Hugh

By Anna Comet

Imagine your entire life. Picture every single detail of that life, story by story, interlinked by a rotating cast of characters that you may or may not care about. You are born. You are raised by a loving family. You don’t try very hard in high school, but you get into a ‘good enough’ university and stumble your way through that. After a few years of partying, getting drunk, staying awake in classes, meeting pretty girls, sometimes getting some, sometimes not getting any, and repeating that whole process, you graduate. You find yourself with a piece of paper that you can use to get yourself a reasonable job. Remember those pretty girls that you dated in university? They were insipid compared to the extraordinary, inspiring, elegant wife that you find yourself with. You start a family, and it’s all going well until one day. One day, one hour, one minute, one second passes and everything’s different.

Your second son is born and he’s different. Not different in the ‘oh Honey, he’s got a rather large head’ kind of way. Not different in the ‘he sure does love to cry!’ kind of way. Not even different in the ‘I wonder where he got those blue eyes from’ kind of way. No, this baby is unrecognisable to your fatherly eyes. You don’t feel that familiar tug at your heart that you experienced when your first son was born. You don’t know what it is, not yet, but you feel the discordance right away. You look deep into yourself, reflect on your life, and there’s nothing that has led to this moment, no instance of karma or fluke. How could your completely ordinary life give you this? 

Now, imagine your name is Suzie and you have a husband called Leo. Your second child has just been born, in a hospital just down the road from where your whole life is – your house. Your first child Hugh, who is now five years old, is at home with your sister Mary. Hugh is a strong, funny, chubby-in-a-cute-way child who will start school next year and is probably colouring in a picture right now. You lie in a hospital bed, exhausted, flushed, and clutching your new baby in your arms like he is the first place trophy you won in grade 8 for cross-country. You gaze into his tiny, glass-like, crystal blue eyes and you can’t believe that you feel this way again – the same way you felt when your first child was born five years ago. It’s that same mixture of terrified and elated. Oh, the miracle of childbirth! Here is a person, a very small person at the moment, but a person nonetheless, that is the perfect combination of your husband and yourself, and he could be anything and anyone when he’s older.  

What will his favourite hobbies be? What will his favourite colour be? Will he find polyester an itchy fabric and only wear cotton? Will he fall deeply in love at age 11 or will he find his soul mate at 60? You pull yourself out of your reverie, to notice your husband doesn’t seem to mirror your emotions – he looks deeply worried, with creases in his forehead, wrinkles around his eyes and his mouth slightly parted. He rushes out of the room, one arm slung around his stomach and the other arm (attached to his hand) reaching for his mouth, to try and stem the flow of food creeping back up from his stomach.

Imagine you’re a ten-year-old boy. You love your mother deeply, and express it in the way only a ten-year-old boy can – by kissing her and hugging her when she asks for it, rolling your eyes when she does, but then closing them and taking in everything about her when she hugs you. You know her scent, the exact shade of her hair, the way she forces her shoes on when she’s running late for work. You have a father, who you still play ‘catch’ with in the backyard, and who supports your lack of focus at school. After all, you are only in grade 5. Who cares, right? You have a younger sister, who is only 13 months old, but you love her deeply for her adorable curls and pearly white teeth.  

Today is your younger brother’s fifth birthday, but you don’t feel very well. You’ve got a pounding headache, like someone is striking a bell tower a metre away from your brain, but instead of every hour on the hour, it’s every second on the second. You go along with the day, your brother acts like he always does, you ignore him like you always do, and nothing is ‘abnormal’ until about mid-afternoon. Suddenly, you hear a voice that isn’t the one that sounds like you. You know how you have that voice that rattles around inside your cranium, saying things that you would say and bossing you about like only you could boss yourself about? Well, it wasn’t that voice. You don’t know how you know, but it’s the voice of your younger brother, Darcy. Darcy’s voice has joined yours, and you find that he can talk to you.

This is the first time you’ve talked to your brother. You, as the reader, are probably wondering how that’s possible, how two brothers who have been raised in the same house, with the same family, have not argued, laughed, played together?

Imagine you’re the middle child of this family, now aged 12. Your older brother is 17, and your younger sister is ten. You don’t know any of this though. You’ve never known the world. You’ve never known your parents, because you haven’t seen them, haven’t heard them, haven’t felt them, haven’t smelt them, haven’t tasted them. Actually you haven’t seen, heard, felt, smelt or tasted anything. You don’t have any senses. When you were born, your mother adored you but your father was disgusted by you. You still don’t know any of this though, because you are stuck, trapped, caught in limbo, in your own mind. You’ve conjured up a whole world in there, which you sometimes share with your older brother Hugh, when he cares to pop in. You don’t use any of this language yourself, of course, because you’ve made up your own ways of getting through the days, and you don’t judge your brother, because he is so different and marvellous to your unusual mind.

 I, as the author of this piece, could try and describe Darcy’s world to you, but it is ineffable; I could do it no justice. What I will say though, is that it is fairer, cleaner, more peaceful, brighter and more colourful than anything we have ever and will ever experience on this planet called Earth. Although you, as the reader, may feel sorry for Darcy, I wouldn’t if I were you. He doesn’t feel a crippling sense of loneliness; he feels free. In a similar fashion to when Hugh first peeped into the recesses of Darcy’s mind, when Darcy was five, Darcy’s mum can now see what Darcy saw, hear what Darcy could hear, smell what Darcy could smell, and she could experience all of the things that we don’t have words for, because we have never had such things in this earthly realm, now that Darcy is age 12.

Imagine later you are Darcy’s younger sister. Your name is Claire, you’re all grown up, married, with two families (as most adults have), and you are currently comfortably curled up in a cushiony armchair, thinking about your older brothers. You’re thinking about the time your mother discovered that she could break past the boundaries of Darcy’s mind, when Hugh offhandedly mentioned that he had had this same ability for seven years, and she just… exploded.  

“How could you not have told us this,” she shrieked. “Why did you keep this to yourself, you selfish child,” she spat. “What kind of brother are you, to Darcy, to Claire,” she screamed, turning crimson, violet in the face. That tore her apart. She had had enough of trying to coax Darcy out at that stage. Twelve years of doctor’s visits, psychological testing, youth assistants. Darcy was firmly locked in his mind. Hugh had lashed out, his words as cutting as a whip, his tongue the fiercest machine he could harness in his utility room. “Who else would have been able to help him, besides me,” he gunned. “I would have been used as a part of Darcy,” he shot. “I would have lost my life,” he fired, the loudest and most damaging hit of all.