The bag lay by the front door at the bottom of the stairs. In the hallway, as his granny used to call it. A worn-out mat lay under the frosted glass of the front door. An offcut from the plain beige carpet in his parent’s bedroom that you were to wipe your feet on before stepping on to the good carpet. There was a glass corner shelf for the phone and the Yellow Pages. He’d smashed the glass himself when he and his sister were playing schools one afternoon. He pretending to be the teacher slamming down homework books on a big desk. The rippled glass held in its metal frame and only cracked from corner to corner. They’d panicked, but no one had noticed. Nobody uses the phone anymore. Or even if it still worked. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d heard it ring.
‘Are you off somewhere?’ said his sister around a mouthful of toast and marmite. He still couldn’t stand the smell of it and she usually had toast and marmite in her hand. But he didn’t quite feel like telling her to get lost or shut up. Not today.
She was still wearing her school uniform, the washed-out green shirt and blazer that wasn’t green. He didn’t think there was a word for that colour of drab. And it looked worse with the thick grey tights and the grey school jumper. Probably designed by the nuns to make all the girls in the school look frumpy and ugly. But it hadn’t worked, not for all of them. A few of his friends thought so of his sister. He couldn’t see it himself. But that could have been the marmite he smelled every time he thought of her. And, she was his little sister.
‘Hey Shelley, come here.’ He said and grabbed her into a hug, squashing the marmite toast into her face before she had a chance to move her arms.
‘What are you doing?’ she shrieked. ‘Get off me, you pratt.’ As she pushed him away.
But he held her, and she relaxed, eventually letting him hug her. He gave her a kiss on the ear, meant for her cheek.
‘Yeah, I’ll probably be gone a wee while.’ he said wiping a smudge of black goo from his shoulder.
‘Where are you going?’ she asked, looking up at his face and down at his packed bag. ‘Is this about Dad? You’d better get that bag up and into the wardrobe again before he sees it there. He’ll crack up on you.’
She put the mashed slice of toast on her plate and reached down for his old tog bag. It didn’t fully zip anymore and she saw his favourite jeans and the Nikes that he kept spotless.
He took the bag from her gently and felt his throat tighten.
‘It’s alright, Shell. It’ll be gone before he gets back. I should have been gone already. There’s a note in your room. I put one into Mum’s bag before she left this morning. She’ll see it when she finishes her shift.’
‘Martin. What’s wrong? What note? Where are you going?’ Her voice rose a notch. The same note of panic he used to hear when he left her behind on purpose on their walks out in the lanes. He’d dart ahead and over a wall or into a ditch while she was picking flowers or feeding a horse. Only when he heard her tears would he let her know she was safe.
‘Shelley, you’ll be alright. He doesn’t hate you. Sure, you’re his wee flower.’ Said Martin, his voice cracking. ‘But I’ve got to go.’
‘No, Martin. Martin, no. It’s not like that. He won’t do anything like that. You two are just not getting along now. Everybody’s the same. You’ll both get over it.’ She sobbed. ‘You can’t leave.’ Her eyes were wet and the toast mashed into the plate she gripped with white knuckles.
Martin fumbled with the broken zip and managed to jam it on his jeans. He jerked at it and it stuck fast.
‘Shelley, I’m going to call you when I get to where I’m going.’ He said, ‘It’s all in the note I gave to Mum.’
His sister was crying now. The bravado of the fifteen-year-old school girl gone. Outside, where school was and she pretended to be cool and hard, was outside. In the hallway, at the bottom of the stairs with that stupid bit of carpet her Mum told her to wipe her feet on every time she came in through the door; and the shelf with the phone; the big crack on the glass, that Martin had cried and begged her not to tell their Dad about; inside their house where it should have been safe for them, she blubbered and her heart broke, while her big brother lifted his old school bag over his shoulder and reached for the front door. In the hallway where they’d crashed on top of each other sliding down the stairs, she knew as the front door opened, her world was changing. She knew that her past was her childhood. Her childhood was her big brother and whatever was on the other side of the door was not childish, not safe and was never going to be the same.
Both had tears in their eyes. Martin stepped over the beige carpet and onto the old straw mat, the Welcome on it had long since faded. He pulled the door behind him as Shelley’s groan rose to a cry of pure grief, and she dropped the plate and the marmite toast onto the little piece of bedroom carpet.
As the door closed and Martin’s shape stepped away, the phone on the shelf let out a ring.