How to Build a Brother – by Helena Pantsis
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My brother is a creature slowly falling apart. First it happens hair by hair. He works as a swimming teacher, and the chlorine is lightening or removing or preventing the hairs on his legs from growing back as thick as they once did. We find it funny that now I have more leg hair than him. It’s the Mediterranean blood; our hairs are too dark for our pale, migrant flesh.
He first breaks a bone in Year 8 when a football hits his hand and fractures his thumb in a thin, painful line down the bone. Our school doesn’t have a nurse, just a bursar with a first aid kit, so he is sent back to class to write with his broken thumb, to return to PE in his bright-purple sports uniform. He falls apart in these ways so subtly it’s hard to remember we are all fading, slowly. It happens insidiously, so we will distance ourselves from the truth and thrust ourselves into a life we love. Everything is always flammable, or inflammable, what with the pair being one and the same.
He is two years my senior, my brother, crafted to be the first and only offspring of our two older parents, my father arriving at the table with a child already six years old. My brother is a surprise, the impossible thing my mother was taught to never expect. He is born with his tongue stuck to the base of his mouth. The great, pink muscle not fully formed to detach part way from the palate. I say they should’ve left it as it was and my brother knows I am joking. They take scissors to his open mouth and free the tongue, let it swirl like a worm in a washing machine or something like it. I suppose we are all born with some ill. The umbilical cord tied itself around my neck when I dived down the birth canal, the noose preceding life itself. My father was born with his left hip displaced. My late puppy was genetically predisposed to develop a hepatic disease. I wonder if there is some muscle memory from when the scissors cut right through my brother’s flesh and gum.
***
In our household I am the one who puts the IKEA furniture together. I think there must be some connection between my love for Lego as a child and my knack for reading instructions now. I am a student of the written word though, so I always do complain that a little bit of text wouldn’t go astray. I take my time with the instructions, turn them and examine them closely so I can see which ways the screws should face or whether the holes should be up or down. I always stuff it up, redoing it fifteen times until it’s right.
It isn’t so easy to put a shelf together, or a couch, or a desk. They give you all the parts, except for the tools, always only an Allen key. I have a hundred Allen keys, scattered all around the place. IKEA designers deserve to be criticised if they place hex screws in corners where Allen keys can barely turn, their crooked necks hooking just enough to impede their circular motion. I bruise the palm of my hand every time, pressing the base of the screwdriver into it to make sure the screw stays tight, my legs tucked around the back of the furniture to push panels and legs and dressers together against me. My bones always hurt the next day. The metal clatters like a knife against teeth.
***
Brother pulls a muscle at work. The new owners insist that teaching is done in the small, above-ground pool rather than from the poolside, so he is forced to step in where the water rises to his knees. It’s not good for adults to have to bend low and lift legs so high. He takes time off work as the pain gets worse, his body fattening and weakening during his time away.
In February 2020 he travels to the Philippines for a cousin’s wedding, someone we don’t really know. Still, my brothers are dear men, always seeing the best in others. When he comes back, his leg still hasn’t healed. He is hobbling, pressing heat packs to his groin to no avail. Mum is getting worried.
When the doctor finally decides to send Brother for scans, they realise the pain in his groin is radiating from his hip. There is a tumour inside his bone. It is growing. The doctor calls it a chondroblastoma. I recall that ‘chondro’, in Greek, means fat. I imagine the mass pulsing inside him. The tumour is not cancerous, we are grateful, but if Brother continues to put weight on his leg, his hip may shatter. The entire leg may become severely injured. Any damage may be permanent; he may never move as he once did.
***
When I was a child I liked to tear apart my dolls. My brother and I had a Ken doll head that we hid in each other’s rooms, an inside joke of sorts. We threw it around like a ball, losing it behind the space of my bed.
Entering early adolescence, I became desperate for a desk, a luxury for which I was sure my parents would never go out of their way. But I had outgrown my bed. My legs no longer fit inside the edges, bumping up against the end. There I see it: a bunk desk. Bed on the top, desk on the bottom. My holy grail, my saving grace.
We all forgot, though, that I am afraid of heights. I used the desk, but not the bed. I begged my brother to share his double bed. Instead, he slept on my bed for the first night. It is funny in hindsight, that the bed I so wanted was the place I refused to go.
***
They cut deep inside Brother’s flesh and through the bone. He loses a lot of blood during the operation, and I have never seen him so pale and thin. Not like we can truly see him either; he is alone in the hospital in the height of the pandemic. He exists now solely through a screen. My mother cries. My father is silent: not stoic, just distant. I hold my mother together with duct tape. I lay a pack of bandaids in my brother’s room. When he comes home, he cannot move on his own. We experience a year and a half of lockdown, rehabilitation, and fear.
Brother is so alone. His friends cannot come, and they do not call. No one seems to understand that his leg is unravelling. He has to rebuild, and I cannot do it for him. I put together his toilet seat, I screw together his wheelchair, I open doors and shut windows and lie beside him in bed.
He shows me his scar. It is long and pink and thick in tissue. I don’t think it will ever disappear.
***
Dad bought me a Meccano kit when I was twelve. It was so intricate: screws and metal parts, nothing like the plastic Lego I was used to. He is a metalworker himself, and has always been proud that his daughter shares his interests. He didn’t say it in so many words. He never says much, but he’d sit down with me, asking to help me out.
***
Dad doesn’t talk to Mum about the tumour. He doesn’t talk to me either. He thinks Brother is fine. He doesn’t offer to help. He doesn’t want to know that Brother cries some mornings, fed up by his need to be wheeled everywhere, fed up by his need to be bathed by his parents as if he is a child again. In some ways he is, learning to walk again, needing his mother to feed him, unable to move without hands on his waist to support him.
Still, when the cancer comes it is unexpected. Brother is almost back on his feet, his hip near healed in its entirety, from the inside out. Then he is back in hospital. They remove the cancer, but he will not be free of appointments for the next five years. He ponders if he will ever be a father.
I ask him if he’s scared to tell potential spouses about his missing parts. He doesn’t answer. So I bide my time, trying to remember what I’ve learnt, collect the Allen keys from my drawer. I never had to build my brother from the ground up, but I’m learning the ways of keeping him together. Him and everyone else. ▼
Image: Jackson Simmer
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