Lifesaving for Beginners

of 1977. My mother never got over it. I was five and had my heart set on a girl. In a pink dress with blonde curly hair and a matching set of dimples. Instead, I got Ed, who had no hair, one dimple and a hole in his heart. In spite of these discrepancies, I loved Ed from the start and I was not a child given to gratuitous expressions of love.
    Dad said he was ‘special’. Mum called him ‘different’. To me, he was just Ed. My little brother. It was only later, when he came home from school with his shirt torn and muck on the knees of his trousers or his lunchbox gone, I realised that the other children didn’t like these differences. They didn’t want anyone to be special.
    I don’t think Dad really noticed, bent as he was across his workbench in the lab where he worked all hours, examining intimate pieces of people he never met. Mum was often away on book tours, and, when she wasn’t, she wrote in the attic room and we were not allowed to make any noise. Mrs Higginbotham brought Ed for his check-ups and mended his shirts and washed the muck off the knees of his trousers and bought him new lunchboxes. She told him not to worry. Said it would make a man of him. I didn’t think Ed was ready to be a man.
    It is in the middle of the night that I can admit that perhaps it is Thomas, the absence of Thomas, that is the hardest thing. I wake at four. It’s always four. If Thomas were where he is supposed to be, he would wake too and reach out one of his ridiculously long arms until his hand gets a grip on my shoulder, or my leg, or my elbow. ‘You OK, baby?’ he would say and I would let him get away with it. There is something about four o’clock in the morning that lowers my resistance to affection.
    ‘You OK, baby?’
    I’m not saying that I do anything as crass as move my hands along his side of his bed, now cold. Or wrap myself in the shirt he left, like those women in the rom-coms Ed loves, with their noses buried in the soft fabric, looking tiny and vulnerable and ridiculous.
    In fact, what I did with that shirt the other day was cut it up into about a hundred pieces, put it into a Jiffy bag and post it to him. Registered post, just to be sure. He called me when he got it.
    He said, ‘Nice touch.’
    I said, ‘I thought so.’
    ‘Should I expect more parcels of this nature?’
    ‘I shouldn’t think so,’ I said. ‘Although you left those cords  behind. The yellow ones, remember? They deserve a good hacking.’
    He said, ‘They’re beige.’
    ‘Anyway, I can’t get the scissors through them. The material is too thick.’
    A pause. And then, ‘How is your rib?’
    ‘It hurts,’ I said, even though it doesn’t. Not anymore.
    ‘And everything else?’
    ‘Fine,’ I told him.
    Another pause. I could hear him gearing up to say goodbye. ‘You could come over and collect the cords,’ I said, holding my breath in the pause that followed.
    He knew what I meant. We’ve had post-break-up sex much more often than would be considered appropriate in a break-up guide book, I’d say.
    ‘I don’t think that’s a good idea anymore,’ he said.
    ‘I never thought it was a good idea. Yellow cords.’
    ‘They’re beige.’ He laughed. I always loved his laugh. The sound of it. Girlish. Almost a giggle. And the fact that I could still make him laugh.
    ‘So are you coming?’ I kept my voice light, unconcerned. The pause was the worst one yet. The one that told me we were nearly there, Thomas and I. Despite the dragging of my feet all the way, it was nearly done.
    Then he told me. ‘Kat,’ he said. ‘I . . . I’ve been meaning to tell you . . .’
    Still I said nothing. But I knew. I knew what he was going to say. Minnie saw them. She mentioned it. She said, ‘It’s probably nothing but . . .’
    Thomas said, ‘I’m sort of seeing someone.’
    I said, ‘How do you sort of see someone?’
    ‘I mean, I am. I’m seeing someone.’
    ‘Who?’
    ‘Her name is Sarah.’
    ‘Sarah? Sarah Keeling? From the Farmers Journal ?’
    ‘Yes. I didn’t think you knew her.’
    ‘I met her once. Tall. Bony. Pointy tits.’
    ‘Where did you meet her?’
    ‘When you forced me to go to the cattle mart, remember?’
    ‘I didn’t force you to go.’
    ‘It doesn’t seem like the type of thing I’d attend of my own free will.’
    Thomas didn’t say anything to that. It sounded like he was rubbing his forehead. He does that when he’s tired.
    ‘You went out with her before, didn’t