# 7. To The Bone.

I hear the strum of Jack's guitar and grit my teeth so tightly that it hurts. A, E, B fucking flat, over and over and over again without pause. It's going to be a long night.

No one bothers to scream at him anymore. Those first few weeks after Norah left, Evan would pound mercilessly against the flimsy chipboard wall that forced a line between their two small kingdoms. The tremors shimmied across the shabby boards and buried themselves beneath the woodwork until the entire house shook with them. My bedroom rattled with the zest of a runaway caravan, shifting the blanket of red dust that coats every surface of this god damn town, until the air swam with it.

I did not interfere at first. I left things to Evan - Evan and his incessant booming, the colourful threats growled at the space beneath the door that would have made our mother faint, if she had heard. If she wasn't globetrotting with Dad on the opposite side of the world, being everything to everybody but her own flesh and blood.

I was content to take shelter here with you...was desperate to have you distract me from Jack's tactless masochism, and even more, from my own internal carnage. You were brilliant. I didn't want to stop Jack from strumming. I was in favour of anything that promised to hold him together. The will to remain in one piece is so ridiculously fickle. Sometimes I would find him in deep sleep, his arms wrapped tightly around himself. I entertained notions of finding him something...anything to help him hang onto himself. A length of nylon rope looped three times, and tied securely at the small of his back...the tatty persian rug he claimed as his own swathed about him like a kevlar cocoon. Anything to substitute Norah's embrace. Though I know it better now, even then, I realised that there could be no stand-in. I left him be.

But the night that the arguments rocked my grubby chrome banker's lamp onto the hardwood floor; the night that I looked down to find myself in just as many pieces as the shattered jade glass, I made an exception. The boys almost met you that night. I remember bellowing as I tore myself out of your arms, half-crazed with fury. The guitar strumming stopped abruptly, but I could still hear the pounding. Poor Evan. I wasn't to know at the time that he had stopped just as dutifully as Jack, and that it was in fact the pounding of blood in my ears that I heard as I stomped bloodied footprints down the hall. It wouldn't have stopped me from busting his lip...nothing could have stopped me that night. Norah gave me that stupid lamp back when we were kids. It occured to me as you coaxed the glass shards from the sole of my left foot, that there was irony in crying over her again.

At least it stopped Evan from causing trouble. I must have frightened him on some level, because he never once bothered Jack again.

In a way, I miss the pounding. Now I have nothing to distract myself from those same three chords. They haunt my dreams. Worse still, you aren't here to help the wounds heal over...and now there's nothing holding me together. Nothing at all.