Psychological horror · 4 min read ·
The Brother Who Stayed Young
Thirty years after his brother's drowning, a man finds that every photograph of the boy has been quietly replaced with a picture of him at eleven, grinning in a school jumper, and his mother has begun to speak of him in the present tense.
- perspective: first
My brother Danny drowned in the quarry lake the summer I was fifteen. He was twelve. We had been told a hundred times not to swim off the Cliff Lane rocks, and he had gone anyway, dared by a boy from the estate, and the water had taken him somewhere under the shelf where the old quarry wall ran into the deep. They found him three days later. I was the one who went to the police station to say his name.
For thirty years I have kept his photographs in a shoebox under my bed. There are not many. Danny at the birthday party with the paper hat falling over one eye. Danny on the back of the bike, his mouth open mid-shout. Danny in the school photo, the year before, with his tie crooked and his hair flattened by a comb he had clearly not wanted to use. I take them out sometimes when I cannot sleep and I hold them under the lamp and I try to remember how he laughed.
Last month I opened the box and found a new one at the top.
It was Danny at eleven. Grinning in a navy school jumper that was too big for him, the sleeves pushed up to the elbow, a grazed knee showing under the hem of his shorts. The photograph was faded at the corners, the way a picture gets when it has been handled a great deal. I did not remember taking it. I did not remember him ever wearing that jumper. He was eleven that summer and he was not yet at the age where a boy wears his jumper like that.
I looked at the rest of the box. Every one of the photographs had been changed. The party picture now showed a boy of about nine, the paper hat gone, the cake in front of him half eaten. The bike picture showed a boy with his hair long over his collar, though Danny had never let his hair grow. The school photo showed a boy of thirteen. Each one was a little older than the last, and each one was a little bit more like the picture of him I had kept in my head, the one with the crooked grin and the scraped hands and the voice that carried over the whole estate on a summer evening.
I rang my mother. She has been in the bungalow on Ravel Street since my father died, and she does not like to talk on the telephone. She picked up on the sixth ring.
"Is it Danny?" she said, and when I said yes, she said, quite cheerfully, that he was out on his bike and would be back for his tea.
I told her he had been dead thirty years. She said I was tired, and that I should eat something, and that he had asked for chips.
I went round to Ravel Street that afternoon. My mother was in the kitchen, peeling potatoes at the sink. On the table there was a plate laid for three, with a knife and fork at each place, and a glass of orange squash beside each of them. She did not look round when I came in. She said, without turning, that Danny would want to see me, and that I should wash my hands.
I went upstairs to the bedroom where we had slept as boys. The bed was made. On the chest of drawers, where my brother's football cards had always been kept, there was a row of photographs in frames, the same ones I had in my shoebox, every one of them a little older, and at the end of the row was a new frame, empty except for a blank white card.
I stood looking at it for a long time. Then I heard the front door open downstairs, and the sound of boots on the step, and a boy's voice calling, bright and cheerful and a little impatient, the way it used to call across the estate when the light was going.
"Mum! Can I have my tea? I'm starving!"
I did not go down. I stayed in the bedroom with the photographs, and listened, and I could hear my mother laughing in the kitchen, and the scrape of a chair being pulled out from the table. The voice said something I could not quite catch. Then, very clearly, from the hall below, a boy of thirteen said my name, the way he always had, as if he had been waiting for me to come down and tell him a story.