Red Excavations
I have had to remove all traces of him, my brother, is no longer in any rooms of my house. I have scribbled him out of photos, burnt all things he may have touched and gotten rid of the hat rack he got me one Christmas. And I loved that rack, it was of an oaky temperament and could accommodate a real range of headwear, including particularly exaggerated sombreros. He has been written out of wills, all numbers deleted and my address book has a black pit where brother used to be: the family tree has been injected with a robust measure of glyphosate on the branches near his side. His name is not welcome at my table or in my bathroom, just as it is not welcome in the study or shower. I have washed my hands of him, the brother who adopted a sense of history and ended up digging in the dirt of our collective past, a past we did not wish to, at any stage, unearth.
The metal detector is at my Mother’s. She’s mounted it on the wall as a makeshift shrine to the brother who dug; a mawkish old bat to the very end, my Ma. I think she feels responsible and she should, one should never instil an interest in the prior, dark ground. Curiosity itches not just present arms, but also the arms of the future that have yet to form and combine. My Mother only loves the past because somewhere in there, there’s a young her, without young things, with a young Dad who is not yet a Dad, who isn’t quite ready yet to run. She wears watches that can’t tell the time because time has no purpose in the steps she now takes, her legs are covered with marks of undesirability; her toes are bruised in the centre from an effort to keep upright without a midmorning anxiety collapse. They didn’t agree on anything my Mother and Father, and ultimately, if you can’t agree even minutely, one of you has to retreat and head for the hills, hoping there are nuclear bunkers in the soil.
He came to us one day with an unusual colouring behind his fingernails. I couldn’t quite place the shade but I think I had seen it in a magazine with candles and sideboards I could not afford. He said he had found his true calling which involved the excavation of old holes that contained stuff we didn’t want to see. A device with a long metal pole was resting in his slimy hands; it looked like a broomstick that had made a terrible and irreparable mistake. Coins were produced from a pocket in a jacket I did not care for, my brother had found them in a ditch along with a packet of rusty nails and a shoe missing a sole. I asked what he had done with the shoe, but he said he didn’t have the pocket for footwear he could not use. There was joy in his heart and eyes when he explained he was to go the following weekend to a quarry that had fallen into dereliction to hunt for more items that had fallen beneath the ground. I warned him that dangerous things happened in places afflicted with limestone, things that made the fronts of newspapers and put lost faces on milk cartons. And they were never really lost, they were always, most likely and somewhat unfortunately, dead.
My mother worked two jobs when my Dad exited out of the side door, she took in ironing from neighbours and steamed out the same creases on the same shirts one thousand times over: a mangle of callous and freshly scarred pink skin. She waited tables in a black uniform and counted pennies for a bank in a blue one, her hands constantly twitched from having to handle food and money that wasn’t hers. It would take the restraint of an angel not to skim something sweet for yourself off the top, but she never took so much as a cold crumb from a departed customer’s plate. It meant my brother and I would often be left alone for long periods of time in the house without a supervising eye or a judging ear. I liked to use this time to do my homework and ensure that I stayed away from boys that would get me pregnant and leave me bulbous and bitter. My brother on the other hand, enjoyed the freedom of a dormant dwelling to invite various impressionable female members of our community to his bedroom. I knew that going any further than the landing when I heard movement or noise was not a benefit to anyone concerned within the walls. Perhaps due to boredom or laziness, I once entered the living room to find my brother cupping a woman’s vagina with one hand and trying to grab it with the other. She had a plastic bag on her head and I wondered if she could breathe. Instead of leaving, I just stared at my brother and he stared back, not relinquishing his grip on the woman in the slightest, if anything it seemed as if my appearance had provoked him into grasping it with a deeper urgency. The incident was never mentioned, despite it rising in my throat a few times after two glasses of red wine. I just hoped it wasn’t one of my friends, as the knees looked relatively familiar and I thought I recognised the woolly jumper that had frayed marginally at the elbow.
The sun shone with uncommon clarity on the day of the quarry expedition. I had a batch of English muffins in the oven that caught fire and could not be saved, even with an entire pack of salted butter. I felt my whole morning had been wasted and went out to purchase some more to pass off as my own. Deceit is not a lie spun with malice, if told through the presentation of bread products in a basket with a gingham table cloth. But my brother was not consumed with ovens or muffins, he had wandered the lengths of the pit with his detector and found a skull. He said it had only taken him fifteen minutes before he had struck oil in the shape of bone. The only reason he had been able to locate the head that had shirked its skin was a bullet in the cavity that rattled like a death maraca. It wouldn’t be too out of place in a slightly alternative orchestra or one of those bands that like playing in pubs with dark corners and over priced drinks. And nobody would ever dance, just nod their heads in mild agreement: all the women would wear black turtlenecks and have sprigs of rosemary in their seventeen pound gins. But it wasn’t the skull that was of the most concern, it was what the skull was wearing that is the fundamental lynchpin of this sorry tale. It was a hat with a reddish hue, more post box than strawberry blond, and with what all published scientific knowledge suggests, should have degraded a long time ago. If the flesh of the bullet-infected head corpse could not survive then how was it possible that a hat could? There was some writing on the front but it had become indistinguishable by, what can only assume, was burrowing in a state of upmost relaxation.
The dead should stay dead, hats go out of fashion and should never have more than one owner. Put new shoes on feet with patterned socks, not a table with disruptive, plaid chairs. Do not walk under ladders that lean against transparent windows of ideology that prefer furnaces to white clouds. Do not attempt to love when it is always much easier to spread the rain gusts of hate: I will thunder upon your dreams and scorch the unbelievers with bolts from the unimpeded Zeus himself.
My brother: his mind began to deteriorate like the soil he sifted without purpose. He put the land hat on his head and it took his brain and future. The red thing sipped on my brother’s depleted sanity; flat cherry cola, free refills in a dilapidated, near-deserted diner. Humanity can usually be saved with the production of carbonated water in glass bottles. Just add the essence of purity and suck on the tooth-imprinted straws of the country that came before you and left with everything of genuine substance. Give black fizz to the third world and spend billons on concrete roses that crumble to dust the higher you build. I have a beautiful bouquet of cement and I’ve thrown New York into the Hudson River because we all know how much it likes to snooze with fish that have no fins.
My brother: he undid all credibility he once had in the space of 140 characters. He accused, lied and used an excessive amount of exclamation marks, the likes of which I had never seen. Because if you sensationalize with punctuation enough, it allows things to trickle into the realm of the true. Winter is here and there are snowflake graveyards in people’s back gardens. Layers upon layers of dead ice that are no longer unique or breathing; a frozen pond that has sown the mouths of afterward with rosy embroidery, too tight to unpick.
My brother: lit stages with fear rhetoric and hammered cynics to crosses in public arenas with arguments, almost lyrical with the nonsensical. A perverse poet propped up through a kaleidoscope of infinite apple pie and baseball. We sit glued to our television sets, wondering where the offense and bigotry will settle next. It’s so interesting, it’s entertainment on a global scale, I bet his hands will be perfectly manicured, nails as silver mushrooms, when he pushes that button of no return.
My brother: is not my brother. He is not yours, or mine or ours. He is his own isle and four years will pass with the slope of the waves on the shore. I erode the sand with the equilibrium of hope and send spider crabs to slash the feet of the marooned man, naked apart from a head that is sheltered with nothing inside. Buried treasure does not exist, snap your survey in two and blow it out to the infallible surf of the quiet, distant sea.
