Family

Four feet tall and one scared only-child

I found her on cool tiles at the wide front-door. He rang the bell and fled. He left her foetal within the archway like a fleshy welcome-mat. She was out cold and her head had a welt on it that looked like a piece of brain, an odd blue-grey, a steel toe-capped signature. I yelled for my grandfather. There were phone calls on the old rotary, and a little while later there were old-fashioned policemen in our threadbare living room. Tall men with tall helmets and tidy moustaches. I saw her the next day in the hospital. I saw her pale feet sticking upright and bare, a corpse without a tag. She was drowsy and barely acknowledged me, and I sat on my Aunt's lap, bewildered like I usually was.

capricious

"You killed our baby!" he said disingenuously, to advance his position in the argument. She said nothing, or nothing that I remember anyway. But the abortion clearly hadn't bothered either of them too much. He modified his voice in a mawkish way as if he was talking about how cute a kitten was. The embryo was put into a bag and taken down with the others to the furnace in the basement of the hospital in which I was born. This was before the days when stem-cell research was possible, the 80s, when we threw away everything.

Drugs

My brother sat on the side of the bed and with scared doe eyes said, “I’m dying. You gotta help me. Get me to the hospital.” “What are you dying of?” “Drugs.” I chuckled. “I’m fucking serious,” he said. “What drugs?” “I did LSD and it’s all wrong. I’m going to die.” “Get in the car, let’s go.” I had just passed my test and was as nervous about driving and me somehow getting the blame for this as I was scared about him dying. He didn’t cry wolf, especially regarding drugs. He did as many as he could. I shakily got us to the hospital which I was surprised to find almost deserted. I guess I thought these places were always busy. On the way I stalled the car at a green light, and some boys in the Ford behind us grinned and beeped and yelled, and I felt like crying. I wished that a helicopter would winch us out of there, me a jumpy emotional wreck, and my brother slumped in his seat, burbling spit bubbles. A young doctor we had clearly woken made my brother eat a charcoal cake. He gingerly chewed and swallowed it, retched about halfway through, and a grey sludge poured slowly out of him like lava. After a couple of hours he was released, and he was his brash self again, and as we walked to the car he said thanks, grabbed my head with both hands, and kissed me on the mouth before running ahead. “Dick!” I called after him as I spat on the floor to get rid of his vomit taste,  and I made a point of walking slowly so he would have to wait. But the fucker started drumming really loudly and annoyingly on the windows. “Shut up Ben! You’d better not do this to me again, you fucker!” I yelled.

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