Trafika Europe 9/10 - UK in Europe

All the voices

putting this curse onme if I dared to look at him. It was because we had to sleep in the same bedroom and he resented it because he was three years older. So I always made sure never to glance in his direction if I could help it because I was a young kid then and didn’t know that devils and all of that were make- believe. But I didn’t have to see Ciaran to know about the asthma. The wheezing kept on getting louder and louder and in the end I’d have to go for Mum and she’d come bustling in armed with the inhaler. And Ciaran hated that inhaler. It made him scream just to see it even though he hardly had any breath left inside him. He screamed and screamed, and I hid myself away under my duvet, holding the palms of my hands

over both my ears. And there were other times, when Ciaran would forget how to breathe. He’d be silent then, not wheezing or screaming and he didn’t even care if I looked at him. Iwonderedhowsomebody could forget how to breathe. Didn t breathing just happen? Did you have to be right there with it, cheering it on like a horse or somebody in a race? To keep up the momentum. I didn’t have any breathing troubles myself but all of this was something to think about. And I did think about it. Plus I thought about some of the other things I knew about Ciaran. For example, he’d told me that he preferred fish to people, and would have liked to be a fish himself if there’d been a

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