10

It was sticky, midsummer, the night before we were due to go on holiday, and we’d both been sent out for the afternoon so that Mum could pack. Not by Mum. Mum preferred us to stay in. Small flies crawled all over my white t-shirt in one-winged disabled circles and wasps begged at the lip of my drink. We walked for a long time up and down our street, and came to rest on a small wall at the end of it, our energy sapped by the heat. Mal sat there in the full blast of the sun. I stooped behind him, contorting to fit the shade.

A flash, then gone. Then a face I see, then gone again. I spotted Lou, peering at us, at Mal, from behind the wall of the shop on the corner. Her head bobbed in and out in bursts, followed quickly by that of a friend, and behind that shelter I imagined them giggling.

I pretended not to have noticed for fear that she’d come over to talk to us and Mal wouldn’t say anything, instead leaving it to me, and I’d be stuck, I’d have no words, and I’d melt in the heat and she’d be standing hands on hips looking down into the splash of goo where I once was.

Though he wasn’t popular amongst the boys, he was amongst the girls, as popular as thirteen-year-olds can be. Where the rest of us were skinny, just ribs draped in wisp, his body was constructed from muscle, every inch of it solid. He carried himself with a poise I’d never manage.

He was good-looking too, unconventionally so, which is the best type of good-looking. Girls liked his chin, and his hair, black and curly, just fell like that. For the same reason, boys hated his chin. And his hair and the way it just fell like that. He was enigmatic. Not to me, to others. He had the right posture, a walk, a way. He just worked. Next to him I looked like I was assembled in the dark from spare parts. Most people knew me as Malcolm Ede’s brother. They’d call it, I’d wave and tell them where he was if I knew.

His idiosyncrasies amplified his achievements. When he swam it seemed he swam further than anyone else. An outsider on his own terms, he was free to build his own rules around him, rules no one but him could even hope to understand. Not even me. I was carried in his slipstream, the fluff that blows in through the smallest crack in the doorway if you close it quickly enough.

It felt as though this was his day, and that he didn’t want it to end. As if he knew that growing up was dying, not death itself.