of year, when I had the kids all to myself. My face hurts, my skin is dry and itchy and my mouth tastes stale.
‘Try and take a sip.’ Mum is sitting on my bed, holding a straw that has pierced the cardboard carton of the strawberry-flavoured protein shake.
I shake my head angrily.
‘Jennifer, take a drink or I’ll fetch your father.’
‘Come on, Jen. I will if you will.’ Kerry looks as bad as I feel as she holds her nose and slurps through the straw, a pinched and soured expression on her face, like the time I made her taste peanut butter.
Kerry stretches and puts the carton onto the bedside cabinet. She rolls onto her side, tucks her knees up, pushes her palms together and rests her cheek against them: the same foetal position that she was in at the beginning of her life, as she heads towards the end of it.
I swallow a few sips of the milkshake to please Mum, even though my stomach cramps. I close my eyes and think back to the volcano, to my trip to the doctor’s, where I’d told her that the tablets weren’t strong enough.
‘Mrs Jones, this isn’t an exact science, we don’t even know what we’re treating you for yet.’
‘I want stronger tablets. I would like my sister to leave. No offence.’ I flicked a glance towards Kerry: her fingers were re-plaiting her hair, holding her bobble between her straight teeth.
‘None taken.’
How long ago was that? My eyelids close, Mum leaves, Kerry snores and as I slip into sleep, I see my fingers picking up the capsules, one by one. I see my body shaped in glass, a working sculpture: my heart beating, my lungs expanding, the blood rushing through my veins, through the transparent shell. I watch the fragile glass, fingers reaching for the pills and swallowing them one by one, filling up the inside of the sculpture like a jar: a blue pill, a red one, two white ones, a yellow and black one, a green one. Pill after pill after pill, until there is no room inside the glass for the lungs, and all that is left is a glass body filled with colour.
‘Hey, beautiful.’
I open my eyes to see Ed’s face peering around the corner of the door.
He closes it quietly behind him. ‘Good or bad?’
‘Bad.’ My voice is a crack, a void, sucking out the daylight.
His shoulders drop a little but a smile forms on his face. ‘How are the kids?’
‘Good. Oscar has just got his five-metre badge.’
‘He’s grown five metres?’
‘No, he, um, he swam. Five metres.’
‘I know, Ed, it was a joke.’ I shuffle myself up the bed. ‘Let me take a shower and then shall we order a takeaway?’ I’m amazed that my voice has the energy to stretch into a higher octave, making it sound like I can’t wait to force some food down my gullet.
‘Nah. I’ve already eaten, and I’m knackered, Jen. Why don’t we stay in here, eh? I’ll go and get us a cup of tea and the biscuit tin . . . What do you fancy watching?’
Kerry is coughing again, a dry hacking that she can’t get rid of. I’d suggest Ed runs to the shop and gets some cough medicine for her, but I don’t think it would work, what with her being dead and all. I’m struggling to hear what he is talking about.
‘Sounds good.’
He kisses the top of my head and leaves the room. As I move myself again, I get a waft of body odour.
‘I love the smell of palm oil in the morning.’ I roll my eyes at her. Her film quotes are getting more and more predictable and less and less precise. It takes all of my concentration to coordinate my limbs in order to get myself into the shower.
Kerry coughs again. ‘I’d offer to help you but . . .’ She mimics a throat-slitting action.
I pull myself from the bed. The floor feels bouncy; the room feels like it is tipped onto its side, a rocket ready to launch inside a child’s hand. I reach for the glass of water beside the bed and chuck the water into my face. But it feels warm and doesn’t have the desired effect. Kerry laugh-coughs. I order my feet to shuffle me to the bathroom; I step onto the landing, past the stairwell which looms to my left like an orange lozenge sliding downstairs. I can hear my parents’ voices, hurried and urgent, and Ed’s voice,