Read Online This Is the Life by Alex Shearer - Free Book Online Page B

hungry man with an appetite who needed to get fed.
    Halfway through the panini, he paused and looked across the table.
    â€œYou know something,” he said. “You’re all I’ve got.”
    Which I thought was pretty terrible.
    â€œThen you’re in a worse way than we thought, Louis,” I said. “It’s more serious than we imagined.”
    Which he had the decency to laugh at. But it made me sad. I shouldn’t have been all he had. He should have had alover still, a wife, a daughter, a son. But he’d never had children, though he could have done. Chancelle would have had his babies for starters—and I doubt she was the only one.
    â€œI could never have dealt with it,” he said to me once. “Don’t know how you coped with them. I could never have coped.”
    â€œLouis, you don’t get it. No one can cope. No one has children thinking they know what to do. It’s just one generation of hopeless cases bringing up another. Nobody knows what they’re doing.”
    â€œThey’d have driven me nuts.”
    â€œMine drive me nuts. Everyone’s kids drive them nuts.”
    â€œI’d have had a breakdown.”
    â€œEveryone’s having a breakdown. People who don’t have kids have breakdowns.”
    â€œTrue enough.”
    â€œBut you’ve got your friends.”
    â€œI suppose so.”
    â€œIt’s not like you’re on your own.”
    â€œNo—maybe not.”
    The next morning I woke at five to hear Louis moving about in the kitchen. The morning was chilly and I got reluctantly out of bed. Louis was standing by the table with a glass of water in his hand, wearing a paint-stained T-shirt and the sort of underpants that went out of fashion a long time since and which I didn’t even know you could still buy.
    â€œYou all right?”
    â€œJust taking my anti-nausea.”
    â€œAt this time?”
    â€œGot to take it an hour before the chemo tablet. And then wait another hour. And then the hospital car’ll come. And then go in for the radio treatment, then after that I can eat.”
    â€œWant me to make you a sandwich to take?”
    â€œI’m going back to bed.”
    He went back to bed, resetting his alarm. I made a sandwich and left it on the table, wrapped up. Then I went back to bed too and fell asleep again.
    I woke to the sound of the doorbell ringing. Louis was dressed and throwing his stuff into his cooler bag and getting ready to go.
    â€œI’ll see you later.”
    â€œGood luck, Louis.”
    The door was open now and the hospital car driver was out on the veranda at the top of the step.
    â€œI’ll see you later, Louis.”
    I put my arm around him and to my surprise he kissed me. His moustache tickled and his beard was damp. I felt a moment of revulsion—to my shame. But then I wished him luck once more, and he was gone.
    I wondered if the car driver realized we were brothers. We didn’t look a whole lot like each other now, not with Louis traveling incognito in his beanie hat. Maybe the driver thought we were lovers instead—a couple of aging civil partners.
    I heard the car drive off and felt I should have gone too. I felt like a noncombatant who hasn’t been drafted into the army yet, seeing a relative off to war. But against that was the knowledge that one day, somewhere along the road, my conscription papers would also come.
    I made some coffee and sat at the kitchen table to drink it. When I had showered and dressed, I started in on Louis’s paperwork. There were drawers of the stuff. I didn’t really know where to begin. I dumped a load of it down on the floor.
    Louis, I thought, why did you do this to me?
    Though he hadn’t done anything, of course. I was just being a selfish bastard.
    But aren’t we all?
    * * *
    When our father was dying, our mother was tending to him. He was high on morphine at the time, and she said to him,