(thinner)
than them.
I became expert at guiding Tomás, who muttered weak protestations in his rumbling baby-bear voice, away from his colouring books and upstairs so that I could dress him in my old clothes. He was small for his age. Papi still calls him el enano, the dwarf, even though he stands taller than all of us now. But back then my brother was swamped in my clothes — the bottoms of my jeans dragged after him like double wedding trains.
One day I poured my Holy Communion dress over him and cajoled him to take a few steps, and he tried, tottered and was catapulted to the ground in a felled tarpaulin of white beads and satin. I laughed myself dizzy. I went to help him up; he lay completely still, his face buried beneath the dress’s sequinned sweetheart collar. He was so lean I could hardly find his body to pick him up and set him aright; he didn’t even have a little child’s pot belly. Tomás’s body was drawn together, hunched, as if the holding space allotted by his skin was too cramped and bones and breath couldn’t coexist. I thought, my God, to be so narrow, to be nothing more than a thought. He had no contour; it was straight down with him, sculpted bone that made muffled clatter against the fingertips, straight down from shoulders to thighs. I didn’t believe that this boy would ever grow. I wished that this was my body, my simple cage. I pushed the dress three-quarters of the way up and clasped both hands around his thigh with a ring of room to spare, and I stared and stared. Material rustled, and Tomás’s head emerged from out of the dress’s neck. He lay still, encased in my dress and my hands. In his gaze I came to know that something was not right in this kind of play.
Through the park’s trees a race has begun, and I squint short-sightedly, trying to differentiate Tomás from the other two tall, short-haired black boys lashing the ground with trainer-clad feet. I spot him as I wend my way through the rows of low metal benches, stepping over seats. On the track, Tomás is second, arms pumping, neck muscles straining as he tries to get near the boy ahead of him. But the boy in front, his face laced on one side with a frothy comma of white paint, is leaping far, far ahead like a blank signal, so unreachable that only Tomás and he actually finish — near the finish line, the third boy curses, kicks off his shoes so that they fly wide, and jogs disconsolately off the track.
Two girls are sitting near me; their hair is in ponytails and they’re wearing the claret-coloured uniform of my old school. One is a West African girl, the other vaguely Jamaican-looking with that chill cast of the lips. They cheer and smile and wave their school scarves. They call out, ‘Tomás! Tomás!’ and I smile at them.
‘Do you know him?’ the shorter of the two calls to me. She’s the West African girl, pretty, snub-nosed and wide-eyed, and I hope that if she has a crush on Tomás he is paying her some kind of attention. I nod encouragingly at her, tell her he’s my brother and check the track, where Tomás and the white-faced boy are standing with their hands on their hips, puffing and stretching and listening to their PE teacher. Then the white-faced boy vaults over the barrier between the benches and the track and jogs toward us — he is Tomás, and I should wear my glasses more often. With the face paint, though, Tomás is different. The eye set in the white is cold and black and bright to excess, as if it contains him. He sits down between me and the girl, grins at the questions I’m wearing on my face, kisses my cheek. He licks his finger and draws it down his own cheek. Paint peels off like icing chipped with a knife. ‘It’s edible paint,’ he says. ‘Vanilla.’
‘And why is it on your face?’
He shrugs. The girl beside him wraps her scarf around his neck and unconvincingly garrottes him. He has taken to shaving a forward slash into his eyebrow, and I think I would like that in any male but my younger brother. Under his vest, the skin around his shoulder blade is swollen, with a shiny purplish tinge. I touch it; it’s still tender. Tomás pulls away and gets up to leave. Once we’re out of the girls’ sight he swerves and asks me what I’m doing here.
‘Chabella wants you —’
‘I know. I heard her fussing last night.’
‘She asked me to come and pick you up —’
‘Just in case I got lost on the way to your flat, isn’t it?’
‘Was that sarcasm?’
‘Nooooo,’ he says, pulling his rucksack straps tighter on his shoulders. His stance tells me nothing.
I follow behind him and ask, ‘Was that sarcasm?’
Nothing, so I say, ‘You were so fast today. I didn’t even know you could run that fast. What’s up, Speedy Gonzales?’
He doesn’t look round, but he takes a handkerchief from his pocket, wets it with his tongue and starts wiping off the face paint with even, practised dabs.
‘So, that short girl’s pretty,’ I try. ‘Is she your girlfriend?’
‘No, man!’
‘Ex-girlfriend?’
‘No, man!’
I see the problem. ‘Why don’t you just ask her out? I think she likes you.’
He doesn’t say anything until we get to the bus stop. He looks blankly at the bus timetable, then at me. ‘Do you think so?’
I try to keep a straight face. ‘Think what?’
He looks hopelessly circumspect. Girls are wearying him already.
‘That she, you know, likes me or whatever.’
‘Yes, man.’
On the top deck of the bus, he sits beside me and leans on me so that his elbow digs slightly into my side; he corners me with thermal weight.
‘What happened to your shoulder?’ I ask.
Tomás clears his throat, squeaks unintentionally, pulls a face because his voice is breaking and he can no longer trust it. I say again, ‘Your shoulder?’
‘There’s this boy in my class whose dad is Colombian or something. He’s such a dickhead. Truly. If you met him, you would straightaway think, “What a dickhead.” It’s something about the way he talks, the way he walks, his big walnut-shaped head —’
‘You hate him,’ I say. I am laughing.
‘No, he’s a good goalie. I just think he’s a dickhead. His name is Jorge Ruiz-Cole.’
‘Jorge Ruiz-Cole,’ I repeat, obediently. ‘What did Jorge Ruiz-Cole do?’
He replies on a long, low whistle, trying to strain his voice deep.
‘Well, he thinks he knows everything about Cubans, right, because his dad’s from Colombia or whatever, so he keeps asking me things, like about food and our family in Cuba and stuff like that, and I usually don’t answer him, so yesterday he asks me how come my surname doesn’t come in two parts, like why don’t I have two parts to my surname instead of just having my father’s surname. And I didn’t answer him. But he started pushing me and saying come on, come on, why are you so quiet, what, are you a bastard, is it your mother’s name? So I said, OK, it’s because we’re black Cubans, and it’s not the same as white Cubans you know, because at first in my mother’s family and my father’s family kids had the same surname because both their parents were slaves in the same household and had the same surname, their owners’ surname. You can’t have the children called Luis Fernandez-Fernandez or Luis Carrera-Carrera, so they had to work it out so that only the fathers’ surname got passed down, right? That’s what I told him. And when I said it, all the others started booing Jorge Ruiz-Cole and telling him to leave it and saying “Picking on a slave’s son! You knew that, you fat bastard!” Because this guy Jorge is actually quite fat.’