He thanked me — it looked like a smile; I close my eyes and I still see a smile — but no, no, my generosity would be wasted. He knew his sheep, and all they would do with my flowers was eat them.
Probably just as well, I said — keeping it up, keeping it up — given the condition of the blooms I was meaning to off-load.
And now perhaps I do see rings of tiredness round his eyes. And the colour vanishing from his face, as it used to do when I pinched him hard, surreptitiously, and would not release him, or fired a fusillade of punches on him, one blow succeeding another, one punch becoming weightier than the last, first on this shoulder, then on that, then on his chest, an endless battery of flat punches, like someone hammering at a door that wouldn’t open… And he would sway, and the light would go out in him, his beauty would die there and then before me, and were I not to hold him, to take his dead weight, to put my arms around him, he would fall…
Was this not a strange reaction to a joke? A joke?
He was a fainter, my brother. Not a holy fainter of the kind that is preserved as a national treasure in your country, one who espies the godhead in artefacts and buckles before their radiance, a passer-out on aesthetic principle, a collapser in the service of the sublime. Abel’s susceptibilities were less specifically targeted. It was life itself he was sensitive to. And any sudden strong experience of it could be sufficient to lay him out.
Your brother is exquisitely attuned, my mother once said to me. It is your job to watch over him.
Because I am not exquisitely attuned?
Because you have more resources.
You make that sound like a disparagement. Are resources things to be ashamed of?
Yes, if you do not properly employ them.
In the service of my brother?
In the protection of your brother.
I didn’t say I felt so protective towards him that I sometimes feared for the balance of my mind. I didn’t refer to the black nights I watched pale into sickly dawn, counting time by the ticking of his heart, my ear moth-fluttering above his chest. I didn’t mention that it was enough merely to see him, some days, in an attitude of abstraction, or deep in concentration on a matter of small moment — his lips compressed, his brow taut — for a scouring terror to descend on me, a purgative melancholy such as I had never known (outside what I knew of it in relation to him), whose mission was not completed until it had hollowed me even unto my bones. I didn’t say anything. Why argue? Against charges which are so savagely unfair you do not bother to defend yourself. It is only the small injustices you go to war over. The grand misrepresentations you fight in your heart.
But what did my fainting baby brother want those flowers for?
A gift.
I must have looked up from what I was doing — cross-pollinating, as I remember; double-cross-pollinating — because I know that I registered his hands. Which ever so slightly were trembling. And which ever so slightly were dirty, from the fleece of sheep.
I weep today, for those fleece-stained hands.
A gift? Flowers? A gift of flowers, I asked, for whom?
For my mother.
(He called her my mother. I called her my mother. Never once did we think of using the word our. Or dropping the possessive altogether.)
Why did he want flowers for my mother?
I always give my mother flowers on this day.
This day? How was this day any different from all the others?
He let out a little laugh — no, he let out a little air. It’s the day my mother…
He couldn’t find the words for it.… met my father?… married my father?… did the deed of knowingness with my father…was chosen to be a help meet to my father?… was extracted from the glop and gristle of my father’s innards?… was, to leave my father out of it, to all intents and purposes born? Single out one anniversary for my mother and you singled out them all. If this was the day, then it certainly put forward claims to noteworthiness. Unless you argued it put forward even stronger claims to be forgotten.
But I didn’t turn my mind to this. Or to the accuracy of his time-keeping. My curiosity had narrowed to something smaller, hairier, stickier than the seeds of common groundsel I carried, for the purpose of yellowing out a family of purple loosestrife, in my fist. How long, was all I wanted to be told, had he been indulging this sentimentality.
I had already been told. Always. That’s to say, for as many years as he could remember.
Without me? Without asking me if I’d like to join him in the commemorative gesture? Two brothers, one bunch?
But you don’t believe in such things, he reminded me. You have always scoffed at such… festive proclamations of periodicity and connectedness.
I didn’t believe in them? I thought we all didn’t believe in them.
He shook his head. His nimbus of curls spiralling like golden worms. An expression of closure, of not wanting to air or raise any difference of opinion between us, dimming his features. I could see he was ready to be somewhere else now, away spinning shells, off with his sheep, unconscious on his back in a dead stupor of exquisite over-attunement. It saddened him too much, saddening me — was how I understood it.
So they’d kept up this ritual of giving and taking just between the two of them?
Yes.
And my mother would be expecting him to keep it up today?
Yes. But I can gather flowers for my mother by myself.
I wouldn’t, of course, hear of it. What, let my brother chance the fairness of his skin on murderous thorn or nettle? Risk him fainting from the smell of primrose or the delicate configuration of freesia? No. I would not have been able to live with myself. I scattered my seeds and took him by the wrist — not meaning to pinch hard — and led him to the buttercups I had bred red, and the cornflowers I had empurpled, and the bearded speedwell I had crimsoned by a method of chromosome interference so drastic that I knew what it was to be a god.
Here, I said, gathering him armfuls of my favourite mutations. Here. Here.
I loaded him up until he looked like a sport of nature himself.
Will that do? I asked.
I couldn’t see his face, but his voice rang clear through all the vermilion foliation. Absolutely, he said. Let’s just hope my mother likes the colour.
You see: he did enjoy a joke.
Is there any distinction to be drawn between love and sorrow?
Everything about my brother broke my heart. The slightness of his stature. The passivity of his temperament. The pale incision that was his mouth. The flicker of grey agitation in his eyes. Above all, his back. Not specifically its slenderness and tensed expectancy — as though it knew the direction from which trouble would finally come; but just the sight of it receding. I hated seeing him go. No wonder turning one’s back on a king is counted a rudeness. The action has a finality which is too suggestive for the fraught nerves of monarchs. Whenever Abel turned on his blue-veined heels and left me, I thought I was seeing him for the last time. He will vanish from my sight, I thought, and that will be the end of him.
As though it were my sight, and my sight only, that gave him existence.
Whether this small confidence I had in his viability was first and foremost a sorrow for him, or a sorrow for me, I cannot say. But if I feared it was only my sight that gave him physical life, it’s possible I was also afraid that the idea of him was alive only in my sorrow. The moment he no longer broke my heart was the moment he would no longer be there.
I cannot determine, although I coined the word, whether this is solipsism or not; only that everything around me that was human saddened me. Abel closing my picket gate behind him, bearing a bouquet of unnaturalness bigger than he was, distressed me unendurably. Because of him the gate was sad. The flowers were sad. Growth was sad. The idea of a small person carrying a large bundle was sad. Giving was sad. Getting was sad.