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We can’t go on like this.
Our father is dead. Six months now, dead of a liver cancer that swept over him so suddenly that it took him from us in a matter of weeks, and now we’re left to pick up the pieces.
Pieces that, specifically, involve gambling debts and back-alley loan sharks who don’t care that our father is dead. He borrowed money from them, and they want their money, however it comes. If our father is six feet under and unable to hand it over, then as far as they’re concerned, we’ve inherited it—my brother and I.
No matter that I waitress at the local pub for just enough to scrape by on our rent and cheap groceries, or that my brother is barely sixteen, too young to hold down a job. They want their pound of flesh, and since my brother is ostensibly now the man of the house, they’ve come to him for it first.
From the look of him—quite literally.
“Georgie, we can’t keep doing this.” I sit on the arm of the chair he’s sunken down in, trying to reach for his face so I can get a better look at his injuries, but he bats my hand away.
“Stop calling me that.”
“It’s your name.” I reach for his chin, but he slaps my hand harder this time, enough to sting. I yank it back instinctively, cradling it against me, though he didn’t really hurt me. It’s more of the shock—my brother has never been rough with me, even as children. He’s always been the quieter one, the shy one, the one who skipped sports to focus on academics in school.
“My name is George.” He looks away from me. “I’m not a little boy anymore, Noelle.”
“George was our father. You’ve always been Georgie to me. You think that stops just because he’s dead and you think you’re almost a man now?” I grab his chin more forcefully this time, turning his face into the light. The bruises and bloodied lip are worse than I thought. His face is already swelling.
“Are there more injuries? Did they beat you up badly?” I lean forward, reaching for his shirt to tug it up so that I can see, but my brother gets up so abruptly I almost topple over into his emptied seat, glaring angrily at me in the lamplight as he backs up.
“I don’t want to talk about it! It’s not fair—these were father’s debts, not ours. How dare they come after us, as if we were some, some—”
He turns away, and the ache in my chest only intensifies. If our ages were swapped, Georgie might have been George to me, a big brother who watched over me and protected me. But I was four when he was born, a late baby after our parents had given up getting pregnant again, and I’d watched over him all my life, his big sister. Even as he outpaced me in nearly everything—smarter, funnier, even more attractive as he got older—I still loved him devotedly. I hadn’t wanted to go to university—instead, I’d opted to stay home and work. Our mother had died when I was fourteen and Georgie was ten, and by the time I finished my exams and could have gone, our father had sunk so deep into his alcoholism that I’d felt obligated to stay and care for him and Georgie, who was fourteen by then.
Now he’s sixteen and I’m twenty, and he needs me more than ever. I hadn’t seen how deep our father’s grief had gone, that he’d turned to gambling as well as drink to cope, but what I missed back then I’m determined not to miss now. I’m determined to protect Georgie, and keep him safe.
I don’t want to hate our father. But it’s hard not to feel angry, looking at my sweet brother’s face. He’s never been a fighter. And I can’t let this happen to him again.
“What happened?” I ask quietly. “Where did they find you?”
“Outside school, like bullies.” Georgie still won’t look at me, shifting out of the light. “They said I needed to come up with a way to pay, they didn’t care how. Or they’d find you next.” When he glances at me, I can see his eyes are shimmering, and he looks much younger than his sixteen years.
He looks like my baby brother. And the wave of vicious emotion that sweeps over me is so strong that I know what I have to do.
The thought of facing down these men terrifies me. But I’m his big sister. It’s my job to protect him.
To protect what’s left of this family.
“Let me help you clean it up,” I say gently, standing up and crossing the room to where he’s standing in the shadows. “You don’t need to do it on your own. And then I’ll—I’ll handle this.”
“How?” Some of Georgie’s earlier bravado is slipping, and I hear a small quaver in his voice, the fear that we’ve lived with on a daily basis since our father died.Will we have enough food this week? Will the lights stay on? Will there be cooking gas? Will the rent be late?
“I’ll find a way,” I promise him, my hand on his back as I guide him towards the small bathroom, the only one in our three bedroom flat. One of those bedrooms I can’t bear to go into any longer. It still smells like our father to me, but not the father I remember from our childhood, who smelled like cigar smoke and exhaust and petrol. It smells like him at the end, a sick, wasting smell.
The smell of death.
It makes me sick just thinking about it.
“You can’t, Noelle,” he protests as he sits down on the edge of the toilet, giving in and letting me pull the half-empty first aid kit out from under the sink. “We don’t have anything left. We barely had enough for food for the week—if you can call what we got from the groceryfood.”
Chipped beef, bread for toast, a half a dozen eggs, some noodles and sauce. It certainly wasn’t much, and my stomach aches just thinking about it. I give Georgie as much of the food as I can manage without starving myself completely, and there’s nights now when I dream about a full English fry-up, a roast dinner, a takeaway curry. The kebabs from the street vendor we used to eat at when we were children.
Before our mother died. Before our father gave up living.
“I’ll fix it,” I promise him again, and I mean it.
But as I get out the things to patch him up, the gnawing dread in the pit of my stomach reminds me that I don’t know how I will, either.
