Golden Boy
Authors: Abigail Tarttelin
For my parents
Contents
Daniel
M
y brother gets all As at school, and is generally always nice to everybody. He is on the county football team that trains and plays at his high school, and they rotate captain between the three best players, which is him and his best friends, so for one month out of every three, he is captain of the team. People like him because he is fair and always calls out the names of the other players to support them and claps when they win, plus if they won because of someone else’s goal, he will always make sure that that person holds the trophy in the picture for the paper.
He is like the perfect one of the two of us. Whenever my family is in the paper, they show pictures of my brother. Mostly they cut me out. My brother is much taller than me, and he also has lighter hair and straighter hair than me, and mine is quite curly and a darker yellow that some people say is ginger, which I have been teased about at school. Mum says he looks like an angel and I look like a little imp, but I don’t think she was trying to be insulting because she was smiling like I’d be pleased when she said it. My brother has proper muscles and can run really fast and wins all the races at school sports days. He is also doing an entrance exam for the big school that goes after secondary school so Mum and Dad don’t have to pay any money for him to go, and he is probably going to get that, Mum says, because he works very hard and is naturally bright.
His friends Marc and Carl are funny. They are humorous-funny, but also strange-funny. When they are at our house sometimes they all go quiet when I walk in a room, and I say, ‘Hey! You were talking about me!’
And they say, ‘We weren’t.’
And I say, ‘What were you talking about then?’
And sometimes they make silly excuses but sometimes one of them will say, ‘We were talking about girls.’
And then I say, ‘No you weren’t! You were talking about me!’
And my brother will say, ‘No, really, Daniel, I promise we were talking about girls.’
And then I believe them because my brother would never, ever lie to me, because we are brothers and we have a blood pact never to lie to one another. A blood pact means you would die before you lied to each other.
My brother is also really popular with girls. Carl told me so and so did Marc, and so did Mum. I also deduced this fact because a few times we have picked him up from school in the car and he has been talking to a girl and holding hands and then once . . . once he was kissing a girl and I was shocked and horrified and Mum laughed at my mouth, which was wide open, and beeped the horn and waved at him and my brother smiled and went red and got in the car and when he got in the car I said, ‘Why are you so red?’
And he said, ‘Shuddurrrp, Daniel.’
And Mum laughed again, even harder.
The best thing about my brother is that he is the most amazing player of
World of War
ever. He doesn’t even play it that often! He only plays it with me. He plays more on the Xbox with Marc and Carl usually, and we play on the Wii downstairs with Mum and Dad sometimes and he also occasionally plays on the Sega, but really he doesn’t play many games because he is out playing football. But he does play
World of War
with me most nights and we play until eight or eight-thirty and then I have to either have a bath and go to bed or just go to bed, but usually have a bath and go to bed. Then I will read to Mum before bed, or sometimes I will read to Dad, but usually Dad is not home yet. Sometimes my brother comes in and we have our talks, which are very interesting conversations about life. My brother says I am very wise and he is right. I always have advice for him.
We are very different people. Some different things about the two of us are good, though, like he is best at English and Geography and History, and he doesn’t know what he wants to be when he grows up, but I am a very advanced robot designer for my age and I know exactly what I want to be when I grow up: a robotic engineer. I will do all the designs on the robots and I will oversee the construction of the prototype and then I will make an entire robot race, or I will use my robot powers to add robotic extensions to normal human beings, so they can be whatever they want to be. Like if you couldn’t see but wanted to be a fighter pilot then I could add robot eyes, which could give you 20:20 vision, or even better 40:40 vision and night vision, with the ability to detect both infra-red and ultra-violet light. You would have a dial on your head and you could turn it to see which one you wanted to see. People would come into my workshop and I would look at them, and I would improve them until they were absolutely perfect and couldn’t be improved further. I would work on my brother and make him really big and muscly and fast as a cheetah, and I would give him a really deep voice and a buzz cut and a gun that formed from his left arm when his heightened senses told him we were in danger.
I told my brother what I wanted to be, and he said that it was cool but unfortunately he wouldn’t let me add extensions to him, because he wanted to be who he was and see how that played out. I said that was stupid. Who wouldn’t want to be perfect? Or a robot?
And this is why I have chosen to write my class essay about my brother.
Sincerely,
Daniel Alexander Walker, age nine and four-fifths.
M
y parents were each other’s antithesis. My mother was a beautiful, sad woman; dark, small and quick to anger. She would mutter about sacrifice and everything she had given up for us. She died when I was sixteen and now I wish I had known her better. My father was tall, with golden hair swept from a side-parting, and had a gentle, mild temperament. Dad used to practise law, and would leave for York very early in the morning, every day, to go to his office. Later, he became a politician. He saw enough of the world to have dreams for us, and when I could go – when it was still free to go study for a degree – he sent me to Oxford University.
I was three years older than my sister Cheryl, and I didn’t want to go alone, so my friend Leah applied to train as a nurse in Oxford and followed me there. Two years after we moved to Oxford she met Edward, a philosophy student, while out rowing on the river. I was surprised she liked him so much, because Leah was so down to earth, and Edward was prone to arrogance. He felt too cold for warm Leah. Six months later, he took her for a picnic on that same river and proposed in front of all his friends. They married and moved to Hemingway for Edward’s work. The houses were better value and roomier, and the town was quiet and safe. A few years after that, they found out they were going to have a baby – a boy.