My Brother’s A Goldfish

My brother’s a goldfish: he forgives and, more importantly, he forgets. He’s pretty much an insignificant creature that, like a goldfish, you wouldn’t really count as a pet. With goldfish, you can’t stroke them, or pick them up, or train them to do whatever you want. Goldfish do whatever they want to do, and really only cause you hassle. You have to remember to feed them and to clean their tanks - and then they go belly-up and you have to bury them in a matchbox in the garden, and if you were particularly close to the goldfish, you might cry a little. But when your best friend’s goldfish dies, you don’t really feel much sympathy.

Of course, I love my little brother. I know that I can tell him anything, and he’ll not tell a soul. In that respect, he’s a loyal little goldfish. He’s always there whenever I need him. When mum or dad just won’t do, I can turn to him and he’ll just sit there, and he’ll listen. His mouth will gape open as I pour my soul out to him, drinking in every word that I say. He never interrupts - I guess he just doesn’t know how to.

He rarely says a word, or even makes a sound by himself. Of course, he can tap things to get our attention, or splash around in the bath when he needs mum to help him get out. But I guess his disability scares him so much that he’s afraid of his own voice. He’s scared of every tiny little thing; of the doorbell ringing, of the door opening, of the letter flap… of the door closing. He’ll flinch, and instinctively scurry off to his little dark corner of the living room, and cower there for hours, until he is sure that the predator will not strike.

I remember when he was born, he regarded me as a predator. Me! He’d attack the nearest object if I came into the room, or tug on mum’s arm if I so much as looked at him. Now, it seems that mum, dad and me are the only ones he can trust. He doesn’t trust the milkman, the postman, the gas man or even grandma. I wouldn’t be surprised if he didn’t trust himself.

Nobody really knows what it’s like inside his head, not even the doctor who told us about… the problem. We don’t really talk about it much - at least, not as a family. I tell him all about it; about how I don’t hold it against him at all, and how nobody thinks the worse for him about it… about how it makes him special. After all, they don’t call him Special Needs for nothing! At least, that’s what I tell him.

Nobody else can really understand - not even mum and dad. I spend more time with him than anyone else - mum and dad just don’t have the time. “He will require a lot of attention -” that’s what the doctor told us. “You won’t be able to leave him for a moment by himself - no-one knows what he’ll do left to his own devices.” They made him out to be some kind of disaster waiting to happen - some kind of monster that would destroy our normal, everyday lives. We’d need to attend to his every need (and there’d be plenty of them), give him his jabs twice a day, no matter how he screamed and protested… and despite all our efforts, he’d go belly-up well before the age of twelve.

I’m thirteen. My life hasn’t even begun yet - not really. His won’t even get the chance to get started. His life means nothing to the world. All he is to most people is ‘a waste of taxpayers’ money’. All he is to them is another person in the queue, the one who took the last bottle of milk from the shop shelf. He’ll never be able to experience half the things I already have - and I’ve got the rest of my life ahead of me. He’s nothing. Better if he’d never been born…

If the doctors had got their way, he never would have been. When they found the disability, they immediately offered a ‘termination’. They would be more than willing to ‘help’ us, and ‘abort’ the foetus. After all, his existence would only be a blip - before we knew it, he’d be in a matchbox six feet under and what would his life leave us with? Painful memories of a disabled child who could never even begin to live a normal life. We’d have to stick our necks out to protect him, and give him all the love and care in the world, and in return he’d wreck our lives. We’d have to live, not just with the practical implications of having a disabled child in the family, but also with the knowledge that we’d never really get to know him. We’d have to live, knowing that he’d be gone long before us. He’d never understand anything.

But they were wrong. He can understand - I know he can! Okay, if you showed him a picture of Tony Blair he’d either be sick all over it or colour it in, and he thinks the world is a two-up-two-down tumble-down cottage in Buxton, but he understands something much more important than all that: love. He knows that we love him, and that we care about him, and he understands that we only do what’s best for him. He knows that we’d never jab him with those long, pointy, metal things if it wasn’t good for him. His little smiling face when I come into the room tells me so. When we all sit around him, he gives silent gurgles of laughter, and when we leave his side, invisible tears roll down his rosy, round cheeks.

Of course, he doesn’t understand what’s best for him, or why it is, but he understands that we do what we do out of love. That’s all we’ve ever done for him, right from when mum downright refused that abortion. That would have been the easy way out - to end his life before it even began (even though he was alive), to get out of the problems - to take the loveless way. We’d never have to think about it again.

But that’s easier said than done. We’d have to live with it, all of us, knowing that an innocent little child inside my mother’s womb was killed, just to give us an easy time. I think that would give me even more pain than losing my little brother after less than twelve years. At least this way, we know that we did our best for him, and on the way, we’ve met a delightful little boy who learnt the most important lesson that life has to offer: he learnt how to love, and that’s a lesson he’s not going to forget in a hurry.

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Cancer

There are many different types of cancer, and many different ways of fighting them. Hardly a day goes by when there isn’t something in the paper about the latest superfruit which prevents twelve different types of cancer, or a terrifying warning about the health risks posed by eating a soft-boiled egg. It’s got to the point where we don’t know what will protect us, and what will put us at greater risk. Maybe that’s how I ended up with the disease...

I suppose, it comes and it goes. Strangely, it didn’t hurt as much, when it began. It was as if I didn’t really know what was happening to me. The disease just crept up on me, no-one knows how or when, and it grew. I didn’t know what it was feeding on, where it drew its strength from – why it had even happened, least of all to me.

But it had, and how could I fight it? It’s one of those rare things that nobody knows how to cure. Nobody can treat a pestilence so severe as that which infected me just a few years ago, when I met you.

My mind was all over the place for the first few months, after I realised what I was living with. I couldn’t think straight, I couldn’t concentrate – just seeing you walk by was enough to throw me off my train of thought. Nobody else could see it, and there was no-one I could trust enough to tell. This was something I had to fight on my own.

Of course, I had no idea how to fight. I had been caught unawares, unprepared, defenceless. And so, it continued. The daydreams, the idol fantasies, and all the while I was wasting away. This was draining my life-blood. And yet, I couldn’t see it that way. It’s a side effect of the sickness. I could only see what I wanted to see – what the illness made me see. You. I wouldn’t hear a word against you. There was nothing negative about you in my eyes – how could you possibly be anything less than perfect?

That is, until I got my first dose of reality. It was bound to happen; it was just a question of when. As Virgil wrote in his “Aenead”, you had struck me, left in me your flying weapon, but most importantly, you were unaware of what you had done. “nescius”. That word came up in my Latin exam, and it was then that I realised for the first time: you didn’t care. You didn’t even know what effect you were having on me. It didn’t concern you, whether I wanted you or not. You were just growing on me, destroying me from within – a cancer.

That was when I began to hate you, fight you. I wanted you to feel the pain that I felt, to hurt like I hurt. Every time I saw you, I turned away, tried to get somewhere else, away from you. But I wasn’t afraid of you. I could face you, but I could no longer talk to you. I hated you for what you had done to me, the searing pain that just the thought of you made me feel.

Yet, no matter how much I fought you, how much of the cancer I destroyed, it wouldn’t go away. It had carved its way into my heart so relentlessly that the wound just would not heal. It was so deeply ingrained within me, there was just too much to get rid of. I was slashing at it wildly, hacking it to pieces, but there was always a tiny bit left, and it regrew, more merciless than ever. I hadn’t even begun to sever it from its roots. The cancer had such a firm hold on me, and it wouldn’t let go. It didn’t seem affected by the anguish I was going through. It didn’t matter how much energy I put into fighting you, hating you – at most, you only ever seemed mildly confused by my actions. It didn’t change you.

There are many different types of cancer. Some of them are more common than others, like the cancer that grows on a mother, a father, on those that really care about someone. Sometimes, they are benign, dormant, subdued. It can fool us into thinking that they are harmless. But if you have taught me anything, it’s the true meaning of pain. The emotional torture of living with cancer, a disease which, once it’s gripped you, just won’t let go, no matter how much you fight it.

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