Serpent Crescent by Vivian de Klerk

Author:Vivian de Klerk [Klerk, Vivian de]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2022-01-12T15:00:00+00:00

20

where was i? My dear little brother Matthew. Spelled with two t’s, for heaven’s sake. How precious can you get? He’s there, in the photos that my mother stuck so carefully in the album, tracing just my development at first, and then his: lying naked on the lounge rug, toothless gums drooling, his head rearing upwards in helpless absurdity. And then ours, and then just mine again. The way it should always have been, with me the centre of attention. And that is not a solipsism. I always drummed that word into my pupils: accusative after a preposition. He was dead and gone long before I learned to spell his name, of course, and we just called him Mattie while he lasted. But I had to put up with him for quite a long time before the problem was resolved.

Nobody ever said that I did it, because the very idea was unthinkable – after all, how could a five year old do such a thing deliberately? No, surely not. But thinking back I’ve got this horrible feeling that I must have. A throat-thickening, fluttery, hollow sensation of unease. And I can still remember the fizz of felicity that came later, with the knowledge that I had become an only child again.

It was an accident, they said. My brother drowned in our plastic paddling pool outside while nobody was watching us play. I remember the hot smell of the rubbery vinyl tubes, bulging like fat snakes as my mother puffed and panted to blow the pool up. Her skin was red and sunburned, and the suntan lotion she had smeared onto it and us haphazardly had left whitish streaks. She smelled of coconuts and orange rind and her bathing costume was a stripy blue affair with a modesty skirt across the bottom, so no one could see the stray dark hairs peeping out from the crotch area along the inside of her thighs, trying to hide her ripe fecundity. I’d seen them before, while she was putting the costume on in the bedroom, squeezing the white folds of her belly into it, and sighing ruefully as she regarded herself in the mirror and patted her bulges as if to banish them and make them disappear.

A smell of the beach, but we were just in our back yard. The plastic tubes of the paddling pool were pink and white and pink, three layers of them, circling a bright purple base which glittered and dazzled my eyes in the sun. The hot plastic smell melted into the coconut base tones of her lotion. It used to be just my pool, but suddenly I had to share it with Matthew, and I didn’t like that. The splashy promise of the water enticed me as the hose slowly filled it up, the level rising, sparkles of sunlight dancing as the water slopped lazily back and forth, inviting me to breach the edges and dip my toes in. If I pressed down on the pliable rim the water gushed over the edge onto the lawn and my mother shouted at me to stop wasting it.

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