But I’d failed him too. From the first, I’d felt as though he’d been given to me to look after, to protect. And I’d failed. I’d failed as badly as it was possible to fail. Doctor I might not be, but I’d no real doubt he was going to die. Quite honestly, I was surprised he was still alive.
WHY, Lord?
I couldn’t hold back the silent cry, even though I knew why. Another human being, a soldier in the pay of the EuroGov, had somehow brought himself to line up his sights on a fleeing child and pull a trigger. Almost beyond comprehension, but that was why.
And I’d been trying to shield Joe, I’d tried.
Unless…unless, horrendous thought, unless the soldier wasn’t aiming at Joe at all. Unless he was aiming at me and simply missed. Maybe not even an accidental miss. Maybe he hadn’t particularly wanted to shoot me either, and it was all more a tragic accident than anything. Maybe he’d been beyond horrified when he saw Joe fall. Maybe, like me, he would bear the guilt of this night until the day he died.
Who knew?
The Lord. Not me.
The Lord knew everything.
My heart felt as though it was clenched up, like a fist, so tight the sinews ought to crack. I wanted to scream out my pain and grief and fear, to pound on the rocky walls until my hands bled—my useless hands that had totally failed to save Joe, that could do nothing, nothing for him now.
Somehow, I managed to simply stroke his fair hair, gently, soothingly. A wordless reassurance—I’m here, Joe, I’m here. Much use I was.
Why did love have to hurt so much? Why did we stupid humans let ourselves love? But with that thought came the memory of that hour walking through the forest, the better part of two weeks ago. Well away from any roads or built-up areas, with a week’s food on my back, the last of the clothes and things Joe had needed successfully—and discreetly—acquired, and Joe even beginning to manage a full day’s walking more easily, I’d felt unusually calm that afternoon. For the first time since I’d ‘died’ on that road outside Salperton, I’d achieved a really prayerful state of mind.
And I’d felt God’s love. Not the first time, but I’d rarely felt it so strongly or so persistently.
And I’d also felt his love for Joe. His burning, overwhelming, pouring torrent, volcanic-eruption…no, no words could express it. Oh, how he loved us. How he loved Joe.
And even then, that Eternal Mind, love itself, had known.
JOE
Shivering…shivering so hard, now. Cold...so cold…
K was moving around…oh, digging my trusty foil blanket out. He examined the bandage closely but finished tucking the blanket over me without changing it. I guess he didn’t have anything better or couldn’t see the point hurting me by messing with it. I tried to return his smile but my head felt heavy. Swimming. Maybe it was all those painkillers. It didn’t seem to hurt quite as much now, though whether that was simply because I was lying still…
“This crack gets even smaller further in,” K was telling me. “It would be warmer, but the walls turn into dirt back there and they don’t look too stable, so I think we’d better stay put.”
The looming walls around us were great slabs of rock, framing a sliver of dull dawn-grey sky. I stared up at them with my slow thoughts. From down here, they looked like they were about to topple in and crush me. It wouldn’t really matter if they did.
Not to me.
But I didn’t want K to die. I couldn’t believe he was still here. He was risking his life by staying with me…and his family’s lives. But the thought of lying here, alone, waiting…
But K didn’t have to die. Whereas I was done for anyway. He was being so…what’s the word…selfless. And I was being incredibly selfish.
“K?” I said at last, in a small voice.
“Umhum?” K was starting to shiver as well. He must’ve been chilling fast, now he’d stopped running.
“Just…just give me something from your magic bag to make me sleep and…and leave me.”
K made no move to reach for the first aid kit, and the selfish part of my heart leapt in desperate hope. Instead, he shifted my head onto my rucksack, settled himself beside me and tucked the blanket around himself too. “I’m not going anywhere, Joe.”
“But your family—”
“Would understand. That I couldn’t possibly leave my little brother. Yeah, I’ve felt like you were my little brother for ages, so I might as well make it official by saying it. Do you mind?”
Mind? My brain had gummed up completely. He was saying he’d adopted me? “Does…does that make it official?” I stuttered at last. “Just saying it?”
“Well, not in the eyes of the EuroGov, perhaps, but who cares about them. Before God, I’m sure it’s good. So our sister would understand that I couldn’t possibly leave you. She would totally understand.”
“How do you know?”
“Because she would never in a million years leave you either. Even if you weren’t her little brother.”
“I wish I could meet her,” I whispered, though talking was getting very tiring. Everything was getting tiring.
K spoke so softly I almost didn’t hear him. “Someday, I hope you will.”
I frowned up at the rock walls. He’d said himself that I was going to die. How would I ever meet his…oh, he was talking about the afterlife-thing, wasn’t he?
I thought about the afterlife-thing for a few minutes. Or possibly hours. I couldn’t tell any more. K had told me that—according to him and his stream of the religious underground—you could have a nice afterlife if you got adopted by God in a special ritual…a sacrament, K called it. Not just a ritual, he’d explained, because it’s not only a symbol of something, it actually does that thing. In some very mysterious—and rather cool—way.
If you never got adopted, your afterlife was a whole lot less certain, depending on all sorts of factors like whether you’d ever been offered the ritual…sacrament…or not, whether you really understood what you were being offered if you’d rejected it, and so on and so on. I’d turned him down flat when he offered it to me, though. The thought of another father to betray me had turned my stomach.
But…K hadn’t betrayed me. K wasn’t going to leave me, even if it cost him his life and those of everyone he loved. What if this other Father was like K, not like my dad? Wouldn’t it be nice to be His son?
And let’s face it: the nice afterlife part certainly looked very attractive right now.
That wasn’t a good enough reason, though, was it? I mean, just wanting to get something out of it.
I could hear myself, a week or so back, demanding an answer from K: “Is that why you want to become a priest? To make sure you have a really, really nice afterlife?” I’d been thinking about it for days, ever since he told me what he hoped to do with his life, trying to figure out why he would ever risk such a nightmarish death. The only answer I’d come up with was that he thought he was going to get something really, really, really good out of it…eventually.
K had looked astonished, though. “You don’t get a…a better afterlife, just because you’re a priest,” he’d told me. “Priests aren’t any holier than anyone else, though goodness knows if anyone should work hard at it, it’s them.”
I’d been back to square one, and pretty frustrated to find myself there. “Then why? Why do it! Aren’t you… scared?”
“No,” K had said, his face grim. “I’m terrified.”
“Then why? Are you…are you just plain crazy?”
K had—almost—smiled, at that. “I hope not. It’s just… well, I’m not sure how to explain it. It’s like, my whole life, someone I love and who loves me more than anything in the universe, has been calling out to me asking me to help with something. Calling and calling and calling to me. And…well, for some years I did try to ignore Him. Because I was so scared. I pretended I couldn’t hear Him at all. But I could. Help me, He was saying. Help me with this task I have for you. Help your brothers and sisters. Come to Me. How can you
ignore someone who loves you as much as He loves me? And you? And everyone?
“Well, you can do it for a while, or I could, but I couldn’t keep it up. It was ruining my relationship with Him. Being so sure, deep down, what He was asking and refusing to do it. So I…I stopped pretending I couldn’t hear Him and ran towards Him instead. And perhaps I’ll be with Him—in person, as it were—sooner than if I’d gone on ignoring Him. But no pain is worse than a lifetime of guilt and grief and… and sundering…because I ignored the person I love the most when He called out and begged me to come to Him.”
His words had struck me so deeply at the time. It felt like K and God were like my parents and me. Only I’d called and they hadn’t run to me. God was luckier than me, to have K.
But what if…what if God wasn’t just calling to K? What if He was calling to me too? What if He’d sent me K, K who hadn’t abandoned me, K who kept telling me God loved me, because…because I wasn’t listening?
Had I ever heard…something…that could be God? I tried to think, but it was too hard. I guess I’d never noticed, so God got bored of waiting and sent K.
I tried to focus on K’s face, there beside me. My vision blurred…cleared…blurred again. Finally he came into focus properly. He had his eyes closed, but his lips moved slightly. Praying?
When his eyes opened, focusing on me effortlessly, he looked…tense. Anxious. Like he was about to do something very important. He took a deep breath and opened his mouth…
“Yes,” I said. ‘Cos I suddenly felt very sure.
He blinked. “Yes?”
“Yes, please. Baptize me.”
Relief and…joy…flooded his face. “You mean it?”
“Yes. Quickly.” Now I’d decided I did want it after all, I didn’t want to peg it before I got it.
Even breathing was getting to be very hard work.
K
“Joseph Verrall Whitelow, I baptize you in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit…”
Feeling more than a touch of…of reverse déjà vu?...I carefully trickled water from the bottle over Joe’s forehead, three times, traced a cross there, then gently blotted the water out of his tightly closed eyes with my sleeve. “There, all done. Simple, you see. But God is now your Father, the Lord Jesus is your Brother, the Holy Spirit is…well, something like your Sister, and Mother Mary is your mother. Spiritually. Your physical mother and father are still your…your earthly parents, of course.”
Joe’s face tightened at the mention of his useless mum and dad. I tried to censor that judgmental thought, removing the ‘useless’, but I knew my heart wasn’t entirely in the correction.
Would my mum and dad flee with Margo? If her Math didn’t improve, these next three years? Bane certainly would. If she told him. And fat chance of that, when it would put him at risk.
But she’d be fine. She was confident.
I choked off that cycle of worry and focused on Joe again. It was full light outside, and sunlight streamed down into the crack, which only allowed me to see just how grey and awful his face looked. His lips were bluish and permanently parted as he drew in slow, strained breaths.
Pain tried to wring my insides out at the sight of him like this.
Oh Lord…oh Lord, give me strength. Help me to be strong for him. Don’t let me fall apart.
“All the saints and all other Believers are your brothers and sisters, as well,” I went on, somehow keeping my voice steady. “So you’re my brother twice over, now.”
Despite the fact he was clearly fighting for his life with every breath, Joe looked…calmer. “You should go,” he whispered. “I don’t want you to die too.”
I slipped my arms around him and held him close. “I’m not going anywhere,” I whispered back. “Not until you’re safely home. So there’s no point going on about it.” But a few tears escaped at last—I tried to draw back but one splashed onto Joe’s face.
“K? Are you…crying?”
“Maybe a little,” I admitted.
“Why?”
“Why?”
“I mean, if you really think I’m going somewhere wonderful?
Goodness, even lying there half-dead, the kid asked such perceptive questions. It did nothing to stop the tears, though, since it simply reminded me of all the things I loved about him. “I’m not crying for you, Joe. I’m crying for me, because I’m going to miss you such a lot. These are very selfish tears, I’m afraid.”
“Oh.”
“And my name isn’t K. It’s Kyle. Kyle Verrall.”
JOE
Verrall. He’d used that name when he baptized me. I’d assumed it was a special religious name, like Joseph—‘cos it just said plain old ‘Joe’ on my birth certificate. But it wasn’t. It was his name. I was, like, officially his brother.
And my brother’s name is Kyle Verrall.
Despite the coldness that seemed to have settled into every bone in my body, that gave me a nice warm feeling. Not a physical one, no doubt, but who cared.
I knew that his name was the greatest gift he could give me—well, other than the Baptism-thing, I suppose—since, as I was still alive—just about—it meant that if soldiers turned up, even if he managed to flee, they could try to beat it out of me. I hoped I wouldn’t tell them. I really, really hoped I wouldn’t. I also really hoped I wouldn’t be tested on that.
I’d always liked to think of myself as brave, but it’d taken one of those conversations with K—Kyle—a week or so back to make me face up to the fact that I wasn’t perhaps as brave as I’d always prided myself on being.
“Were you ever bullied at school?” K had asked me.
I’d shrugged. “Not really. I wasn’t hyper-cool or anything, but I wasn’t one of those kids, either. The ones everyone picked on. I should’ve been, of course, being Dead Meat. But my parents kept it secret.”
But they could have kept it secret from everyone else and still told me. My heart ached all over again, at the thought of their lies.
“Did you feel sorry for those kids?” K had gone on.
“Yeah, of course. It sucked to be them.”
“So you stood up for them, then?”
“Stood up for them?” My stomach had given a really uncomfortable sort of sideways lurch, at that. “What…what do you mean?”
“Well, you clearly felt sorry for them. I just thought you might have tried to stop the bullies, sometimes.”
“Well, I mean, sorry, yes, but…” I’d been floundering by then. “I mean, they’re those kids. You don’t…stand up for them. I mean, you’ll end up one of them, that way.”
“I never did.”
I’d eyed K, my face hot and my insides churning with shame and embarrassment. “You…used to stand up for them?”
“Well, sometimes I chickened out, especially when I was younger. But yes, when I could.”
“Well…well…you’re really big and…and strong…and…I’m not. Really big. Or strong. I’m quite little for my age, aren’t I? How could I stand up to the bullies? They were some of the biggest boys in my age group. Strong. Mean. How could I possibly take them on?”
“So you think it’s okay to stand back and let something bad happen if you don’t feel you’re strong enough to stop it? If the people doing it are very much stronger and more powerful than you are?”
“Well…not okay…I didn’t say that. Exactly. But…but you can only do what you can do, you know? Are you…are you calling me a coward?” I’d felt hot inside, right down into my belly, at the thought that K considered me a coward.
“No, I’m not calling you a coward,” K had said, his tone still friendly—relief had filled me at that. “I’m just saying that sometimes people are paralyzed in the face of something overwhelmingly stronger than themselves. And no, it’s not really okay. But it is understandable. Do you see what I mean?”
Not really, K, I’d thought to myself. Because I’d a nasty feeling what he was really saying was only that he wasn’t going to c
all me a coward, and I didn’t want to accept that.
“I just mean we should try not to judge people too harshly,” he’d added, when I didn’t reply. “We all do things—or don’t do things—out of weakness even when we really, really, really want to do them with all our heart. It’s always best to forgive weakness like that. Well, it’s always best to forgive, period.”
KYLE
“So I guess you’re not going to swear to avenge me, then,” murmured Joe, as though continuing a conversation I wasn’t aware we’d been having.
I brushed the hair back from his forehead again. “Would you even…want me to?”
He frowned…his lips moved slowly, but he was talking to himself. “What would that even mean…kill the soldier, I guess. If Kyle killed the soldier…he wouldn’t…but if he did…soldier would be dead. Soldier’s parents would be upset, I guess, if they liked him. Lives ruined, maybe. I’d still be totally dead…wouldn’t achieve much.”
Joe’s eyes moved back towards me, though he seemed to be having trouble focusing. But he was clearly speaking to me again. “No. I don’t think it would help.”
“That’s all right, then.”
“Soldier’s…not really the problem,” murmured Joe.
“No, he’s not. But I will promise you this, Joe. If I ever get a chance to do something, anything—anything moral—to bring down the EuroBloc Genetics Department, I’ll do it. I promise you. Even if it costs me my life.”
But Joe’s eyes widened in distress. “No…not your life. You have to live. No…”
I hugged him tight and tried to soothe him. “Of course, Joe. I’ll be very careful. It’s okay. Shhh. Don’t you worry about me.”
He calmed again, but I carried on stroking his hair, on and on.
Lord, please help me. Please give me the words to help him understand. Please, Lord. Quickly!
JOE
I couldn’t seem to make out K’s face any more, but I could feel him, holding me. It made me feel very safe. I relaxed again. It was bizarre that a little water from our drinking bottle and a few words from K and ‘yes’ a couple of times from me could make me feel so much better about everything, but I just didn’t feel so scared any more. I really trusted K’s judgment, and he thought God was real and that God was now my Father, so I believed it too.
Brothers Page 5
