Written by Lauren Hobbs.
There’s half a quiche somewhere, rotting in my bedroom. I took it out of a handbag a few months ago, an uneaten lunch to be dealt with later, and forgot about it. At some point, I draped a scarf absent-mindedly over the Tupperware that it’s wedged into. I discovered it weeks later, festering quietly behind a wall of flimsy plastic. The quiche has been divided in half, unsettlingly accurately, by two colonies of mould. On the one side, a fuzzy covering of ashy green dust blankets a cherry tomato. Splotches of cotton eat away at the pastry and a strange, dark shadow has spread from the centre like a swarm of tiny flies. The other half is enveloped by a tangle of tangerine arches like dripped candle wax – a slimy, orange nest which seems to twist into itself, consuming my neglected quiche like something odd and alien.
When they told us what they thought your skull might hold, that the folds of your brain were excessive, curling inwards and overlapping in boundless pink ridges, the first thing I thought of was that quiche. I remember how I felt when I picked up my scarf to find it sitting there, how I wanted to throw the whole container away. I didn’t; too guilty for the waste and embarrassed not to have noticed while a batch of musty penicillin developed on my bedside table. They brought out your scan, the image of a sallow blob, a bundled string of cheap sausages, vacuum-packed into supermarket plastic in the vague shape of a brain. I knew I wasn’t far off in my comparison. I couldn’t understand it, how the mess in your head had lay dormant, writhing and volatile for twelve whole years, just behind your face. I wanted to fling the scarf back over you, go back to bed and forget the way your mismatched brain was screaming.
It isn’t even a real quiche – it’s a vegan alternative from the plant-based section in Sainsbury’s. Without a base of rotting egg white to take hold of, I’m not certain why the mould spread as quickly as it did. I’m imagining the growth of it; spanning creamy surfaces with fluff like a noxious dandelion clock. I wonder if the same thing has been happening behind your eyes. Have I been oblivious, or just desperate to ignore the signs that your beleaguered mind was spouting? Can I ignore the way our parents parcelled you into the waiting rooms of specialists to emerge with diagnoses that you couldn’t pronounce? The way you held your breath when you were small until you passed out at birthday parties, or the constant, jerking movements of your left arm? There was always something going on; a cold that clung on or some unexplainable symptom not to worry about. Until there wasn’t. You were healthy, growing, doing okay.
Perhaps the unappealing quiche was on my mind simply because I was starving. I had woken, inches away from my secret Tupperware, to a horrible keening noise. I knew exactly where the sound was coming from – but like Sister of the Year I rolled over, resigned, thinking Mum will deal with it. It’s only a nightmare. Minutes later, the three of us were in your room, crowding over your bedframe and your dancing body. There had been screams, shouting, shaking, and an impressive amount of Oh, Fucks before there was any suggestion of calling an ambulance. Your limbs were flung at impossible angles as you sung to us with eyes rolled right back in your head like you were trying desperately to see what was going on inside, caught somewhere between dreams. Dad was frozen over his mobile, frantically muttering something about how he couldn’t find the number nine. And then I had been bundled into an ambulance beside you, still blinking off sleep as I watched you seize with a sinking feeling and a great, ugly disbelief.
Now, with more wires threaded through you than hairs in your head, you smile sweetly in your sleep. The sun is beginning to rise, and you know this will earn you at least one day off school. When you wake up, you will flirt coyly with the pretty nurse. We know now that each current that runs through you is a risk, that you have been a tower of stacked plates waiting to collapse, we know that the fragments of porcelain you have broken into will be digging into our feet for the rest of your life. I will watch as you stop growing, as the liquid in your veins bleeds more barbiturate than blood. I’ll learn how to be a mother, then a sister again as you fluctuate through life, always cracking that same cheeky smile.
I will always be there under the moon for you to confess to. Tell me what confuses you and I will do my best. I know that you don’t see yourself as regular anymore, that you’re embarrassed by the scar across your throat and the way you can’t quite understand the things about the world that other boys your age pretend to. I know that you are scared of all the things you can’t remember. At some point I will have to pry my own life from between the ravelled valleys of your brain. I will have to let you go. But until then, I will just throw away that damned quiche. I’ll see the beauty in the pattern of its decay and scrub its plastic chamber clean. While perhaps your insides echo the vibrant rot and spoiled surface of something unrecoverable – that is not what you are. You are not something to be trashed or decidedly unfaced. You are not quite a colony of beautiful mould.
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