Brotherhood
….
We all live in a house on fire, no fire department to call; no way out, just the upstairs window to look out of while the fire burns the house down with us trapped, locked in it – Tennessee Williams
There were many reasons why they had decided to rob the bubblegum machine, but the main one was that Mick McElroy had been taken into care.
It started on Mick’s street. It was also the two brothers’ street, where the houses were small and looked like they’d been drawn by an overzealous but unrealistic child architect. They started out nice enough, big and square and cold, even in the summer, with cracked single paned windows stuffed up by copies of anything but The Sun. But further down the road the toddler town planner had evidently realised they were running out of space on their page, and the houses became more cramped, shoved up against each other, grass and railings and leftover roof tiles spilling out onto the cribby, the debris of an afternoon’s drawing quickly abandoned once the creator realised it was ruined. Mick lived five scribble houses up from Peter and Joseph. Sometimes on the walk home from school it was often hard to tell the buildings apart from this end of the street. It was easy today though because, outside his house, Mick’s mum and a man that wasn’t his dad were screaming at each other on the cribby. Also Mick’s mums teeth were on the cribby, and there was a police car.
Nobody ever called the police in the scribble street, so seeing them at Mick’s house was a shock. Nobody would tell Joseph or Peter anything, but Mam had installed herself by the window on a Friday to Sunday shift, drinking one cup of tea while tapping her feg into another, empty mug. Unfortunately for their mother and the other mothers in the street nothing else happened at Mick McElroy’s house that weekend. The little scribble drawing front door remained closed, and only one light, in the kitchen, flickered on and off.
At school on Monday morning there was no Mick. Peter, who considered himself Mick’s best friend, didn’t ask about it, because one of the louder kids, a girl named Theresa who had buck teeth and was taller than any of the boys in his class, having been held back a year, stage whispered during registration to no one in particular that they – Mick and his still school-age brothers and his two little sisters – had all been taken into care. His house was ugly, she said.
Theresa talks shit, said Joseph later that day when they were walking home together, Mickless. Joseph was only eleven months older than Peter, but they were in different class groups, as though the teachers expected them to be too much trouble placed together, an insurgent cell plotting at the back of their classrooms. ‘Irish Twins’ it was called, but they only found that out much later, by which time they had learned to be embarrassed by aspects of their own lives that they had no control over, such as whentheir birthdays fell. She’s talking shit, Joseph said. And then, quieter, sure their house is just like our house.
Theresa may have been stupid, but she was also right. On Friday they arrived in the playground to find that Mick was already there before them, sitting alone on the low stone wall next to their school gates and swinging his feet, scuffing his new leather shoes as they hit the asphalt. Beside him sat – and they stared at it to make sure this was correct – a navy blue rucksack. Rucksacks and lunch boxes and tupperware and backpacks and everything they showed in catalogues and on TV shows about schools weren’t compulsory in real life, certainly not at their school. The two brothers and (up until this point) Mick, all carried their things in plastic shopping bags, and they had not, until now, seeing Mick’s inexplicable new navy blue rucksack in real life, thought to be embarrassed about this. It was simply a receptacle for their things, a shared experience, a practicality of life. Neither of the brothers could stop themselves staring at the proof that their own plastic bags were indeed, not the norm. They twisted the stretched handles back and forth, looking without seeing as Mick explained that he lived in a different house now, with different children and a different mum and dad. It was this mum and dad who had bought him the leather school shoes and the rucksack, and who had told him he’d be better going to a different primary school now, one that was closer to their big house with all the children and the new things. So he was here now to get his books and say goodbye to his teachers and to them, and soon there’d be no more Mick.
Peter was shocked to find that he was most sad about the sight of Mick’s schoolbag. Later, when he and Joseph left school to go to the old train station, Peter was still preoccupied with the rucksack, although he could not understand why. Dropping his own plastic bag in the overgrown grass, he watched his older brother climb up into a rusted engine car and pondered on this. The rucksack, not Mick or his sad, broken up family, continued to upset him. Inside the engine car, Joseph had found a steel pipe and was bashing violently and pointlessly at what remained of the leather driver’s seat.
They called the place The Station. All the kids on the estate and at the school called it that, but it wasn’t a real station. It had been once, years ago, or at least, it was the end of the train line that had once run through the village where they lived. It was the place at the end of this line where they took all the trains at night to sleep, so babies would say, or if they were broken or needed fixing up or repaired, they would stay here for a few days until the engineers got round to sorting them. Like a train hospital, babies would say. Grass and weeds had grown over where the tracks used to be, and now there was only a crumbling tunnel, through which you could walk to get to a prehistoric field. Towards the back of the field, dotted around here and there with seemingly no pattern or reason, were a few abandoned train cars. Maybe they had been forgotten when they moved the train line on, or maybe they were just too far gone to be fixed and so they left them there on purpose, like fossils.
Often they would climb into the trains and claw and press at the buttons and levers, trying to make them go. Once, climbing inside the engine car where Joseph now sat, still hitting at nothing with his metal bar, the three of them interfered with enough of the equipment that they were sure – they would swear to it – that the car lurched forward a few inches. Suddenly scared, they all tumbled out into a heap on the grass, panting and exhilarated. It wasn’t pretend, they told Mick’s older brother later. He was laughing at them like youse are just babies, sure they’ve been down there years, those cars. It moved, Joseph whispered later that night as they lay in bed, their pillows like parallel lines in the gloom. I know, Peter said back to the darkness.
The car never moved again though, and it was not moving today, however hard Joseph hit it. Who does he think he is, Joseph was saying in between clangs, and presently Peter realised his brother was talking to him. Peter knew that Joseph was talking about Mick, and that he was upset, because his swearing was childish and slurred, in a way that suggested he wasn’t allowed to talk like that at home (they weren’t). He also knew, deeper down, in a small place that he was sure existed in his brother too, that Mick wasn’t lucky, that it was sad what had happened and that Mick would probably just want to go back to his own house. Ah but, a bigger voice said, filling up his chest and coating his intestines like tar, but the schoolbag. We should do something, Peter heard himself saying, out loud now. Joseph looked up and dropped the bar. It hit the grass with a soft thump.
Peter couldn’t tell, even to himself, who had come up with the idea that this Something should be robbing the bubblegum machine, but he suspected that it was him. Peter harboured an unhealthy obsession with the bubblegum machine. For months now it had taunted him, shining and swollen outside the shop, pregnant with sweets he couldn’t have. Twice a day it was inescapable, inevitable that he would have to see it. On his way to school and on his way back, his knobbly knees red and scabbed and cold and shaking and his shoes (which used to be Joseph’s) too tight and depressing to look at because the tongue was coming away and ‘Adidas’ was spelt wrong on the back (too many D’s, but that’s how they spell it in the shops now, Mam said when he asked about this), he would see the bubblegum machine. His eyes would flicker up, as always, against his will, from his greying Addiddas, and there the bubblegum machine would be, as always, proud and smug and filled with sweets and other people’s pocket money. And standing behind it, proud and smug and willing him to dare to enter the shop with no money in his own pockets was the man whoowned the bubblegum machine – and by extension the shop. And without fail Peter would drop his eyes again, quickly, evading the shopkeeper’s contemptuous stare, and shuffle past.
And so, on Saturday evening they found themselves standing shoulder to shoulder outside the corner shop, ready to carry out their heist, no longer two boys but two of the finest bank robbers their town had ever seen. Peter imagined the sun drawing out a long, thin shadow behind them while twanging guitars and whistling flutes played and every shopkeeper on the high street shut their saloon doors. Invisible tumbleweeds blew down the road, bouncing over the cobbles and potholes. In real life, the night was humid and shadowless. But the pair stood shoulder to shoulder, and that was enough. They were bandits, blood brothers, co-conspirators. Standing side-by-side they looked like the same person, replicated twice with deliberate differences. Peter was shorter than Joseph. He had stubbier legs, an underbite and rounder eyes. The first born child had high cheekbones and his face possessed a feline quality that when he became a man would blossom into a dangerous unknowability. But not yet. Now they were not men. They were two boys ready to carry out a heist.
They waited until evening, and that was as far as the plan went. The total absence of a plan, this was what Peter would remember later. Or rather, that there might have been a plan but his brother had not invited him to discuss it. Once the shopkeeper was gone Peter made his move forward and the immediate realisation that they had no plan caught his breath in his throat. Joseph stuck out his arm and halted him in his tracks. He felt their eleven month age difference stretch out between them, making him feel short and impossibly young. What was he going to do? His big brother’s arm barrier seemed to be saying. He couldn’t lift the thing – it was nailed, anyway, to the tarmac. Did they expect to chase after the shopkeeper? To hold him hostage and demand as ransom the contraption of glass and metal, sweets and pocket money and all? And where would they go with their contraband? He was getting panicked and embarrassed over the lack of a plan when he saw a glint of metal in Joseph’s jacket pocket.
They did not have a garage, and they did not have chemistry labs at school, and Dad did not fix things, so he had no idea where Joseph had managed to get a blow torch, but there it was nonetheless. Afterwards, Peter would be unable to explain why the sight of the weapon that wasn’t really a weapon had caused him to stay rooted to the spot while his big brother marched ahead. He felt, for the second time that night, young, younger than anyone had ever been, and stupid and scared. The weapon made it real. He wanted to move his legs but he couldn’t so he watched as Joseph went toward the shop. Until now, Peter suddenly realised, he had thought of himself and his brother as the same entity, as two parts which made a whole. They were always together. They wore the same clothes. They went to the same school and had the same last name, the same Mam and Dad and their baby sister. They heard the same slurs. It made sense that they were joined, a plural being. Watching Joseph storm ahead with the crime was like watching himself commit the crime.
If he hadn’t been so paralysed by his own fear and disgust at that fear, by his own fascination with the realisation that he was not Joseph and Joseph was not him, Peter would have noticed the plan – whatever it was – instantly falling apart. For one, neither of them had taken into account, realised or questioned how they would remove the machine from its home, or how loud their attempt at liberating their prize would be. It was a balmy evening but still the street was quiet. Nobody was around to see Joseph maniacally attacking the machine with his weapon. The blue flame that the blowtorch promised was unreliable. It flickered on and off, licking the glass sphere of the machine and illuminating the sweet sticky prizes inside. Peter stood behind his brother on the pavement, shoulders hunched and eyes wide. The blowtorch hit metal and glass with loud clanks that made him wince. Give it me, he said eventually in an urgent whisper, unable to stand it any longer. Peter felt the hand of the moustached policeman on his shoulder, warm and huge and firm. Fear curled tightly in his throat, pressing against his collar bones and threatening to explode out of his skin like a Catherine wheel. He held out his sweaty hand and Joseph turned and they noticed the street had become darker. The gloom was coming from a pair of monstrous wholesome policemen, who had appeared spectrally as if from nowhere, and were now looking down at the two armed and dangerous boys with expressions that were somewhere between bemusement and gleeful disgust. Now then, the one with the moustache said.
They had to tell the policeman their names, the ones they used when they weren’t the little brother and the big brother. When they weren’t the nameless, faceless numbers on a class list, with little angry red marks beside them. When they weren’t silent altar boys with unreadable faces.
When they weren’t Mick’s friends, the ones who lived down the road, you know the family, them ones. Peter and Joseph. It’s what the policemen had called them and one of them had laughed, another Joseph, just like the dad, and his son – another Joseph – had stared straight again and narrowed his feline eyes and said nothing, the comment hardening inside him like cement, like a toxic thing that would never be digested, never leave his gut. Their names were Peter and Joseph, but that wouldn’t matter until they were men.
Róisín Lanigan is a writer and editor based in London and Belfast. She works at i-D, and her writing has appeared in The Atlantic, New Statesman, VICE, The Face, The Fence, NYMag and Honest Ulsterman, amongst other places. She is represented by Kat Aitken at United Agents and she is currently finishing edits on her first novel, as well as publishing a short story in the upcoming final issue of The Moth.
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