The year my brother died was the year he turned sixteen. That year Mum threw him the party of her dreams.

'Wasn't it awesome?' she said every day for a month later. 'Glen just loved it.'

Big deal. Glen just loved everything Mum did. This time it seemed like she figured if was going to die he might as well get his eighteenth and his twenty-first, and the other birthdays he'd never have, all rolled into his sixteenth. Everyone we'd ever known roamed the dusty aisles between sideshow tents, weaving between jugglers and clowns and fanning their red faces with the gold-embossed invitations. The air was so thick I could taste smells on my tongue; sweat blended with candy sweetness from the pancake and fairy floss stands. A hot air balloon full of screaming kids drifted up and down on a tether and the bells from the sideshows dingalinged over shuffling feet and laughter.

When you got close you could see the laughter was followed by a mouth twist of pity and then by the whispers nobody wanted my mother to hear. 'It won't be long now…' 'Such a lovely boy…' 'Tragic. And his brother…'

It was all lame, lame, lame. Especially the pole dancer. I guess she was from the 21^st party Glen's friends might have thrown him if he had any apart from Aaron. She had this big ass hanging out of a purple bikini and she ground it and wound it around a wobbly broom handle with a frayed pink ribbon hanging from the top. Glen had the birds' eye view from the table in front of the pole, Aaron beside him as per usual, Mum on the other side, smiling her brilliant smile like it was her wedding or something. Glen had his Good Boy Glen-face on and I wondered if the chemo had made the hair around his dick fall out like the hair on his head.

I didn't have a seat and I couldn't look at that ass, so I ducked into the fortune-teller's tent. It wasn't like anyone was going to miss me. It was the lamest thing of all; all the sparkly scarves and fake smoke in the world couldn't hide the fact that Madame Rosa looked more like a teller from the supermarket than a gypsy. She smiled up at me from her plastic chair behind a chipped folding table and I could see the paint had half-rubbed off her blacked-out tooth. 'Palm reading, sweetie?' she asked, and then she glanced at my hands and said: 'actually, honey, I think I'll use the crystal ball for this one'. The tent stank of shit from the porta loos next door. I didn't even bother to sit down. She sighed and whispered over an upturned fishbowl, but all she told me was 'you will hold your mother's happiness in your hands'. Crap. The only person who ever held her happiness in his hands was Glen. If I had her happiness in my hands I'd crush it between my palms like a baby bird with a broken wing.

A couple of months later, I turned fifteen. It was the day of Glen's funeral. A week after Mum gave me twenty bucks.

'I need a new laptop,' I said. She shrugged. She didn't have to say anything. The party, the hospice, the funeral. It all cost money. I fumbled the twenty bucks into my pocket.

Glen's room was empty when Mum wasn't in there crying. I went in there that night and laid the side of my head on the pillow that Mum said still smelt of him, but really smelt of her perfume. I wondered when she would change the sheets. He'd been in the hospice for two weeks, dead for another two. They must be getting pretty rank by now. When do you change your dead son's sheets for the last time?

I rolled over and punched the damp pillow like it was his head, whumping into it again and again with my palms.

I should have been happy not to see Aaron around our place any more, with his chiselled chin and habit of dismissing me with a snap of his long fingers, but I found I kind of missed him. He walked past me in the corridors at school like I wasn't there and I wanted to grab him by his wide, pink cheeks and pull him to me, make him notice me. But I couldn't do that. I was Crow and he was Aaron. He only hung out with perfect people like Glen. If I ripped off those shiny cheeks, dug into them with my twig fingers, scraped the flesh away from the bone, then he wouldn't be perfect. Then he might be my friend. Time after time he passed me in the corridors, looking down; time after time I folded my fingers back into my hands, feeling the scars scrape against my palms.

I had to use the twenty bucks to buy a new ink cartridge for my printer. It wheezed its way through my assignments, but it was in better shape than the laptop. I punched at sticky keys, edited on a fading screen, re-typed work lost in the depths of the hard disk. A couple of months after Glen died the laptop decided to join him. I was halfway through a history project, peering at the misty screen, when, just for a moment the screen lit up, all bright like when I first got it, and then the brightness shrank to a tiny star in the middle of the screen and into blackness.

Mum was washing up.

'I need a new laptop,' I said to her back.

Her shoulders slumped. Glen's headstone had been ordered. Marble, customised. 'Here lies my beloved older son, my perfect child. I wish it had been his brother.'

'Can't you make do?' she mumbled to the bubbles.

'It's completely gone. Fritzed. Dead.'

Her head drooped further. 'We can't afford it. You'll have to manage.'

Glen's bedroom door was closed. For some reason, Glen's door had a round handle, while all the other doors in the house had straight ones. I couldn't grasp this handle with my fingers, so it operated like an anti-Crow lock. In there, Glen was safe, in his princely paradise, the walls covered in cricket and footy heroes, the dresser lined with trophies and photos of his teams. Team after team. Cricket, tennis, soccer, footy; all with Glen, always in the front row, the golden boy holding the bat, the racket, the ball.

I grasped the handle between my palms and heaved. My hands slid around and around. I wiped them on my trousers and tried again and again until, finally, the handle turned.

I destroyed the photos first. I dragged them from the dresser and crushed them under my feet; then shredded the posters, scattering the strips over the floor. I pulled his clothes out of the wardrobe, spat on the uniforms and pounded them into the broken glass of the photos. Everything was going down: the papers on his desk, the books on his bedside table, his precious freaking teddy bear from when he was a baby. I ripped the arm off that with my teeth. Finally the bed, with its mixed stink of stale perfume and Good Boy Glen sweat. I threw myself on to the cover, rolling and rumpling, and then kicked it off with my feet to join the chaos on the floor. I stood on the mattress, bouncing on it like a kid, feeling the springs suffer and give under my feet. I leapt off the bed, thrust my palms under the corners of the elasticised sheets, feeling the elastic stretch as I pulled until the fabric, worn by years of Glen Sleep, tore right down the middle. I dropped to the floor, and sat on my butt and pushed at the mattress with my feet, until it slid off into the carnage.

Under the mattress was his diary.

That was the moment Mum appeared in the doorway; drawn away from her bubbles by the breaking glass, the crashing or, gee, maybe even my screaming, because when she appeared in the doorway, I stopped and all of the sudden the silence made me realise the shrill, high pitched sound that had accompanied my destruction had been coming from her mouth.

She reached out with her eyes and then her hand. 'A diary,' she whispered. 'He kept a diary.'

I snatched it up, nearly dropped it, squeezed it tight between my palms.

'Give it to me,' she said. 'Cory, give it to me!'

The diary, leather-covered, padded, felt warm against my skin. 'No.'

She stepped forward, holding out a wet, pleading hand. 'It's Glen's. It's a piece of Glen.'

'Who the fuck cares?'

She stepped forward again and I ran, past her, through the door, awkward on the stairs with no hand to clutch the banister. I stumbled in the hallway, crashed through the screen door and then my bare feet were slapping against the gritty, sun-hot pavement.

I read the diary leaning up against the wall of the old scout hall while the flies sucked salty sweat from my skin.

Then I called Aaron.

He sat down beside me half an hour later, his back sliding down the wall of the hall, flicking off dry flecks of peeling paint that blew around us like confetti. He didn't speak for a while and I listened to the wind rustling the dry leaves of the gum tree above and felt oddly peaceful.

'When you started school, Jordan Fleming called you Edward Scissorhands,' Aaron said eventually. 'Glen knocked his front tooth out.'

'What about Crow?'

'Glen figured you would end up with some kind of nickname and he thought Crow would do. You were so skinny, with that black hair. He said at least it had nothing to do with your hands.'

'Everything had to do with my hands.'

'I guess. Glen hated them.'

I flinched inside, and maybe outside too, because Aaron paused and then started again.

'Not because they're gross or anything…' He stopped. I held up my hands and we both looked at them. The stubby half-fingers without nails or joints. The scarred, twisted toes, transplanted to give me thumbs, with the coarse, black hairs growing out of them. The Frankenstein appendages the doctors had created to give me a 'normal' life; the misshapen, lumpen things that could barely hold a spoon, let alone a pencil. Things that would never hold anybody else's hand.

'I mean he hated them, because of what they did to you. To him.'

'To him?''

'When you were a kid. Did you know why your Dad joined the military? It was because of you. They needed the regular money. Then he was gone for months, Afghanistan, Iraq, wherever, and Glen said when he came back he was different. Not his Dad any more, even before he left. Your mum changed too, he said. She spent hours with you, doing the therapies, massage, teaching you how to do things, telling you how special you were.'

All I remembered was the pain and the fierce look in Mum's face as she manipulated the stiff tissue while I cried.

'Nobody had any time for Glen,' Aaron went on. They signed him up for sport, every night, so they could concentrate on you. You got a laptop, a printer, and encouragement every time you so much as pointed at something. He had to score a hat trick at soccer for anyone to even remember he was there.'

'Didn't exactly hold him back, did it? Or you.'

'I loved him.'

I lifted up the diary. 'So he says.'

'He loved me.'

'He says that too.'

'What are you going to do with it?'

I let him read the diary, and then I took it and left him there, curled up, his face buried in the dry grass, as if it might swallow his heaving sobs.

'You will hold your mother's happiness in your hands.' I did. I plodded home through the gloopy midday heat, the leather cover of the diary slipping between my palms. The extra piece of Good Boy Glen that Mum longed to discover. It was full-on, what he'd done with Aaron, and where, and how. Turned out Glen was a really good writer. Made me feel like I was there. I couldn't wait to show Mum.

I turned my head to one side, wiping the sweat off my face with the sleeve of my t-shirt, keeping the diary clamped in my hands. The pavement grilled the soles of my feet. I glanced down. My feet were as ugly as my hands; both second toes missing, uselessly transferred to my hands where they functioned about as well as a clock with its hands tied together. I remembered Mum's hope before that operation. 'They say you might be able to grip with them, maybe even turn things.' The hours she spent massaging the scars and encouraging me to do pathetic little exercises, always hopeful the strength might come, the dexterity would follow, her little boy might be normal. Glen would come in, after a soccer game or a swimming carnival, and tell her how he'd done, always another victory, and she'd flash her brilliant smile at him, then turn back to me, her face tight with concentration as she worked on another thread-thin muscle while I cried. She never smiled at me. Only one time. When the doctors said they were finished. No more surgeries. They couldn't make things any better for me and it would be better not to cause me any more pain. She turned to me and gave me that brilliant smile. We went straight home and did two hours of teeth-grindingly painful therapy. 'I'm not giving up on you, Cory,' she said.

That brilliant, meaningless smile. The one that meant she wasn't listening. To the doctors. To Glen. I stopped walking. The pain in my feet grew from a grilling to a barbecue. I let the diary slip from my hands, stretched them out and waggled the stubby little fingers. Just a little waggle. Enough of a waggle, enough thread-thin muscle to open a door, to pick up a burger, to stab out words on a computer keyboard. I bent down and picked up the diary. Without Mum I couldn't even have done that.

I held my mother's happiness in my hands.

Five toe-frying minutes later, I was home. I slipped through the screen door, with only the tiniest squeak from the hinges, but even that was enough for Mum. By the time I was sliding the bolt of the bathroom door closed - the big, wide bolt Mum had put in when I was ten so I could have privacy in the bathroom - she was already pounding on the door. The tiled floor was cold and hard under my knees as I knelt by the toilet, ripping the pages out of the diary, shredding them with my hands and teeth. I filled the bowl with Glen and then I flushed him away. Again and again I did it, while Mum thundered on the door, sobbing: 'What are you doing? What are you doing?'

Afterwards, I slid the bolt gently and stood aside as she rushed in. The leather cover of the diary lay on the floor by the toilet. Mum's hands flew to her mouth, her knuckles bloody from the beating she'd given the door. 'What have you done? That was Glen's diary. I'll never know…'

'Mum…'

Her voice rose to a shriek. 'How could you? How could you?'

'You've hurt your hands, Mum. Come on, let's go to the kitchen and fix them up.'

She looked at me, eyes wide over her torn, bleeding hands, then down at the diary cover.

'There's no Glen there,' I said. 'Not the Glen you knew. Not the one you want to remember.'

I reached out my hand. She took it.