It’ll burn on your skin. The problem is that you won’t put a whisper of sun cream on underneath; you’ll just slap the hard stick of face paint on under your eyes, faintly sweet like crayons, one long stripe, and you’ll think of the school fair, six years old at your favourite stand, begging to be made a tiger.
We’re staring down a tin of Quality Street at the centre of our circle of seats when the church door bangs open. It’s a new bloke, crucifix dripping from his neck like a lanyard.
Tell your mother the truth, complicated boy. Illuminate your cramping collegiate mind-spills, logarithms, fruit flies, Shakespeare, splattered on plush beige carpet, unreachable from your bedridden grasps.
I’d hauled myself skywards on steep metal rungs. You were safe below, hurling taunts like stones. We’re two brothers, poles apart, but I’d climbed the ladder. I’d had to. You’d dared me to rodeo the Donkey.
Once, Alex ate the same cereal for nine months because each carton earned a square inch of Alaska. “Eighteen, all told. You earned them,” his mother said when Alex was thirty-one, handing him the deeds the summer before she died.