Read The Language of Dying for Free Online Page B

bright, her
glow
bright. ‘Good plan. We can have a liquid midnight feast later.’ She is halfway up the stairs when she comes dashing back and grabs the corkscrew from the drawer. ‘We won’t get far without this!’ I start laughing too and she puts it between her teeth and that nearly sends me over the edge. Penny has been through some stuff in her life. But with all that glow she is forever eighteen, bubbly and full of life. Listening to her thump up the stairs I don’t even feel envious, just in awe.
    More searching finds an untouched bottle of vodka left over from Christmas and half a bottle of whisky under the sink. I have no idea how they got there. We put those under my bed too and then empty the medicine cupboard on to the breakfast bar. There are two large bottles of liquid morphine – you no longer need them now you have the constant pump attached – and four trays of heart pills, sectioned into individual boxes with the names of the days on them. Penny stares at it all before pushing the pills out of sight,
out of mind
, into a carrier bag. She is in full organisational flow now. ‘I’lltake these down to the chemist while you have a shower. I won’t be long.’
    I ache slightly as she whisks the pills away and out of the house. One route for you is now gone. The fast, self-medicated heart attack is no longer an option. Just the slow road left. I wish I’d hidden some of your tablets where she wouldn’t find them. But I didn’t. I didn’t think. My thinking space was too full of cliché and claptrap.
    I scrub myself hard in the shower.
    *
    The twins arrive within half an hour of each other despite living hundreds of miles apart. This doesn’t surprise either Penny or me. The twins have always been like that, as if they never stopped breathing in the same fluid, taking a little of the womb with them as they grew. Sometimes I think that link has hurt them far more than helped them. They feel each other’s self-destruction and feed it. I don’t know which boy started on that damaged road first, but they took the other with them, that much is for sure.
    It’s Davey who gets here first, even though he was the second-born, the youngest of the five, if only by seven minutes. Penny opens the door with a squeal of delight and I grin behind her. My dread melts away a little. It’s only Davey, after all. His dark hair is too long, but the brown eyes underneath it look soft and scared and warm with no hint of rage or madness. I join intheir hug, Penny tiny between us and I squeeze tight. Poor Davey. Always a boy to us.
    ‘You’re looking good, Davey,’ I whisper and he crushes me back, knowing what I mean. He is too thin and his clothes are cheap and tatty and he has wrinkles on his face that shouldn’t be there yet. When he hesitantly smiles I can see the nicotine stains on his teeth and there is a gap where one is missing at the side. But he looks good
in the eyes
. And that’s where it counts. ‘Do you fancy a bacon sandwich?’ I hide my tears with a grin.
    Unlike Penny, Davey goes straight up to see you without even taking off his jacket. When he comes back down ten minutes later he isn’t crying. He doesn’t say much, smoking a cigarette before eating his sandwich. I think maybe he is stronger than all of us in his own way. Penny is filling him in on all of little James’ antics and he laughs. ‘When I’m sorted, I’ll have to come up and visit you. It’s about time the little lad got to know his Uncle Davey better.’ Penny nods, and in this minute she truly does want that to happen. We’re in a bubble again, all of us together this time. Not a bubble of time though. This time it’s a bubble of self-deception.
    We want so much to believe that it’s easy for Davey to slip in and out of Penny’s world, but deep down we all know it isn’t. It isn’t Penny’s fault. It’s Davey’s. He thinks his world is normal like everyone else’s, but it’sbeen so long since he’s been part of