to buy Falcon’s PlayStation. But he didn’t know that.

The man who pulled me out of the car made me sit on the grass next to all the swan poo. He told me to stay where I was and he dived straight back into the water again to try to get Falcon. But his arms came up through all the weed and then his head popped back up out of the water and he was gasping in big gulps of air but he didn’t have Falcon with him.

Mum came and put a blanket around me that smelt like a dog and she sat beside me like she didn’t notice all the swan poo and we watched all the other people diving into the water. All those people scared the swans away. I heard people say ‘She’s in shock’, but I didn’t know if they were talking about me or Mum. And then ages later when the ambulance was there, two men came out of the river with the water pouring off them and one of the men was carrying Falcon in his arms and he had green slime all over him and he was white and very wet. They tried to push the water out of his stomach with their hands.

Afterwards, when I was in the hospital, it was nice. Everyone wore shoes that squeaked on the floor. The nurses were kind to me and gave me green jelly cut up into squares and strawberry ice cream. They wouldn’t tell me if Falcon was dead but I knew he was and then later Dad came in with his eyes all red and told me the doctors hadn’t been able to save him.

When Mum sat beside me on the grass with all the swan poo and put the smelly dog blanket around me she made me promise never to tell anyone it was me who took the handbrake off. She said I got it wrong. She said I hadn’t done that. She said I’d imagined it. Mum said that she had killed Falcon, that it was her fault he was dead. And she was so sure about it. And in a funny way, I believed her.