I’ve only been in there once all year. It was right after the funeral. Ned was leaving for art school in London and Papa was falling apart and pretending he wasn’t by hiding at the bookshop, so I did it. Not looking left or right, I took a garbage bag and I swept in everything I needed to—deodorant sticks, beer bottles, dirty plates, half-read newspapers. (Grey’s cleaning philosophy: “Here be dragons!”)
Then I went through the house, picking out the things I couldn’t bear to look at—the enormous orange casserole dish and the Japanese lucky cat; his favorite tartan blanket and a lumpy clay ashtray I made; dozens of tiny Buddha statues tucked into shelves and corners—and I put it all in the shed. I did the same with his car. Papa didn’t notice, or didn’t say anything, not even when I rearranged the furniture to hide the spectrum of crayon marks on the wall, marking our heights as we grew up—Mum, Ned, me. Even Thomas, occasionally.
Then I shut Grey’s bedroom door, and it hasn’t been opened until now.
Paper beats rock, again. I win.
“Whatever.” Ned shrugs, no big deal. But I notice his hand rests on the doorknob for a full minute before he turns it. His nails are pink. When he finally pushes the door open, it creaks. I hold my breath, but no swarm of locusts emerges. There are no earthquakes. It’s exactly as I left it.
Which is bad, because there are books everywhere. Double-shelved from wonky floor to sloping ceiling. Piled up against the walls. Stacked under the bed. Word stalagmites.
Ned clambers past me and yanks open the curtains. I watch from the doorway as the evening sunlight pours in, illuminating approximately eleventy million more books and sending up dust tornadoes.
“Whoa,” says Ned, turning around, taking it all in. “Papa told me you cleaned it.”
“I did!” God. I lurk in the doorway, afraid to go in any farther. “Do you see any moldy coffee mugs?”
“Yeah, but…” He turns away and starts fiddling with cupboard doors and pulling things open. There are more books inside a chest of drawers. After Ned opens the wardrobe, he lets out a long, low whistle.
He doesn’t say anything, just stands there staring as if he’s seen something … odd. As in disappearing-notebook-hole-in-the-universe odd.
“Have you found Narnia in there or something?”
“Grots.”
“What is it?” I take a step into the room, keeping my eyes on Ned and not the rest of it—the photographs of our mum everywhere. The huge painting on the wall above the bed.
“Grots,” Ned says again, not looking up, talking to the wardrobe. “Fuck. Gottie. His shoes are still in here.”
Oh. There’s that swarm of locusts.
“I know.”
“Couldn’t face it, huh?” Ned gives me a sympathetic look, then turns to sit on the piano stool. When Grey was steamed on homemade wine, he’d leave his door open and tunelessly pound out music hall hits. “It’s not the melody that counts, it’s the volume,” he’d boom, not listening to our many declarations otherwise.
Ned runs his hands up and down the keys. The notes emerge in a series of muffled plinks, but I recognize the song.
Papa’s left a stack of flattened cardboard boxes on the bed. I walk round to the other side so I don’t have to see the painting, and start assembling them. I’m careful not to touch the bed itself, even though it’s covered in a dust sheet. This is where Grey slept. In twenty-four hours, Thomas is going to erase his dreams.
“Man, this is going to take forever!” Ned exclaims, even though he hasn’t done anything yet. After a final ten-finger kerplink on the piano, he spins round idly on the stool. “You shouldn’t have to be in here, doing this. It’s Papa’s grand plan.”
“Do you want to tell him that, or shall I?”
“Ha.” He bounds past me to a book stack and starts shuffling through it—not so much organizing as rearranging. Fiddling. Flicking through and reading bits of things. He glances up at me. “Grotbag. What do you think Thomas did?”
“What do you mean?” I frown at the box in front of me. I’m trying to line up the books perfectly perpendicular, but one of them has warped pages from being dropped in the sea, and it’s wonkifying everything.
“You know,” says Ned. “To get sent back here. Banished to Holksea.”
“Banished?”
“C’mon, there’s no way this settle-in-for-the-summer story holds up,” Ned continues, juggling a book. “It’s so last-minute—the flight must have cost a fortune. Nah, it’s punishment for something—or getting him away from whatever he’s done. I bet he’s pulled a Mr. Tuttle.”
Mr. Tuttle was Thomas’s hamster. A furball who escaped at bedtime seventeen nights in a row, until his dad worked out what was going on and bought a padlock. “Oh dear,” Thomas would sorrowfully declare, having opened the cage not five minutes before. “Mr. Tuttle has got out again. I’ll sleep over at G’s in case he’s there.” His bag would already be packed.
“C’mon,” insists Ned. “You know what Thomas was like.”
Huh. It hasn’t occurred to me to wonder why he’s been sent home so quickly.