In the Absence of Saint Paul

The whisper of a song shuddered me awake, but for a moment my thoughts remained sloshing about in the dream I’d just inhabited. Tiny fragments of which appeared tantalizingly in sharp focus before dissolving into my ever-awakening consciousness.  

Squeezing my eyes shut, I willed myself back into the dream, but whereas before there had been something, and someone, now there was only darkness.

“Paul!” my mother called from the bottom of the stairs.

Opening my eyes, I imagined my mother wiping her hands on a dishtowel after washing up the breakfast things, soft pieces of foam still on her arms from where she’d missed wiping them clean.

“Paul!” she called again when I did not answer, ”are you getting up this morning?”

Outside, Mr. Thomas, our next-door neighbor was cutting his grass. The rhythmic lullaby of his electric lawnmower filled the air as he moved up and down in precise lines. In the backyard below our mutt, Betsy, barked continuously through the gaps in the fence at the machine she did not understand.  

Staring up at the ceiling, Eddie van Halen stared right back down at me. I’d not slept in my own bed last night for the third night in a row. It wasn’t something I planned, as each night I’d climbed the stairs, brushed my teeth, put on the baseball t-shirt I slept in, and climbed under the covers. Then, somewhere around 2am, when sleep had eluded me for hours, I made my way into my brother’s bedroom.

At seventeen, Stephen was older than me by five years and never let me forget that he was the easy one, the one who had arrived when my parents wanted, whereas I was the tardy one, the one who didn’t want to be born. On his most cruel of days, which were rare, he would follow that up with, ‘and shouldn’t have been born.’

Stephen liked to call me his ‘groupie’, but not said with a sneer in his voice, as I’d heard his other friends describe their younger siblings, but instead with a sense of pride.

In the run up to Christmas, some months before, Stephen had asked what instrument I’d like to play, and when I said guitar, he shook his head and pointed to himself saying, ‘That’s already taken by the big dog.’

Shrugging my shoulders, I said, ‘keyboard’, expecting he might laugh at me, but instead he went out and bought a secondhand keyboard, presenting it to me on Christmas morning.

‘You better get practicing,’ he said, grinning, ‘Sinner Steve and Saint Paul have a band to form.’

‘Why am I the saint?’ I whined.

Arching his brow, Stephen said, ‘Now we both can’t be sinners, can we?’

For months I practiced, my fingers scrambling to hit the right notes, and playing scales until my fingers ached, but we’d yet to play a song together.

The room was exactly as Stephen had left it, music posters on the walls and ceiling, crumpled clothes upon the floor, and his prized possession, a second-hand red electric guitar propped in the corner.

In the light coming in through the window, I could still see Stephen’s smudged fingertips on the body of the guitar from where he’d held it as he strummed along to the Guns and Roses version of, ‘Knockin’ on Heaven’s Door’. His long blonde hair tucked behind his ears; and a black bandanna printed with skulls tied around his wrist.

From below, I could hear my mother begin to climb the stairs; her tired, heavy thread upon the steps. Opening Stephen’s bedroom door, she eyed me, and said, ‘This again?’

She was dressed in a pink bathrobe which went all the way down to her feet, and beneath that she wore a white nightgown with the image of a giant Tweety Bird on the front.

‘I thought you promised us you were going to stay in your own bed last night?’

Turning away, I stared out the window just as Mr. Thomas shouted at Betsy to shut up.

Sighing, my mother said, ‘This can’t go on Paul. You know it can’t.’

When I didn’t respond, she said, ‘Do you hear me?’

The bandana was how they’d identified Stephen. Charred around the edges, they’d shown it to my parents in a small plastic Ziploc bag.

My mother began to cry as my father stared at the bag in his hand.

‘It could be anyone’s!’ he shouted at my mother.

‘I want to keep it!’ my mother screamed, lunging for the sealed bandana.

‘I’m sorry, ma’am, but it’s evidence,’ the police officer said, taking the bag back from my father.

‘Evidence?’ my father shouted, ‘what the hell are you talking about?’

From the couch, I’d watched the police office enter our living room, with his hat in his hands, and tell us that Stephen was no longer alive. Opening my mouth to call him a liar, I found I was unable to speak. On the television screen, Hawkeye from M*A*S*H was crying, and I felt like I should join him, but it was then that I realized nothing inside me seemed to work anymore.

Instead, I stared at my father, his head in his hands as he whispered, ‘Evidence. Jesus Christ.’

Sitting on the edge of the bed, my mother said, ‘Stephen wouldn’t want you moping about here all the time.’

Showed how little she knew, I wanted to say, that’s all Stephen ever did. Mope about his room, strumming his guitar and listening to records. That and argue with my father about how much he moped about his room and did nothing.

Maybe my mother was scared I would turn into Stephen, and the same fate would await me which had befallen him.

At the funeral, the priest stood on the altar and talked about Stephen as if he knew him. His words didn’t make sense however, and the person he described could have been anyone, and not my brother.

‘(Insert name) was a loving son, and a guiding big brother. (Insert name) loved his family, and the hobbies which kept him occupied after school. Fun and outgoing, (insert name) always had a smile upon his face, and loved to laugh. Thought of highly by his fellow students, (insert name) will be sorely missed. Not just by his family and friends, but by the community at large. Let us pray for (insert name).’

What a joke! I wanted to shout at the priest, but my voice was still broken. I’d not spoken a word since the night the police officer called to our house. Instead, I stared down at my hands and marveled at how pale they were against the stark black fabric of my trousers.

Beside me my mother cried into a tissue, while my father sat stone-faced and impassive. He’d not uttered a word since the coffin arrived that morning, when I’d heard him say, ‘What a waste.’

‘Do you need to go to the doctor, is that?’ my mother said reaching out her hand to lay it upon my chest.

Inside, I could hear the words I wanted to say. They floated upwards to my throat, where they gathered and became clogged and went no further. There they sat like an uneven stone, heavy and awkward until with great effort, I swallowed them back down to the blackness of my stomach. Every time I did this; I became heavier and heavier. Taking a any form of step felt as if I was carrying Stephen upon my back. There he lay, strumming an invisible guitar and telling me to ‘hurry up’, because he had ‘places to go’.

Where are you going? I wanted to ask him, but no words came out, and the uneven stone just turned slowly in my chest.

‘It’s OK to be sad,’ my mother said, ‘we all miss Stephen terribly.’

Then why can you all still talk? I wanted to shout.

Outside, Mr. Thomas finished cutting his grass, and with the dying of the lawnmower engine, Betsy stopped her barking. The sudden silence terrified me, and I sat bolt upright.

‘Honey?’ my mother asked, alarm in her voice.

In my head, I heard the thud of my heartbeat, dull and constant against my temples.

‘Paul?’ my mother said, before rising from the bed.

When I continued to stare forward, my gaze centered solely on the guitar in the corner, my mother said, ‘I’m going to call the doctor. This can’t go on.’

Hurrying back down to the phone in the kitchen, I heard her muffled voice talking to the doctor’s receptionist. Climbing out from under the covers, I crawled to the end of the bed. Reaching out, I took Stephen’s guitar from where it stood against the wall and held it in my hands.

Surprised by its weight, I almost dropped it to the floor. When he was alive, Stephen never let me touch his guitar and for a moment, I felt like Indiana Jones at the beginning of ‘Raiders of the Lost Ark’ when he picks up the golden idol in the crumbling Peruvian temple.

Like in the film, I suddenly heard the grating of a trap being released, only it was happening within me, inside my chest. Faster and faster, the boulder rolled, and as I sat on the edge of the bed, I gasped for breath as if I was trying to outrun what I knew was going to crush me at any moment.

Without realizing it, I began to strum the guitar. The strings hard and taut against my fingertips. Faster and faster, I plucked at them, not making a musical sound, but just any sound. A shrieking, off-key noise that filled the vacant space around me. I did this until my fingertips burned and the air around me hummed and vibrated.

Into that horrible, screeching sound, I found my voice and shouted, ‘Why did you have to die, you asshole!’

It’s then that the boulder smashed and opening my eyes, I saw my father stood on the landing, staring in through the bedroom door.

‘I’m glad you’re back with us,’ he said, ‘For a moment, I thought we’d lost you both.’

Outside, Mr. Thomas whistled as he swept up the fallen grass from his lawn, and the sound was so pure and clear, that I began to cry.