When a star reaches the end of its lifetime, it explodes in this violent supernova. Sometimes the outer layer of the star blows off, leaving behind a small, dense core that continues to collapse. Gravity presses down on the core material so tightly that the protons and electrons combine to make neutrons, and they combine to make a neutron star. Something born from a death that ripples out from thirty-three light years away. The core of the star speeds up, and it spins faster and faster, up to 43,000 times per minute, so that eventually the universe just becomes this blur – a blur of time and space – where nothing can hurt you because you don’t really exist. Not properly. You’re just a floating cluster of subatomic particles, trapped in this perfect world.
Last summer, me and Nate went to the fair. We climbed on to the Spin Master, one of those rides with the metal cages that catapult you forward, and Nate’s face was all stretched out and weird. He kept shouting and yelling because he loved it so much. And, as the wind hit me in the face, I could feel the corners of my mouth lift and then I closed my eyes and thought, This is the closest I’ll ever get to being a neutron star. Me and Nate, together in this whirl of colour . . . this rush of light and sound. Pulsating. Rotating. Orbiting. Lifting off the ground.
I held on to the metal safety gate and thought of the patterns that were all around. I thought of the Fibonacci sequence and how everything in life is made up of numbers. I thought about how you can time travel in your mind with your memories. You do it, without even realizing. It’s called chronesthesia. I thought about Van Gogh leaving out the bars on the windows of his room in his Starry Night painting. I thought about how it can take ten million years for a star to form, but it can only happen once there’s been the perfect gravitational collapse.
And I thought of me and Nate on the boxing-gym roof. Me and my little bro up on that roof, and my chance to tell him everything, but not being able to find the right words.
Then I sat back and prayed that the ride wouldn’t stop. Because I knew that when it did I wouldn’t be a neutron star any more. I’d just be Al.
Al who was nothing.
Al who wanted to disappear.
Al who wanted to be up there instead . . . where nothing can touch you and all you know is helium and nitrogen and dust.
One day, little bro, you’ll see. It will happen and you won’t even realize it. You’ll look up at the sky, stare at all those stars burning hundreds and thousands of miles away, and you’ll think: I get it now. I get all that stuff that Al was banging on about – I really do.
‘It is not in the stars to hold our destiny, but in ourselves.’ That’s what Al said.
It was the last thing he told me before he disappeared. He said it was from some play he’d been studying in English, and then he ripped it out his school book and tossed it to me. He’d scrawled all these drawings down the sides of the words, cramming his pictures into the margins. All these people with no faces. I hated reading more than I hated school, so I screwed it up and flushed it down the bog. Then I told Al exactly where he could shove his poetry. I didn’t care that he thought it was a good one.
At least I didn’t then anyway. Cause Al was always coming out with crap like that. Talking to me about some book, or a fact he’d remembered, or going into one of his weird moods when he couldn’t get a drawing right. He’d get all stressed out and start running a hand through his thick Afro, pulling at the tufts of hair. Then he’d screw the whole drawing up and toss it in the bin. His room was full of half-finished faces and half-finished things, all split in two and scattered round the place. He had proper sketches, but he’d never let me see them. He kept them hidden, locked inside one of his desk drawers.
Al was full of secrets, but that didn’t stop our mum from loving him the most. Al would be the one to get out of Wythenshawe. Al would be the one to do something with his life. To end up in one of those posh university halls and make her proud. Al, Al, fucking Al. Mum loves my little sister, Phoebe, probably cause she’s the only girl. She loves Saul, probably cause he’s the oldest. But, with me, it’s like she didn’t have enough love left to give. Maybe she doesn’t love me so much cause I look most like our dad.
I turn over in the dark and I wait for it to stop hurting. Not the kinda hurt when someone gives you a dead arm in school and you laugh your head off, pretending it doesn’t sting, even tho it kills. This is a different hurt. One that seems to come from inside and pull down on me. Like all these different parts of me are slipping away, and I can’t do nothin to stop it. It’s this hurt that takes over. That splits me right down the middle. That reminds me every minute that Al ain’t here, and there’s nothing I can do to change it.
I hear the muffled sound of the telly coming from downstairs, forcing its way through the cracks in the floorboards. Mum’s probably fallen asleep in front of it again. Since it happened, she hardly ever goes upstairs. She doesn’t even sleep in her room any more. She spends more time praying, tho, heading down to this crappy church round the corner from our house or bringing these old fogeys to ours. People who’ve never bothered with us before, who hold her hand, and bring her stuff, and tell her that ‘Al is in heaven now’. That ‘at least he’s with God’. That ‘he’s in the best place’.
Mum nods like heaven is better than our house, or Civic Town Centre, or the pop-up funfair. That Al’s better off dead than necking as much alcohol as he can, or getting on the Spin Master or the Miami Wave. And all I want to do is tell her there’s no point in praying to some idiot in the sky. That God is just a taker, like one of those idiots in your year, who nicks a new pair of trainers even before you’ve managed to break them in. God took Al. And, if anyone asks, that’s all I’d say he is – a taker of brothers and trainers and really important shit. I never believed in God much anyway, but I believe in him even less now.
The floorboards outside my room creak. I watch as my bedroom door begins to open and the light from the landing floods in, making me cover my eyes. And, for a moment, he’s there. Al. Standing in the doorway, his Afro blocking out most of the light, his body leaning to one side, his dark shadow stretched. He shakes his head slowly, like he can’t believe wot a fool I’ve been, and I think I hear him say, ‘Got you!’ Like this is all a joke. One of the stupid tricks that he’d play when he was messin around.
‘Al?’ I whisper, and my throat tightens. ‘Al . . . ?’ But all I can see is a shadow.
‘It’s just me,’ a small voice says. Phoebe.
The door opens wider and I suddenly feel stupid. Phoebe moves towards me, a bright yellow dressing gown wrapped round her, the end of her long plait slowly unravelling. She’s clutching this old teddy. The thing looks like a rabid cat shoved into a small doll’s dress. Al bought it for her one Christmas ages ago. I hadn’t seen it for years, but the night it happened she came into my room with it. She didn’t speak, she just lay there. Curled up on her side, with this teddy pressed to her chest.
‘I can’t sleep,’ she says. ‘I can hear Mum crying again.’
I move over and peel the covers back. I don’t mind Phoebe coming into my room cause at least then I’m doing summat for her. At least then there’s summat I can try to fix.