My brother was eleven years my elder. He taught me how to ride a bike, he invented a game in which if I broke this absurd rule or that one, I’d have to go to “Proper School”—I can still see him at the phone in the family kitchen, pretending to talk to the teachers who ran the imaginary school. In the days after his death, all these memories crowded my mind at five in the morning. It all happened so many years ago. What once was will never be again.
