It’s dark. I’m hot and the air is stuffy. I’m covered in a thick duvet, poised like an animal, ready to attack.
”Ready, steady, go!”
I charge across the carpet, covered in my soft armour, and crash into someone. Before I know it, there's a weight on top of me. I need to break free before I'm pinned down. I punch outwards and hit something hard.
“Ahh!”
Someone pushes me down again. Then I feel a weight on my head, followed by a fart, a terrible smell and hysterical laughter.
This was a normal Saturday for us boys. We called it blanket fights.
Not long before this, there had only been two brothers.
My father died when I was six. Sometime afterwards, Mom met a man named Denis. He had a son called Gabriel. I first met Gabriel when he and Denis came to our house for a braai.
“You know what?”
”What?” Gabriel replied.
“Sharks are really dangerous,” I said, out of the blue.
“Oh yeah?”
”Yes, really dangerous.”
A few minutes later, I apparently had another fact he needed to know.
“You know what?”
“What?”
We braaied and swam while Mom and Denis flirted.
Before long, Mom, Pierre and I had moved from Durban to Johannesburg. We moved into Denis and Gabriel's house in Greenside. To me, the house was enormous. There was a swimming pool in the back garden, an aviary under the bougainvillea and enough space for three boys to turn almost anything into a game.
Gabriel and I shared a huge bedroom. There was a bunk bed in one corner, a table for Lego, board games and long nights of Dungeons & Dragons, and an ugly greenish-blue carpet covering the floor. We created a child's universe in there for ourselves.
At night, with the lights off, we played our blanket-fight game. The three of us and Gilles, the kid from next-door, took each corner of the room. On all fours, we charged to the center like stampeding buffalo.
We would have weekend-long Monopoly sessions. We converted the entire house into a gigantic spaceship, using blankets, sheets and moving furniture to create our vessel. Mom and Denis put up with the mess while the three of us played non-stop.
We spent several good years in that house in Joburg. Then Gabriel’s mom came to visit from Paris. I overheard them talking about Gabriel moving there to live with her.
I told Denis what I’d heard.
He confronted Gabriel and everything escalated. Denis was upset that his son wanted to leave. Gabriel was angry with me for telling his dad. I don’t remember everything that was said, or whether I understood what moving to Paris really meant. I just remember feeling sad.
Gabriel eventually left for Paris.
Afterwards, the room felt different. The bunk bed was still there and so was that ugly greenish-blue carpet. But the universe we’d created together was gone.
My brother was gone too.