“We should hang out again soon,” he says. “I’ll swing by.”
He slides gracefully through the panel, and I suddenly wish I hadn’t moved away from him before. I lie down on my back and smoke with my eyes closed, breathing in the tobacco, the cannabis fumes, and the lingering smell of Tay’s aftershave. I no longer care about Ailsa Fitzgerald or that scummy school, or even the flashing images. Eddie is deep inside me, laughing. I remember one of his favorite jokes.
“Why are there fish at the bottom of the sea?” I ask him.
“Because they dropped out of school,” he replies.
9
EDDIE AND I GOT JOKE BOOKS FOR CHRISTMAS WHEN WE WERE EIGHT. Mine was red, Eddie’s was blue—his favorite color at the time—“the color of the ocean!” Eddie loved the water even more than I did. I liked looking at it from the shore because I was afraid of getting tangled in the seaweed, but Eddie always wanted to be in it, have the waves break over his head. He was fearless when it came to the waves.
That Christmas day, we sat on the sofa together to open our presents. I was uncomfortable because Eddie was sitting on my leg, but he was so excited about Christmas, I didn’t want to upset him. So I sat still and let him cover me in ribbons and tinsel. Mum gave us the presents from Granny and we tore off the wrapping paper together. A joke book each. On the front they said Jokes for Eight-Year-Olds. I had to read the title to Eddie because he couldn’t read.
“It’s full of sea creeeeeeeatures,” he exclaimed as he flipped through it wide-eyed, looking for dolphins. “Look, look!”
He pointed to every page and illustration and held the book right up to my face so I could see. I remember feeling the shiny paper on my nose and the weight of it when he dropped it on my foot.
We hadn’t seen Granny for a while. She lived somewhere near Loch Lomond on the west coast and apparently we went there lots when we were small, but I don’t remember. Most of the time, she came to us but the visits were becoming less frequent because she was getting too old to travel. The last time we saw her, she visited us here on the Black Isle for Christmas, when Eddie and I were nine. On her last night, she and Mum had a fight. I never knew what it was about, but from the closet Eddie and I hid in, I heard Granny say to her, “I didn’t know I’d raised a wee liar.” On her way out she hugged Dad and told him to visit and bring us kids. He never did, though. She died in January this year, and Mum hasn’t spoken about her since.
The best thing about Granny was that she treated me and Eddie the same, even though we weren’t. I was normal. Normal height, normal(ish) weight, and about average at school. Eddie wasn’t. He was small. He walked like his legs were broken and fell over all the time. He wasn’t “clever enough” to go to my normal school. Sometimes it wasn’t always for the best that Granny treated us as twins, because she’d buy clothes that were too big for Eddie or books that were too difficult for him, but Eddie didn’t seem to mind that much.
“I’m the same as you, Ellie,” he’d say, grinning, wearing a sweater that went down to his knees. Or, “If you read the words first, I’ll read them when I’m ready.” He got that from Granny. She told him that he’d be able to do stuff when he was ready, and she never lied about how old we were either. She didn’t pretend that I was eight and he was six like Mum did.
“Ellie, what’s your joke book about?” Eddie asked when he’d finished showing me his.
I pulled my book out from under the cushion and showed it to him. My foot was tingling.
“Horsies!” he exclaimed. Then he looked at my face and reached out for my hand. “Oh. I am sorry to hear that. You can share mine.”
From across the room my father guffawed.
“Celia, come in here, quick!” he called to Mum, who was in the kitchen cooking something that smelled like gone-off cheese.
She came running through, with oil splattered across her apron. “What is it?”
“Say it again, Eddie,” my father said, clasping his hands.
Eddie looked at me, confused.
“Can you remember what you said about my book?”
“Horsies!”
“No, after that,” I say.
Eddie grinned. “Oh. I am sorry to hear that,” he said again, this time sounding even more like Mum when she’s on the phone to friends who’ve “had a terrible time.”
Mum clamped her hand across her mouth and doubled over at the waist.
“Oh, shit,” she cried. “Is that really what I sound like? Colin, why didn’t you tell me I sound so insincere? Shit.”
“Don’t swear, Mum,” said Dillon from behind his encyclopedia. “Mum, did you know that black holes can have a mass of a hundred billion suns?”
Mum didn’t respond to Dillon’s astronomy test and instead asked Eddie about the joke book.
“Jokes for Eight-Year-Olds,” she read out. “Wow, aren’t you grown-up?”