The day had gone so slowly, with Dennis checking the clock every ten minutes the whole time. He’d forced himself to get out of the house. He’d taken more photos of the restaurant and Foxglove and he’d made sure she hadn’t seen him. Dennis made toast and paced and he'd gone through his bag to quadruple check what things he’d need to buy before he returned to school. Time had inched forward, and Dennis had had lots of time to think about a great deal of things, few of them very pleasant. Being alone with his thoughts had been torturous. He’d been alone for the past two weeks and it had been far too much time. Dennis had spent the whole day as an agitated, anxious mess.
Then he’d curled up on the couch and had a nap, and he’d woken up two hours later with a note beside him saying that Dean had found him asleep when he’d come home from work… and that he’d be back soon.
Dennis thought of groups of people as constellations sometimes.
Smatterings of stars, somehow connected by all of these invisible lines. Constellations often felt so big, so inconceivably vast, but in reality their cosmic significance only mattered as far as humans decided that it did. Dennis lay on his back on top of Dean’s badly made bed, a mostly-empty bottle in one hand and a handful of photographs in the other. He stared out of his friend’s window, wishing that he could see the stars as well here as he could at Hogwarts, back in Melton Mowbray, or even Foxfied in Cumbria. The lines between stars weren’t really invisible, he corrected internally – they were imaginary. Given value and consequence by the people that looked at them. Dennis had never understood how constellations could be related to magical things, like divination, when being in a different spot in the universe would give you a totally different view of the constellations.
The skinny seventeen year old pushed himself up onto his elbows. He'd woken up maybe three or four hours ago. What did Dean mean by soon? Dean’s note had really shaken him - not that he could possibly know why, of course. Dennis knew that he was overreacting, but the piece of paper with messy writing on one side reminded him of a different note, left on a different night by another boy. That note had been left on the back of a receipt listing simple shopping items. Two crème eggs, he thought distantly, a loaf of bread. A bag of capsicums. One pack of triple A batteries. Naturally, he’d remembered everything listed on there. He’d looked at it enough times. Dennis got unsteadily to his feet, stuffing the photos in his pockets and smoothing Dean’s sheets. The liquid sloshed uncomfortably in the bottle and in his stomach too, it seemed. In his head, he turned the receipt over to look at the hastily scribbled note on the other side.
Please call this number and tell my uncle I'm sorry about the car. It was an emergency and I'll make it up to him somehow.
Every time he read the words, he read them in Colin’s stupid eager voice. The one his brother had taken on whenever something big and exciting was happening. Whenever wonder lit up in the boy’s eyes and all sense of reason was all but tossed out the window. By now, though, Dennis was sure the voice he’d enshrined in his internal library of memories was no longer Colin’s. He’d thought about it too much, too often; he’d reframed it over and over again, not wanting to let it go, and unintentionally he’d coloured it with a slightly wrong tone or tempo or timbre every time. It was inevitable, he thought, and it horrified him quite a bit. The more tightly he clung to those childhood memories – the more fiercely and obsessively he combed over every detail – the more he changed them into something else. He morphed and tainted them every time he thought about them. He hated that, but he couldn’t escape it. He couldn’t stop remembering – not for lack of trying.
Tell Dennis I love him and I'll be back soon.
“Liar.”
Dennis raised the bottle to his lips again, taking a swig of the foul liquid inside and telling himself not to cringe as he made his way back to the kitchen. It tasted like gasoline. You’re a man now, he reminded himself, swallowing the bitter drink down. He’d hoped he’d have stopped thinking by now, but rather than calming him down, the rum had made him think more. He’d wanted to wash away all thoughts of his brother and the inevitable disintegration of his memories inside his own head. That was why he liked photographs, he thought distantly. Unlike the unreliable narrator in his own head, photos were objective and immortal. They told stories too, and sure – the reader could take all kinds of meaning from the images, moving or not – but the pictures were captured moments. They were pure. Dennis placed the bottled carefully back where he’d found it, in a cupboard above the stove.
He was a little unsteady, but not so drunk that he couldn’t walk or make decisions. The mousy haired boy rolled down the sleeves on his denim jacket and started methodically gathering up all of his things. He packed his spare pair of shoes into his bag and pulled on his trainers. He wrapped his red and yellow scarf around his neck twice and turned off the lights in the bathroom and Dean's bedroom. He was leaving tonight.
Some might find it hard to consolidate this boy – the quiet, thoughtful boy who took a lot of photos – with the person he was when he threw himself into the path of danger. Sometimes he had problems consolidating those things himself. He remembered rushing through the forest as hot flames licked at him on all sides, catching and skittering up his shirt and burning the soft skin of his waist and side. I don’t want to die, he’d thought. Dennis’ hand moved to his side now, creeping up under his shirt to feel the skin there; tight and smooth.
The fire had torn through layers of his skin so violently that when he’d finally collapsed, Dennis had been left gasping for breath. It had been such an intense, vicious pain that he’d felt the edges of his vision feathering into an inky blackness as he flickered and fluttered in and out of consciousness. The pain had been immense, but so had the relief. The words ‘I don’t want to die’ had screamed through his head, and he’d felt them with every fibre of his pained body. It had been euphoric. Being here now was decidedly not euphoric, he thought, forcing himself to move again. The adrenaline-fuelled wave of absolute certainty he’d felt in the forest that night – and many other nights – was so far away from now. This moment was more of a repetitive seashore lull towards dullness, numbness, as oppose to a crashing, tumultuous clash of water against rocks. A gentle undercurrent tugging him under the sheen of the water, blurring everything above it.
Things got pretty abstract when he was drunk, he thought vaguely. His head turned to metaphors and questions for comfort. Tonight, it was just him and the beast that was his thoughts – the exact opposite of what the teenager had wanted when he’d unscrewed the cap from Dean’s muggle-branded, three-quarters-full rum bottle.
It was as if that creature – that real, breathing understanding of death and loss that had come with Colin’s death – had wormed its way right into the building blocks of who he was. Dennis vaguely remembered its acidic sting as it’d dissolved the parts of him that had been shaped like youth, innocence, and his brother, and replaced them with a sense of morbidity; a sense of understanding and curiosity about loss that he’d never even considered as a young teenager. It had crept into his head sometime between standing next to his mother dressed all in black, wondering why her wild curls had been pulled into such a severe plait, and a week later where he’d hovered by the toilet for an hour, waiting to throw up... eventually flushing the toilet even though he hadn’t vomited anything at all.
The Gryffindor looked out of the kitchen window, glancing up at the sky. It wasn’t raining tonight, but Dennis wasn’t sure if the sky was cloudy or not. It was too polluted to tell. He took a pen from the kitchen’s windowsill and made his way hazily back to the loungeroom, where he flipped Dean’s note over and wrote one of his own. A quick and simple goodbye note.
Then the boy stuffed the last thing – a stray photograph – into his duffel bag and stood to leave.
