Being Small Read Online Free Page A

thing from where I kept it beneath the fire-escape, cloaked in a tarpaulin, “against the weather” was what I said to Mum. Adam sucked air through his teeth, and clearly felt much better about his own embarrassing machine.
    “It’s too small for you, though. Haven’t you got a little brother you could pass it on to?”
    Here we go. Round the mulberry bush, round and round again. “Yes and no,” I said, still not good at lying, never having had the chance to learn. “I’ve got a brother, he’s Small, he’s my twin, but he can’t ride a bike.”
    “Why not?”
    “He’s dead.”
    A blink, a shuffle, a glance aside; a curious look back. “I’m sorry. That’s awful. When did he...?”
    The real question was how did he...? This was old ground, familiar ground, and I’d never really cared. Of course they wanted to know, who wouldn’t? And Small was mine, his life had been mine and his death was intimately my own and I could afford to be generous with the news of it. No boy’s gossip could diminish me, or us.
    “Oh, he’s always been dead, he was born dead, almost. He was born out of me, and then he died. In my arms, but I was asleep, I don’t remember that.” Except in dreaming, and maybe the dreams were only what my mother told
me.
    “I don’t...”
    Didn’t understand, didn’t believe? Of course he didn’t. Who would, a chance-met boy with a fable running counter to all biology lessons, all the sweat and slime of the TV documentaries, all the grunts and whispers of his lying, lubricious, ignorant, studious friends? But it was a warm day, a day for T-shirts and shorts. I pulled up the hem of one and pushed down the waist-band of the other, and he still couldn’t see all the length of the finger-thick scar that zipped my belly up.
    “That’s where they cut him out of me,” I said. And then, taking pity on his bewilderment, or else perhaps valuing his obvious wish to believe me, “Look, we were twins together, in my mother’s womb, yeah? But very early on, we’d already split into two but we sort of got joined together again, and I just absorbed him into me. It happens. Kind of like Siamese twins, only the weak one’s internal. He went on being himself, he even kept on growing, just very very slowly, and he took all his nutrition out of me. That’s why we call him Small, because we’re identical twins but he never got to be my size, or anything near it. Big enough, though. That’s how they knew he was there, because of the lump he was making in my
belly.”
    “What, you mean like a cancer?”
    That was what they all said, it was a label they thought they understood. “Sort of. If a cancer could be like a person. Small started to show because I was so thin, because he drank all the strength out of me. That’s like cancer. And they decided they had to cut him out of me, that’s like cancer too, except that they knew he’d die if they did it, and that’s like Siamese twins again, where they have to be separated but only one of them will survive. It’s a moral dilemma.”
    “He wasn’t a proper person, though. Er, was he...?”
    “He’s my brother,” I said flatly. “Why not?” I wasn’t going to tell him about the little fat clean white grubby boy in the jar. My brother, the pickled twin. That kind of Small he might understand, where I still couldn’t get my head around it. I didn’t want anyone understanding my brother better than I did.
    He shrugged, bony and awkward under the sun’s weight. “So will you be coming to my school, then?”
    “I don’t go to school.”
    “You don’t? Not ever?”
    “No.”
    “Why not?”
    “We never have. Mum teaches us at home.”
    His eyes narrowed, and I thought he was going to ask you and who? If I said me and Small I knew he’d figure out that jar, only he’d see it perched on a schooldesk next to me and he’d be off on his bike in a moment. I held my breath, and he asked a different question altogether.
    “What, are you some