Sparrow

Sparrow leant her face against the bus window. The drove of sweating people cramped into such a tiny space had corrupted the atmosphere with the humid tang of body odour yet the freezing conditions outside had made the glass cool and soothing to the touch. It took the edge of the flush burning her cheeks and allowed her to gain a little clarity in spite of her hellish surroundings.

She watched blue tinted buildings float past in the bus’s slipstream. In the last three months it had seemed as if nothing was anchored as it should be. Previously solid things around her like houses and trees and cars seemed liable to drift away from the world at any moment. They never did of course, but Sparrow knew that they were thinking about it.

Angelina’s funeral had come and gone, and since then the days fell between her fingers like sand. She went through the motions, still went to work as usual, but she’d folded in on herself, and the miniscule amount of words that used to escape her mouth from time to time had dwindled away into almost nothing.

At the wake her brother had gently suggested that she visit a bereavement councillor. They had been sat on the sofa in Angelina’s parent’s house, rarely speaking to anyone else. Not that many people had tried- as far as they were concerned she was nothing more than Angelina’s introverted roommate. She’d asked James to come along for moral support, needing to know that someone there appreciated the full, stomach-wrenching extent of her grief.

So they’d spent most of the evening on that sofa, slowly bleeding the household dry of liquor. When everyone rushed over to look after Angelina’s mother, who had broken down into a fresh wave of tears, James had turned to Sparrow and, placing his hand on her arm, said gently, “Stephanie knows someone who might be able to help you. He’s an expert on bereavement, and I think it might be good for you to talk about what you’re going through. I don’t want to push you into anything, not at all, but I just want you to know that the option’s there.”.

Sparrow finished off her vodka and coke and considered the empty glass for a moment, swilling the ice cubes around, and then turned her face towards her brother. One look at the thousand yard stare that was now passing straight through him, he knew that he had misjudged his timing and she was nowhere near ready for that yet.

She opened her mouth but it was a few seconds before she managed to squeak, “Can I just talk to you?”.

The pain etched in his sister’s eyes was achingly familiar and he felt his own filling with tears. She collapsed onto him and he cradled her like a baby, rocking her softly and whispering “of course you can, of course you can, of course you can”.

They must have seemed a strange pair, hunched and swaying on that pinstriped Ikea couch. Sparrow, the delicate girl in the pinafore dress with the bush-baby eyes, and her brother, a big, strong workhorse of a man with a shaggy rock ‘n’ roll mop of hair, clutching onto each other for what seemed like dear life.

As children, they had never fought.

Sparrow stepped off the bus on autopilot, and only as it let out a hiss and pulled away did she realise that she’d disembarked at the stop outside James’s house.