Being Small

I
CALCULUS

To-day I playd my brother is a live.

I told mum. She said reely. And how did he feel abowt it.

I said he wosn hapy.

～

I
t’s strange how swift
, how keen we are to give ourselves away. I was, what, four years old? Five, perhaps. No more than that. And being precocious, keeping my first diary in the back of a discarded Moleskine notebook of my mother’s. I didn’t think to date it, and there are no reference-points to fix it anywhere in time; I suppose I could ask her, but I doubt if she would help. I doubt she could. One notebook among dozens, hundreds maybe, and she never dated them either. No telling whether this one had been abandoned the week before I started using it, the month before, the year before or longer.

It doesn’t matter, anyway. The text, that’s what’s important, not the date. I was burning-bright, I was blazingly impatient, I couldn’t bear to have the urgency of my thoughts dragged down to the slow tempo of orthography, of asking one word after another how each was spelled. Anything above four letters I hadn’t learned yet, so I went for the phonetic option and wrote by ear.

Anything except. At that age I could already spell brother. And I understood my brother too, more than just in embryo. That’s textual, it’s there, you can read it. I was exact in saying that he wouldn’t have liked my pretending he was alive. He wasn’t. He was dead, and that mattered to us both. He always had been dead; our whole relationship was predicated on the fact of it.

Which was why I wrote about it, first and early; why I’m still doing that, still at it, older and better-spelled but still struggling to make sense of it on paper, my life and my brother’s other thing, his unlife, his being dead. Nothing changes.

Nothing ever changes. I still live by my brother’s side, necessarily on my mother’s back, you can’t have one without the other. I still write for both of us and do it on her skin, on her ’Skines. She scatters, where I glean. She sketches on one side of the paper only, leaves whole pages blank and then abandons what she’s made. I gather them up, these little black books, I hoard them all and write on the reverse, in all the blanks, I fill those bare white spaces. Profligacy, parsimony: she can’t keep hold of what’s important, and I can’t let anything go. I’m only ever generous with words. Even then, my handwriting is – well, crabbed. Tight, held back, to make the most of all that open paper. Controlled or cramped or crushed; cabin’d, cribb’d, confin’d. What I’m trying not to say, since you ask, what I like never to say is that it’s small.

～

Small was my brother, where I was Michael. Always Michael, not Mike; neither Mikey, Mickey, Mick. I was never happy with contractions, and I hate diminutives. I had to do all the growing for both of us, for Small and me; of course I wasn’t comfortable when people tried to make me smaller than I was. I worked for every inch of growth, I valued every letter of my name and wanted more, I wanted middle names and hyphens and increase.

My mother wouldn’t give them to me, almost the only time that she was mean with what she could afford. “Small is Small and you are Michael, what do you need with other names, or more? Be who you are, boys, both of you, make the names worthy to contain you.”

～

There was a jar containing Small. She’d taken me to see it, just the once. Hand in hand on a Saturday morning, one of our expeditions: this one not up a college tower or down into the bowels of a museum, not a long walk among the river meadows or harder work to climb above the city, all the way up Shotover for a view of spires rising from a stony shadow, all the murk and sprawl of history in the keeping, in the making, in a broad and shallow bowl. This particular expedition took us, she took me to the station, to a train; and then half an hour later through streets that she knew and I didn’t, another town, the echo of another life before me. Before us, I should say, before Small-and-me. Sometimes I could be selfish, though, it was easier back then. He was so much a part of me, I could forget that we were not in fact the same little boy, just me, hand in hand with my mother.

And so we came to an edifice, a monument, an example of Victorian engineering, social as much as structural: a red brick building with a frontage too long to see straight, far too long to have been built straight, all bows and bays half-hidden by the last of the English elms only waiting to be diseased. It was almost too high for me to see the top of it, standing too close with my little head tipped back almost far enough to topple me; and what I did see was fake, battlements that must be hiding the slate slopes of the roof, that were only there to top out the Gothic upthrust of the turrets.

I might have asked, “Where are we?” – but there were words cut into the stone arch above the iron-studded oak of the door, and they would tell me before my mother would. I was maybe six by now, and long words came easily to me.
Queen’s College
needed only a blink, a moment of recognition, I’d seen that before;
School
was simple, basic, I knew several of those. I walked past them every day and never troubled my head with what went on inside.
Medicine
took a little subvocal work, a mental trip-and-recover before I knew it for the thing it was.

“What does it mean, a school of medicine?” I asked cheerfully enough, not expecting any useful answer, only really wanting to observe that I had read it all in the briskness of our passage up the steps to the doorway.

“School for grown-ups,” she said, “it’s where people learn to be doctors.”

“Not us, though. We don’t go to school.” Unless she’d decided that should change, we should change again, her mind and my life. All our lives. That was always on the cards.

“No, darling. Only when they’re useful. We’re here to visit Small.”

That needed thinking about. Small was in my head, in my heart, no longer in my belly nor in hers. And he was dead, of course, that was inherent. I didn’t see how he could be here unless he’d come with us, or why we should bring him in order to visit him somewhere alien and enormous when I played with him daily in our own house, our own garden, all our private places.

It needed thinking about, but I wasn’t given the time to think, nor spared the breath for questions. I was dragged clickety-click behind her sharp and bustling heels, down the corridor and up the stairs. Up many flights of stairs, where they wound themselves squarely around the open ironwork of a lift-shaft, and I thought she was denying me the breathless adventure of that lift simply to keep me out of breath and out of thinking.

Classic behaviour, perhaps, for a classic parent, to buy herself a lull from questions; but it wasn’t like her. Questions were the point and purpose of the world, or of our being in it. That was why I didn’t go to school, she’d explained that, so that we’d have more time to ask each other
questions.

So I was questioning myself already in the heat of that yank-and-scurry, wondering what was different here or now: how we’d managed to leave Small behind in order to visit him here, and whether that meant we had to behave like normal people now, in that world where grown-ups had no time for children.

It seemed not, or not for long. Just a vagrant weakness slipping unregarded into my mother’s head, shy as smoke and about as enduring. After the stairs came a corridor; halfway down the corridor was a door, one among dozens; she skittered her knuckles across its varnished panels in a vague pretence at knocking before she pushed it open and pulled me in, all without pause, all a part of that same long movement that had possessed us both since we entered the building.

She had, it occurred to me then, been here before.

And had met him before, the man behind the desk; and more to the point he had clearly met her, been expecting her, known at least a little of what to expect. This sudden irruption, curious woman and curious small boy, didn’t faze him in the least. He rose to his feet already smiling, as if he understood already what some men took months to learn, what some men never learned at all.

“Mrs Martin. It’s a pleasure to see you again,” and it was, quite clearly, he was looking forward to spending this time with her. I beamed hotly. No swifter way to win my approval back then, than to show approval of my mother.

“So you’re Michael,” he said, looking down at me but not talking down and blessedly not reaching, not patting or tousling or going for one of those soft ridiculous all-men-together handshakes that I used to resent almost more than any other kind of condescension, “and you’ve come to see your brother.”

I nodded, because that was what she’d said also. It still bewildered me. Grown-ups were strange as a matter of course, almost I thought as a matter of principle, but my mother could generally be relied on. Today I wasn’t sure.

“Good. Well then, Michael, how do you want to do this? Shall I just bring him out, or do you want to talk about him first, what happened to him, to both of you, things like that?”

I shook my head, pleased to find that I could be so firm about it. What had happened to Small and me was a private affair, not to be discussed with strangers. This man might have walked a casual way into my affections by being so clearly pleased to see my mother; that didn’t give him any right to share in family matters.

“Don’t you even want to know what he’s going to look like?”

Someone else’s description, someone else’s Small, what would be the point of that? I knew what Small looked like to me; I knew that no one else could see him the way that I did. I’d already figured out what this meant, that I could never see him as other people did. That may be a definition of sentience, that moment of realisation that your world is personal to you and nothing is universal, nothing is shared. It’s certainly the font, the source of all loneliness. We spend the rest of our lives in futile resistance: touching, grabbing, holding on grimly, making believe that the whole is greater than the sum of its parts when we know all along that it’s a lie, we’re lying to ourselves and to each other, to our children. Especially to our children, and sooner or later they will know it too. Me, I got there early. Being bright isn’t always a blessing. Smart isn’t always lucky. Just ask Small.

I shook my head again, and said, “When you show him to me, I will see.”

He looked at me, and for a moment I knew what he was going to say.
Out of the mouths of babes and sucklings...
People were always doing that. I had my best scowl ready for the occasion, and I was all set to snap that I wasn’t a babe and I hadn’t suckled since I was three years old. There was no better weapon in my armoury, than making grown men flame with embarrassment in front of my mother.

But he looked at me and perhaps he saw the scowl building, perhaps he sensed the riposte waiting. Perhaps he was just a decent man who thought better of a lazy phrase. He said, “Quite right,” and nothing more; and turned to a high cupboard set into the wall at his back, and opened the doors to show a rack of shelves, rows of great glass jars with strange contents. It was dark in there, within the shadow of the open doors. I thought it was meant to be, I thought all the lights in the room were arranged that way. And he was a broad-backed man and he stood four-square between me and the cupboard and I thought that was deliberate also.

A clever man, a decent man, he was a careful man as well. He’d known that we were coming, he knew what we wanted, he knew just where it was and still he checked, he took a moment to bend close and read a label in that darkness before he lifted out one of the jars and set it down on his desk, in the light.

A glass jar, the height of a man’s forearm, the breadth of a man’s hand from fingertip to wrist. Straight-sided, round: even empty it would have said
laboratory
rather than
sweetshop
, even to me who had never seen a lab.

It wasn’t empty, but I wasn’t ready yet to look at what it held. Not directly, not gazing in through glass at what might be gazing back at me.

The lid of the jar was shaped to give a grip, but not for carrying. He’d lifted it down two-handed, handled it as if it was heavy as well as precious. Probably it was.

Nor was that lid coming off in a hurry. I could see tape wrapped around the join to seal it. Only a precaution against spillage, obviously. I wasn’t young enough to think that they needed bindings to keep Small in, to stop him clambering out. I don’t believe I ever had been young enough for that. How could they contain him, in a jar or anywhere? Small was mine, with me, inside me and around. He always had been.

～

Here in the jar, though, he was something entirely other. He was a dough-boy and I thought he was swimming, the way he dandled in the water, arms wide and eyes open. I thought there would be bubbles leaking from his mouth at any moment. I looked to see him wave.

～

Well, no. He wasn’t, I didn’t. None of that. It was only a moment, an image in an eye-blink, not long enough for the thoughts to form. I leaned forward, bent right over the desk to see better; my hands did their own thing, reaching out to clutch the cool curve of the glass, maybe tugging just a little at the weight of it, to slide it just an inch across the wood.

My mother spoke my name: a caution, a warning, whatever. It didn’t matter.

～

Seen close, he was more like porridge than dough. Porridge a day old, skinned over. Lumpy porridge, where the lumps show through the grey slip of the skin. And he was squat, bulbous, only crudely human: toad-creature, troll-baby, seeming to smile wide and happy and nub-toothed in his bath.

And he was my brother, my twin and part of me, as I was part of my mother: one sundered flesh, twice sundered. I could feel the scar on my belly where the edge of the desk was pressing my waist as I pivoted across it, on tiptoe and far astretch.

I’d never had to reach so far for Small. I’d never felt so distant. That glass, that glassy stare, little black eyes in folds of pasty flesh, uncooked pastry was closer almost than porridge and the way his hands were lifted, perhaps to keep me out, to thrust me back – this might have been a worry for my mother. Not the same worry that the man had, the custodian of the jars, that the sight of what he kept in custody might scare or sicken or disturb me. Even playing at being a normal parent, she couldn’t take the game that far. But she might have worried that this fat and floating gnome, this lardy-boy could squeeze Small out of my mind, out of my life, that I would lose my long-time companion in this vision of a stunted thing, a dead thing, O my brother...