Joyous and Moonbeam Read Online Free PDF Page A

(including Kyle) had different ideas about what had happened so we had heaps of arguments and Miss Qureshi sat back like the cat that got the cream or caught the bird, whatever that old saying is.
    So, back-story. Mum was twenty-one when I was born, Dad was twenty-four. They were already engaged but Mum got pregnant so they got married a bit earlier than expected, then I came along. Perfect child apparently – slept well, fed well, goo-ed and gaa-ed, hardly ever cried. Saving it all up for later, I suppose.
    For a long time it was just me, and then, a bit over a year ago, Mum came into my bedroom and said that she was going to have a baby. I’ll never forget that day. It was really gloomy outside, rainy and windy, cold, but Mum had this look like, I am the sunlight. She was radiant. Sounds corny but it was true. She let me touchher tummy and I could actually feel the extra warmth coming out of her.
    I had just turned fourteen and I remember thinking, hope it’s a little boy because I’d love a baby brother. I could hold him and take him for walks, dress him up, stuff like that. I didn’t care that there was going to be such a difference in age between us. We were all so excited. Every weekend since they invented the game Dad has watched the footy on TV but for weeks after Mum’s announcement he’d stare at whatever was happening and you could tell he wasn’t really seeing it. Instead he was dreaming of the new baby which made his eyes go glossy.
    We were happy, we really were. I think, when you’ve known that kind of happiness, that level of anticipation, it’s even harder to see it destroyed.
    I still don’t know the sequence. Kinda random, like cloud-bursts. Everything was good for a few months, home was calm and we were like people in a waiting-room, flipping magazines, whispering our days away – then Mum had a couple of
episodes
(Dad’s word) and there was bleeding, heaps of it (I saw the sheets in the washing-machine) and night-time visits to the hospital, scans, worried faces, silences. Eventually Dad told me my baby brother had died inside Mum and she would have to give birth to him before they had a funeral. A stillborn. They called him Jamie, after Dad’s father who got hurt in thewar in Vietnam then passed away in a home. I never knew him either.
    The rest happened because it had to happen. It was unstoppable. Mum and Dad away for a few days in hospital, me with Uncle Paul and his new wife before this tiny white coffin at the funeral and my parents returned as ghosts. They were pale and shrunken, as if all the blood and water inside had been drained. There was nothing left but skin draped over their skeletons like dust-cloths on chairs. It was horrible.
    Looking back, my naïve little-kid brain thought that the funeral would mark the end, that Jamie would be buried and we’d be sad but we’d go back to being our old family again. But it never happened. Instead there was this gradual taking-away. A few months ago I saw this story in the newspaper about beach erosion, with before-and-after photos. The after shot showed how the beach was a different shape, hardly any sand, huge holes as if a giant had munched them. I remember thinking, that’s us. That’s our family. Eroded and full of holes, re-shaped into – nothing.
    Mum threw herself into work. She’d been part-time, now she was full-time plus some, home late, drinking wine, not caring. Dad went the other way, shuffled around, stopped talking. He started eating heaps so of course he put on weight and became what he is today, a big old pillowbut too lumpy and musty and distant to hug. He took leave from his job and he’s never been back. I’m sure the leave must have run out. He’s probably unemployed. He was in sales – hardware – although he’s always wanted to be a musician. He’s got this golden saxophone that he used to play on Sundays before the