Cathy Rentzenbrink - The Last Act of Love: The Story of My Brother and His Sister

CATHY RENTZENBRINK

The Story of My Brother and His Sister

PICADOR

For my original family:

my parents and my dear lost brother.

Oh, we aint got a barrel of money

Maybe were ragged and funny

But well travel along, singin our song, side by side.

Harry Woods

The chapel is not how I remember it. All these years Ive imagined a simple wooden room buried deep in the hospital. Instead, light shines through a splendid stained-glass window onto an altar with an embroidered cloth and large brass candlesticks. It feels like a church.

I ask the chaplain if everything looks the same as it would have done when I was here over twenty years ago.

Weve had a new carpet, she tells me, and pink covers for the seats. Though soot blows down from the roof so Im always out here with a little hoover.

There is a smallish tree to one side of the room with a blue-and-white cuddly elephant propped against the base and bits of coloured paper clipped among its leaves.

Thats newer, the chaplain says. A prayer tree. That wont have been here when you were.

I walk over to it and gently take one of the leaves between my thumb and forefinger. Plastic, but convincing from a distance. I read the messages written on the bits of paper. This must make it easier for atheists, I think. Far easier as an atheist in extremis to write something down and attach it to a tree than to kneel in front of an altar and try to work out how to make a deity you dont believe in listen to what you have to say. Some of the messages are addressed to God, some to the living, some to the dead. There is a range of handwriting styles, differing levels of ease with grammar and spelling. It is the badly punctuated ones that I find most poignant: I imagine they demanded the most effort. Some are in a spindly, elderly hand, others in childish rounded letters.

I hope the baby is alright when you have it.

15 years and I miss you like yesterday.

Dear God, thank you for listening.

Please pray for my little brother. Love you loads, littlebuddy.

For my dearest, greatly missed daughter. She died 25.10.83. I have never got over it.

Pray for us all.

I pause, lost in these hints and echoes of other peoples stories, other peoples love, and then wonder what I would have written if this tree had been in place when I stumbled in here on my way from intensive care to the relatives overnight room. I know what I wanted then, but how would I have found the words? To whom would I have addressed my plea?

Please dont let my brother die.

Dear God, please dont let my brother die.

Please pray for my brother. I dont want him to die.

Dont die, Matty, please dont die.

The years collapse, and I see myself kneeling and crying and begging, with my hands clasped together in prayer, talking to some unknown force.

Please dont let him die, please dont let him die, please,

Ill do anything, only please dont let him die.

What strikes me now as it never has before is that I cant say my prayers went unanswered. I was given what I asked for. My brother did not die. But I did not know then that I was praying for the wrong thing. I did not know then that there is a world between the certainties of life and death, that it is not simply a case of one or the other, and that there are many and various fates worse than death. That is what separates the me standing here now by the prayer tree from the girl kneeling in front of the altar all those years ago. She thought she was living the worst night of her life, but I know now that far worse was to come. The thing she feared was that her brother would die, but I know now it would have been better for everyone if he had. It would have been better for everyone if, as she knelt here, begging for his life, his heart had ceased to beat, if the LED spikes on the monitors had turned into a flat line, if death had been pronounced, accepted, dealt with. It would have been so much better if Matty had died then.

She was praying for the wrong thing.

I was praying for the wrong thing.

We were spending a long, lazy, teenage Sunday afternoon in the garage at the back of the family pub. It was before the times of all-day opening, so the pub was shut and there were none of the usual comings and goings, no customers stopping to chat as they made their happy way home, no music from the jukebox floating out through the back door. It was just me, my younger brother Matty and our dog. Pollys parentage was unknown as shed been thrown into the river in a sack when she was a puppy, but she looked like a black Labrador with a slightly curlier coat. She was never far from Mattys side, though she had to be tied up or the lure of the bins from the Chinese takeaway next door would prove too much. Her love for us was never proof against the temptation of discarded food.

The garage was huge, far from the one-car garage that wed had in Almond Tree Avenue, the street in the next village wed lived in until moving into the pub a year before. This beast could have fitted four or five cars and was an Aladdins cave of oily delights. The previous owners hadnt cleared it out, so it was full of curious half-used tins with different-coloured drips down the sides. There were mechanical parts, old beer pumps, bits of lighting. It looked like anything broken in the pub had been slung in here in case a use could be found for it. There was an inspection pit, a big hole in the ground designed for people to get into so they could look underneath a car, Matty had some sort of science experiment going on that involved a vice, copper wire and beakers of liquid, and empty glasses were dotted around on the shelves and the floor. Recently Matty had got into big trouble with Mum and Dad for putting oil in a pint pot that ended up in the pub dishwasher and put it out of action, creating chaos on one of our busiest nights. Even Carol, the head barmaid, who adored him, had been unimpressed.

He gets away with too much, that lad, shed said, shaking her head.

That afternoon, we were discussing the nature of love. Or rather, Matty was messing about with two broken-down motorbikes, taking parts off one to put on the other, and I was trying to get him to agree with me that love exists.

I dont think so, he said. Its an illusion. A trick to make people procreate and then look after their young. But I know love exists because I feel it. Dont you? I think love is a con. Its all about the continuation of the species.

Well, I love lots of people. Matty unscrewed a bolt. Who do you love? Mum and Dad, obviously. I reeled off a long list of relatives and friends.

Thats loads, Matty said. And you really love them? Yes, I do. And you. Maybe I even love you best of all. He grinned at me, oil smudged over his face. He had considerable charm, my handsome brother: a fact of which he was well aware.

Though I might take you off the list if theres no chance of being loved back.

Dont worry. He picked up a rag and wiped his hands. I suppose if I love anyone then its you. Is that good enough?

Itll do.

A couple of weeks later, on another Sunday afternoon, we walked down to the riverbank to try out the salvaged motorbike on the dirt track there. Matty had succeeded in making one working machine out of the two wrecks and there was pride and pleasure in the way he wheeled it along. Occasionally he patted it. I was holding Pollys lead. I was not much interested in the bike but was happy to be tagging along; it was a beautiful day, all blue sky and picture-postcard clouds.