Once Home Is Lost it's Hard To Find Again
John was only fifteen the night his parents had gone out to dinner that time, leaving him and Harry home alone. The meal had been planned for weeks, a date on the calendar that neither John nor Harry had paid little interest to. It was just another night home alone to them, watching rubbish on the telly and eating oven-cooked pizza and chips. There was nothing that said that this night would change their lives forever, and nothing that they could have done to stop it.
It was just after seven when their parents went out, reminding them to lock the door and to be careful with the oven as though they were still the children they had been when they were first left home alone for the evening. John waved them off, accepting the hug from his mother as she left, and followed Harry into the lounge.
As it turned out there was little on the telly that night and they ended up playing cards, first cribbage then Rummy then snap. It was Harry that broke first, flopping onto her back from her position on the carpet and throwing the cards into the air with a drawn out "I'm bored". John put his cards down too but stayed sitting up, grinning as his sister blew at the cards that had settled on her head. She was older than him, her eighteenth birthday being only weeks away, but sometimes she acted like she was a kid again.
Later on they ate their pizza and chips on the floor in front of the telly with their backs pushed up against the sofa and their plates on their knees. Harry opened a can of beer and poured them half each, insisting that their parents wouldn't mind. John drank his, mostly because if he didn't Harry would take his too even though his heart felt heavy at the idea of taking it from their parents. Harry had laughed when he had voiced his opinion and said that he would say it was wrong if they were merely taking lemonade and he found he had to agree.
After dinner, John washed the plates just for something to do, and Harry dried, her phone held to her ear with her shoulder. She was chatting to one of her friends, saying she would much rather be out with them than stuck at home with her baby brother although John knew it was just a cover and that she wasn't a fan of the party scene anyway, probably due to the amount of time that her friends spent snogging the faces from boys.
It was only eleven when they went to bed, both bored with the trivial game shows on the main channels and the repeats of 'Family Guy' on BBC3. John quite liked 'Family Guy', but after seeing an episode once or twice before there was not much joy in watching it again. They parted on the landing with a 'night, then' from John and a shrug in reply from Harry.
John woke once in the middle of the night, his sleep-clouded mind barely processing the time on the clock and the ringing of the phone before he fell back into the clutches of sleep. In the room opposite Harry woke too and sat up in bed, wiping the sleep from her eyes as she lit up the backlight of her phone. Three AM. With a groan she flopped back down, one of her parents could get it, after all, it was their phone.
He was woken by his father's alarm the next morning, but pulled a pillow over his head to block out the metallic bleeps and the early summer sun shining through his thin curtains. Soon the alarm timed out and he drifted back into a doze. It was only when the alarm sounded for a second time that John truly woke, opening his eyes and rolling onto his back. He listened carefully, wondering why his parents weren't stopping that wrenched beeping. It was only when he heard Harry groan across the hall and the thump of her feet on the floor that he pushed himself from his bed.
He was tying his dressing gown when she called his name, her voice higher and a hint of panic edging into her tone. He pulled open his door and stopped. Harry was standing in the doorway of his parent's room with her back to him. She was still in her pyjamas and her long, sandy hair was messy from sleep. Slowly John crept forwards, his gaze fixed past the back of Harry's sleep-messy hair and into the still empty room of his parents.
The morning passed as a blur for both John and Harry, neither of them knowing what to do. They ended up on the sofa sitting in silence, a mug of tea clasped between their hands as they waited in vain for their parents. John sipped at his, letting the hot, sugary liquid slip down his throat in a failed attempt at comfort. Harry merely held hers, her glazed eyes fixed far away until the tea was cold and John prised it from her icy hands. Neither of them noticed the red flashing light on the answer machine.
Just after lunch there had been a knocking at the door and they both had run from the room, a childish hope in their hearts that it was their parents home at last. In hindsight John should have known this would not be true, after all, his parents had a key. It was Harry who opened the door to reveal two grim-looking police officers but she backed away quickly, retreating to the living room with her messy head held stiff and her eyes wide open. John gestured the police through then followed behind, his heart pounding in his throat.
The police had sat them down on the sofa and told them the news, told them of the car accident that had killed their parents. One looked as though he were about to say something else but stopped as Harry broke down, throwing her arms around her brother. John sat in silence, all emotion gone from his body and white noise ringing in his ears. It had been as if all thought had gone from his brain and he was unable to process the information. In the end he had just sat there, his face expressionless as he patted Harry's back, her tears soaking a salty trail on his pyjama top.
Both Harry and John spent that night at their Auntie's house on the outskirts of the city. She was their mother's sister but they hadn't spoken in years, though her eyes red and blotchy as she had opened the door to let them in. She had cooked them dinner and taken it up to their shared room, not that either of them was really hungry.
There was very little John actually remembered about the week that followed. He dressed each morning before going down for breakfast, he ate lunch and dinner, and went to bed each night but the space in between was bleak and empty, the time moving in stops and starts. Somewhere midway through the week his aunt called in her friend who was a doctor to look at him. She had said it was shock.
It was at his parent's funeral was when it finally sank in for John, when he was watching as their shared coffin was lowered into the ground. It had been six days since their deaths but it was only then John realised that he was an orphan. He had returned home after that, smashing one of the side windows to gain access. The house had been clean and deserted, exactly as he had left it all those days ago. He had seen the red flashing light on the phone then and had started to play back the message, quickly stopping when he realised it was from the hospital on the night his parents had died. It was then that it all fell down for John.
Harry had found him curled up on top of his bed some hours later. He had been asleep, the remains of tears clinging to his eyelashes and a salty pathway stained down his cheeks. She woke him with a gentle hand on his shoulder and sat down beside him, pulling him up so that his head rested on her shoulder. They had both cried then, both of them mourning their parents, and their home, and for life as they had always known it before.
John went back to school two days later, his grieving mind desperate for the distraction of schoolwork. He had his GCSE's coming up too, and the exams were little over a month away. Harry didn't go back. She pulled out of college, suddenly losing all determination with her education and vowing to get a job instead.
Weeks passed and John buried himself in his studies, not for the grades but more as something to do to take his mind from the prolonged ache in his chest. Harry's birthday came and went but she spent the day out, only coming back after dinner to change before going over to a mates. It was early the next morning when she staggered back, her hair a mess and her clothes torn. John never told her how much he had worried she wasn't coming back that night.
Neither Harry nor John was present for the reading of the Will but as everyone had thought the house had been split between them, leaving both Harry and John with the little money left after the mortgage was paid off. Harry used hers to put down the deposit on a flat and moved out barely two weeks later. John left his money in the bank and stayed living with his Aunt and three cousins, but it wasn't as though he really had much of a choice.
He didn't see Harry much after that, she had buried herself in the bottle as he had buried himself in his work. She came to see him again shortly after his exams ended, her once long hair trimmed nearly as short as his as she swayed on the front step. He slammed the door back on her in a fit of rage, his mind rejecting the idea of losing his sister so soon after losing his parents. The second time was harder though, and for the first time since his parents had died he felt truly alone.
The next week was John's birthday but he ignored it, spending the day walking the fields around the house to avoid spending it with what was left of his shattered family. He went for a walk every day after that, it helped to empty his mind and stopped him from thinking back to his life before the crash.
John went back to school after the summer to complete his A-levels. He picked his choices numbly, deciding on what his teaches and Aunt thought was best. Not much changed that following year, or the year after, really. He studied, Harry drank, and their Aunt watched on, unable to do anything to help.
It was in the summer after his A-levels that John spent the money he had been given in his parents Will and he enrolled himself in Medical School at a university. There wasn't really a reason why he chose to become a doctor, It was just something his mother had said he would be good at all those years ago. He gave his applications in late ended up in the centre of London over four hours' drive from his Aunt but he found it didn't matter to him; it wasn't as if he had anything to go home to anyway.
Over those years away life gained some normality for John. He worked hard during the day and made friends during the evenings. Harry would often phone him during these evenings and he vowed to always answer her calls, even if she did tend to slam the phone down whenever he gave his point of view on her drinking. Eventually she stopped calling, and in the end John stopped caring.
John stayed in London when he graduated from uni, using his remaining money to rent a flat whilst he found a job in a hospital. He liked it there, found that the hustle and bustle was good for him and kept him occupied. He got himself in a couple of relationships but none of them lasted long and he often found himself watching the telly alone at night. Sometimes he wished Harry were with him, and they were sitting on the floor once again with plates of pizza on their laps and a can of beer shared between them. He had been worrying over beer that night, it seemed such trivia now.
It was midway through one of his shifts that John got the call to say that Harry was in hospital having her stomach pumped. He had left work there and then, ending up back at his flat with the photo album of his childhood in his hands. There was a picture in the cover behind a clear plastic screen of the four of them, him, Harry, Mum and Dad, but it was years old; he looked only about nine. They were all happy though, all smiling and together as a family, his arm draped carelessly over Harry's shoulder. He had never got on well with her when they were children, they were just too different, but she had still been his sister. Even that felt lost now.
It was later that night when John saw an advertisement for the army on the telly and the next day he signed up, saying he was ready to leave whenever. He moved to a training camp that weekend and was shipped out to Afghanistan three months later. He still hadn't spoken to Harry but he found he didn't care anymore; she could be dead in a gutter for all he knew.
John spent a total of five years in the army before he was shot and deported back to England, a bullet wound in his shoulder and a cane in his hand. He met up with Harry again shortly after and she gave him her phone but not once did she stay off the drink as she had promised. Later that year he met Sherlock Holmes in Saint Bart's and he went on his first case, saving the mad detective's life. The next day he had moved in to 221B Baker Street and for the first time since he was fifteen, John felt that he was home.