Grief is sneaky. Like the most stubborn of weeds, it finds its way through every crack. Sometimes I’d be working on my computer and hear my phone ping or the sound of a car turning onto our road, and I’d nod to myself and think that must be Luke, and it would take a moment before the penny dropped. Something in me refused to believe he wasn’t somewhere close by. After all, he couldn’t possibly have gone far. At any second I expected him to come strolling nonchalantly into the kitchen and order whoever is in there to make him some food.

            I mean, this was a guy who’d lived his whole life within half an hour’s drive of home. In the last decade, he’d left West Sussex only a handful of times. Mostly with the Middleton Hockey Club, going on tours that took the team across France and Spain as well as to the Netherlands. Yet for all the photos I saw, and all the obscene tales I heard of drunken dares and riotous pranks on these trips, for some reason I found it hard to imagine Luke outside the small locus within which he spent almost every day of his twenty-four years.

            It made sense that he only travelled with the hockey club. They were the only people who could persuade him to do anything. Hockey meant everything to him. On the pitch – and celebrating in the clubhouse afterwards – were some of the only times I saw that mask slip, and that air of nonchalance and disinterest with which he inoculated himself against the world disappear to be replaced with pure joy and celebration.

            He’d practiced not caring for a long time. This last year had seen him attempt to start his own business managing and hiring out a posse of bouncers and doormen, a short-lived venture whose lack of success he found deeply frustrating, but whenever you asked him about it he’d simply shrug off any questions. Yeah, whatever. If he pretended hard enough not to give a shit about anything, then he’d be immune to the humiliation of failure and self-doubt. It was an act he’d carefully honed since he was first diagnosed as dyslexic, and later perfected when he started secondary school.

            In fact, as soon as he finished primary school he began to change. Perhaps it was the formal diagnosis of his dyslexia itself that was the catalyst. All of a sudden he found himself in a straitjacket that no amount of struggling or fantastic contortions could shake loose.

            Overnight, he changed from a curious, outspoken and imaginative child keen to try and understand everything around him to a boy that successive school reports characterised as anarchic and uncontrollable, deflecting each task with an obscene joke, flippant remark or wild prank. The only place he really seemed to feel at home was on the hockey pitch.

            It wasn’t that Luke was a different person once he put on the shirt, shorts, long thick socks and studded boots, but that he somehow seemed to inhabit himself more fully on the hockey pitch. He was blunt remade as sharp, sharp as a sliver of broken grass. Sprinting across the Astroturf towards the goal, he possessed a grace and refined agility that puzzled and amazed anyone who had only seen him sitting slouched and morose in the classroom or had witnessed any of his blundering attempts at riding a bicycle, trying to cook or even catching a ball in the park. During hockey matches he was quick and alert, unexpectedly dextrous and cunning, and he revelled in it: showing off with dummy passes and half-twirls as he dodged effortlessly past the defenders determined to stop him.

            Almost every week he attempted seemingly impossible shots at the heavily-guarded goal, playing as if he was convinced that the outcome of any game depended only upon his confidence and self-belief.

            There was something both uplifting and melancholy about watching him play. As soon as a game got going it appeared as though his mind and body were working in perfect tandem, with no gap between thought and movement, and no room left for even the slightest doubt. Normally he must have felt that his body was out-of-sync with his brain and unable to keep up, since I’d seen him dent countless tennis rackets and golf clubs by angrily throwing them to the ground when they would not do what he wanted them to.

            Hell, he’d thrown a few tennis rackets at me! And many times, I saw him grow enraged when his dyslexia prevented him from translating his thoughts and stories into words on the page, or from getting to the end of even the simplest book. And that is why seeing him shrug off his frustrations and give in to instinct and intuition was both elating and upsetting, for once the weekend game finished and he got back home, thoughts of school on Monday morning dredged up all his resentments and disappointments, and it wasn’t long before he had returned to his usual sullen, clumsy and surly state. 

            It seems likely that some of my brother’s happiest times were on the pitch and in the clubhouse bar afterwards, because in the aftermath of those games when he was lauded as the saviour of the hockey team, he must have believed that anything was possible. Yet he was always the first person to say that nothing lasts. Even in the midst of celebrating, he would tell his teammates that they should enjoy it for now, because things would probably be different next week – it was as though he had accepted that it was his fate to never be allowed to hold onto any of the glory or success that occasionally passed through his fingers.

            Nothing lasts, but everything persists.

            He never, of course, went away to university, but instead worked in a gym within walking distance from our parents’ house. Even when he was living with his girlfriend in a small ex-council house in Lavant, he still frequently found the time to drive the fifteen miles back home so that Mum could cook him dinner and he could kip for half an hour on the old battered sofa in the living room. He was intimate with the area and took a great amount of pleasure in the fact that everyone who visited the local pubs and clubs knew his name.

            When he talked of friends and relatives who had left the area and started again in new cities – including myself – he usually shook his head with a certain weariness. He felt we had failed some kind of test. How could someone hope to find happiness and contentment in somewhere strange and new if they couldn’t find it in that intricate spiderweb of friends, family and memories we call ‘home’?

             I wanted to go home. But home didn’t exist anymore. Because home was the place where my brother would be snoozing on the sofa. Home was where we’d shared bunkbeds and made forts. Home was the place where I knew I’d always find him.

            And I know he felt the same. He knew where he wanted to be, and even as a kid he couldn’t bear to travel too far from home. I remember our first trip across the channel, when he was five or six. We were walking back to our campsite after lunch in a neighbouring village, following a route that led down a dry, dusty road flanked on one side by a line of lanky sunflowers, their sullen faces peering down from over a pale stone wall.

            All the local cottages had their windows shuttered and the roads were deserted; we didn’t realise, though, until we were already halfway down the path and sweating furiously, that this was because everyone in this part of rural France was sensibly hiding from the midday heat.

            The sun was blanching the road and a sandy-backed lizard scuttling across my foot when I stopped to draw breath. Luke was dragging his feet at the back, something we rarely saw him do as he usually delighted in taking the lead. On this occasion, though, he was groggy from the heat and as we walked he asked again and again how much longer it would be until we got back to the campsite. Every so often he would kick up small clouds of dirt that, instead of falling back to earth, hung in the air around us.

            We turned a corner and ahead I saw the burning air trembling above the path, the trees beyond it warped and contorted in the searing afternoon sun. For a second, I felt terrified, since it was as if the very fabric of the air was so flimsy and slight that at any moment it might rip apart and leave us staring into a gaping black hole, into which everything around us might suddenly be dragged.

            It was then that Luke began to scream. At first I thought he had also seen the quivering heat lines distorting the track before us and was reliving the paralysing fear he had felt the first time we visited a fairground and wandered together amid the hall of mirrors – he had glanced into one of the panes of convex glass and thought that by some malevolent carnival magic the whole world had suddenly been transformed. My second thought was that once we rounded the corner he had seen how far the path wound down between fields and hedgerows before it sank into the valley where our campsite and our toys were waiting, and at the thought of walking that much further through the blazing sun something within him had snapped.

            When we were finally able to decipher the words, he was babbling between sobs and sniffles, however, we recognised a familiar childish refrain, bawled over and over: I want to go home.

            I want to go home. I understand that longing now more than ever. All I want is to go back home too.

            He simply wouldn’t move, and so we stood still for ages, the minutes made endless by the heat and the baleful urgency of his wails. At seven or eight years old, even I could see that his refusal to budge from the spot where he had set down in the middle of the dusty country track was completely at odds with his repeated desire to be taken back home – though I was careful not to point this out in front of him. I knew better than that. Eventually, my parents calmed him down with the promise of sweets and ice-cream and he was coaxed up onto my dad’s shoulders. Even then he continued to assert that he wanted to be taken back to England: to his own home, his own boglins, his own cats, his own beanbag.

            He didn’t cry again, though he remained withdrawn and restless for the rest of the day. We tried to distract him with Frisbee games, then with a trip to the small river beside the campsite where we tried to catch minnows and other tiny fish in our wispy nets, but nothing worked. He abandoned each activity after only a few minutes, only to reiterate his longing to be taken back across the channel. My parents repeatedly assured him that we would be leaving France the next evening, but it was clear he didn’t believe them. He suspected that they were making this up simply to placate him and cover the fact that we would never return home.

            I have not witnessed such profound homesickness since. My brother acted that day as though his desire to go back home had taken the form of a physical ache that grew more unbearable with each step he took. He seemed somehow bound to this small part of the south coast, and that is why it is impossible, even now, for me to imagine him somewhere else.

– Sam Meekings