TOUCH

by Rachael King
 
 
 
She is surprisingly heavy. I am the middle pallbearer; my four brothers are at the corners and my cousin William across from me. William and I seem to be carrying most of her weight. His neck flexes with the effort and a small puff escapes his mouth. Like me, he is not a big man. We carry the coffin down from the altar, past the rest of my family – my father, grief crumpling his features, and my sister Elizabeth, her gaze fixed on the back of the pew in front of her. She doesn’t look up, even when I am close enough to reach out to her with my free hand.

~

"Look after your sister," she says.

"Yes, Mum." I concentrate on the oily spot on the wall above her head. "Don’t worry." 

Then I stare at my hands, while hers lie alone, curled and small, on top of the blankets. 

"Look after your sister," she says again, pleading, and now I look at her, into her tiny eyes. 

"I will." 

~

I find her in the corner of the church hall, sucking on a Coke. The heat is unbearable; I feel my suit shrivel in the dampness from my body. Elizabeth is wearing a cool cotton frock of the palest pink. 

"Nice dress for a funeral," I tease. She looks up at me, and away again, her expression unchanged. I feel the years yawning between us, though I am the youngest after her. She was a late surprise to my parents; my mother’s 40th birthday present, as she liked to say. 

"Hey, Blister. I was only teasing." I sit down beside her and reach for her hand. She is wearing Mum’s engagement ring on her middle finger, slightly too big for her fourteen-year-old hand. "Looks good," I say. What I want to say is, Look after it, it’s all we’ve got. She puts down her empty glass and pulls her hand away gently. 

"Jake?"

"Mm?" 

"Can I come and live with you?"

"We’ll see, Blister," I say and I spot my father’s face at the other side of the hall, looking at us. "There’re some things we need to talk about first." 

~

We are all gathered around her bed. My four brothers are on one side, in descending order of age. Elizabeth and I are on the other side. My father is at the foot of the bed.

Elizabeth holds her hand, watching her face and her rattling chest as it jerks with uneasy breaths. My father has his hands on the bed-end. His fingertips are pressed into its grainy wood. He watches his wife and his daughter.

"I’m sorry," he whispers as the jerking stops and my sister lays her face on my mother’s stomach.