Brother

by Ben Jones

My brother will turn ten years old in less than a fortnight, just under a week after my own birthday. He, one of our two sisters, and I are in the house alone. Our sister was sleeping already. I sat with my brother on his bed and we both read separately. He often asks me, when I’m around, to sit there with him at bedtime.  I read Nausea; he, something about animals to begin with, before moving on to Read Me and Laugh. From the first book he read out facts about ants. The Fire Ant, I think, can kill a man in twenty minutes. He looked up my birthday in his next book, written as a diary, and showed me the poem on the page. It was about the carrying of the simple pleasures of childhood into later life: I can’t remember any of them now because I’m tired. I need to get to bed. One verse was about ice cream. Maybe the poem isn’t even about what I thought it was, but as I read it I realised he was experiencing one of the pleasures I remember from childhood: sitting late at night with somebody older, leaning on their big shoulder, moving up and down as they breathe; feeling so safe because there’s someone so much bigger by your side, and they’re on your side, and there’s nothing that could hurt you because they’re there.

My brother misbehaves. He shouts and screams and we don’t know why. He does this almost daily. But he is equally sweet, and helpful, and generous, and affectionate, and funny.

We both read for a while. He tired quicker, lay his book aside, and linked his arm through mine. Head on my shoulder, his breathing deepened and he dozed. I continued to read, and at the same time I felt an intense love for my brother. I don’t mention it as if I’ve not felt it before. I often do feel this way for the people I care about. But the peacefulness of the moment and the gentle breathing of my sleeping companion felt somehow poignant in its finiteness. He isn’t going to be this little boy for much longer, and I believe that when this boy is gone I will miss who he is at this moment. He won’t ask me to sit with him on his bed when he’s fourteen, and it wouldn’t feel the same to do that either. He won’t want to tell me how long it takes an ant to kill a man, or to show me what my birthday poem is. Sitting with him, letting my book fall back as I began to drift off too, I felt that feeling of love that makes me want to curl up so tightly that my face is tucked right into my heart and my knees are touching my head and I’m smiling like The Cheshire Cat.

I’m frightened of him growing up, of his teenage opinions of me and how I am, and how I am not what he is. He is as boyish as a boy can be. As much as he turns his nose up now, he will like girls. He doesn’t know that I don’t. I think he should have been brought up fully aware of that fact, but that is for another entry. Maybe that won’t ever be an issue. Maybe I’m underestimating my sibling’s liberalism. Still, as he grows older, the differences between us, I fear, are going to widen, and I’m going to miss moments like that moment when he fell asleep on my shoulder tonight, when I was just Ben, his big brother.

I woke up, and I tucked him into bed, treasuring the act.