The Only Brother (2 page)

We turned Will’s old room into a staging area for all his stuff. There was so much of it, Dad and I made six trips with the minivan from London to here. Six long, drawn out, agonising trips where Dad would do nothing but alternate between talking in German to IT guys and project leaders, and going on and on to me about all the ‘fun times’ we had on holiday.

It’s been four months since the funeral. They still keep talking about him, over and over, all the time. It’s all ‘Will would have laughed at that’ or ‘that was Will’s favourite programme’ or ‘the cheese in that omelette looks like Will’. They see Will in clouds, just
like those old bats seeing Jesus in a water stain on trees outside their houses. If they weren’t so private, the olds, they would gather up all the family to sit and stare at this sort of crap for hours.

The last holiday, by the way, wasn’t that much fun. Mostly it was fighting with Will because I wasn’t clumsy or because I wasn’t sick all the time or because I didn’t have a funny-shaped head. Yes, Will had a funny-shaped head, and he was all those other things that happen when the doctor induces the pregnancy and pulls you out with forceps, all because he doesn’t want to miss a day of his own bloody holiday. Pinched a nerve on my brother, which resulted in all these problems he had: clumsy motor skills, his mind literally working faster than he could express himself and the frustration that comes with all of that.

‘I miss Spain,’ my dad said, pulling back into the inside lane. ‘Will loved it. Just lying out on the beach, swimming… I wish you had come out more the last time. I swear you chained yourself to that computer of yours.’

‘It was a nice villa,’ I said, not even looking up from my sketch. ‘Why would I want to leave? Besides, I did go out and do lots of stuff.’

‘Yes, by yourself, sketching the place like it was going to disappear. Who buys a hundred pounds’ worth of paper and pens on holiday? You should have been out having fun!’

He put his hand on my shoulder and shook me. Fortunately, I’d pulled my pencil away from the paper.

Who buys a hundred pounds’ worth of paper and pens on holiday?
The artist who is walking around a place that dates back over a thousand years with some of the most amazing architecture you will ever see. Besides, the best way for any boy to meet a girl out in the world is to make it look like you are starting to sketch her. I keep a few starts of sketches in my papers so that if I see a girl I like, I can start some work on it and when she notices me, it looks natural. Sara thought this was positively awful, but admitted it had worked on her.

Sure I was out having fun, what with sketching girls and buildings and the apes in Gibraltar. It’s not every day you get to draw animals in the wild on a mini excursion. They just never noticed.

‘We were very lucky to get that place,’ Dad rambled on. ‘It’s one of the advantages of the job, all these rich people with no time to enjoy the things they buy themselves. Not that we’re badly off ourselves, all things considered. Just not ‘super-rich’ yet,’ he took his hands off the steering wheel to make air quotes. He’d seen it in a movie and thought it made him look cool. I’ll let him have that one, if it gives me a moment’s peace.

It’s amazing what you can draw from memory if it’s a strong enough one. Family, friends, dreams, hopes… Sara. It was some silly photo Sara and I took, she gave me rabbit ears above my head without telling me. I had no clue what she was doing, even after one of my friends took the shot. I rotate the picture as the desktop background for my computer and on my phone, but it’s not like I even need the picture to remember that moment.

Sara and I were at my mate Trevor’s, watching the telly, and just balled up on the sofa together. Everyone else was drinking and smoking and whatever, about a dozen of us all over in Trevor’s basement. His olds were never around and never actually took stock of the drinks cupboard, so everything flowed freely. Sara and I weren’t ones to drink or smoke, or anything; just not our thing. You could say that our vice was each other. I couldn’t get enough of her and she couldn’t get enough of me.

It wasn’t even the sex – although there was lots of sex. No, it was just having someone there you could talk to, laugh with, be around without any pressure. Someone just accepting who you are, no matter how strange you turn out to be.

‘I’m your friend, dammit,’ she would yell at me, ‘which means you aren’t ever going to get rid of me, even if I have to strap you to the hood of my car!’

No hang-ups about who fancies who, or who’s going to be serious about what, or
anything. Just two people spending time with each other and not caring what anyone thought of it.

Classes flew by with her, days and nights stood still, and a year of study was just moments. It was everything I ever saw in those afternoon movies I usually changed the channel from, but she insisted we keep on watching. Yet it wasn’t like she was a girlfriend; just a friend who I trusted with lots of thoughts concerning my life. A friend who happened to be a girl.

And Trevor takes pics of everyone. Good pics, like the downshirt shot of Emma when she bent over to pick something up, and bad pics like Bobby passed out and Ricky sticking his arse in Bobby’s face. But then there was our shot, Sara and I just tangled up in each other watching the telly and talking about which Doctor Who is the best one –

And then a grey scar of pencil mark scrawled across Sara’s face as my dad slapped my shoulder and kept his hand there. It ran
from jaw to forehead on her, almost ripping the paper.

‘Bloody hell!’

‘What?’ my dad said, still keeping his hand on my shoulder.

‘You messed up my drawing! What the hell is wrong with you?’

I took out one of my gum erasers, working on the scar with plastic surgeon skill. I could always fix it on the computer after I scanned it, but that’s not the point. Once again, my olds get in the way and screw up something I’ve worked on, something that was mine. They never did that to Will, never got in the way of anything he did.

‘It was an accident.’

‘Just don’t touch me, OK?’ I hissed.

‘Alright.’ My dad sank into his seat, finally pulling his hand away.

I kept working on Sara’s face, dabs and wipes and touches of the eraser finally restoring her to her natural tone of pencil shades.

‘I just don’t want anyone touching me,’ I mumbled to my dad.

‘You never have, Andrew,’ he said. ‘I just don’t get it, though. We’re all that we’ve got now – you, me and your Mum. And you keep on fighting us about everything.’ His voice trailed off, cold and hollow like it does when he tells anyone how he is doing
alright
.

‘I’m not fighting anything. Just don’t want you touching me.’ I kept on sketching, finally cleaning everything up.

‘I swear, you’ve always been like this.’ His hands squeezed the wheel. ‘Never wanted anyone touching you as a baby, no hugs growing up.’ He laughed weakly. ‘Mum always thought you were a little grumpy old man in a baby’s body. Never made a fuss as a baby…’

Not like you would have listened if I
had
said anything. Maybe I’d screamed up a storm and you didn’t notice between driving Will to various doctors. Maybe I didn’t go
look at me, look at me!
all the time, because I’d already figured you were doing all your looking at Will. Maybe I didn’t want to waste my time. Maybe there were better things to do than fight for something I was never going to get.

And through all this, Dad just kept on talking at me. He was back to talking about Will, and all the wonderful things Will had done. His college degree and his work, and how he lost all this weight, and… well, so on, and so on. Fortunately, I only had to take another half-hour of this before we arrived at my brother’s old flat in Amersham. Not bad, as far as places go: two bedrooms, an assortment of other small rooms and the remains of a mess we’d finally made a dent in over the past few months.

We could finally see the floor, with many things already boxed up and ready
to go. My brother had paid a few months in advance so we had another month before we needed to get everything out of the flat. It was my job to ship out everything my brother had sold on eBay before he died. All of that sat in my room – boxes and boxes of coins and books and whatever other junk Will sold off when he’d got bored with it. Hours of sending boxes out by post, fighting with my parents to get the money back for the postage, fighting with people because their auctions were late. Look,
I didn’t kill my brother just so that your auction would be late. I need your address again.

At least Will kept records, so I could get into his accounts. For a rampant slob who once got a whole block of butter into the top of his video cassette recorder, he was meticulous when it came to his auctions. Cheques and bank transfers right into the estate account and right back out as fast as we could; no sense in his credit card debts eating up the money. And we had to pay the medical bills somehow…

‘Andrew!’

‘What?’

I must have zoned out. I held a picture frame in my hand, polished steel. It was Will and me on Christmas morning, three years ago. We were just coming down from the top of the stairs and my dad decided he just had to take a picture. My brother was in his hat phase, covering the scars and his bald head from his – fifth? – lot of surgery. Yeah, fifth brain operation, this time to take out a shunt that drained spinal fluid from the base of his brain stem into his stomach. Will’s hat was silly, with a stuffed lobster sticking out of the front.

And me, bleary-eyed – I’d been up all night working on a picture – barely awake and barely able to stand after the flash went off in my face. My brother thought this was as funny as ever, just like Mum and Dad did. They always thought it was ‘fun’ to take my picture when I didn’t want it, to keep on touching me, to keep talking when
I just wanted to work. I only ever talked when I had something to say.

‘Andrew!’

Dad hovered over me, and I wasn’t able to cover the picture in time. He put his hands on my shoulders and looked.

‘That was a great Christmas,’ he said.

I don’t get it. I just don’t get it. How can he call that a great Christmas when William smacked me around, when I got screamed at for hitting him back, when my own brother called me a fag for drawing, and for dressing how I wanted? I have no idea how he could think I’d call it ‘great’ when Will just acted up, but they would insist that it was my fault every time something crap happened…

‘I guess,’ was the best I could push out of my mouth. I threw the picture into a box with piles of old clothing, putting it from my mind as best I could. All this would end up on eBay. I’d scan the pic at
least, and save it. Every picture needed to be scanned now, all so that no one would ever forget William and his wondrous achievements.

More packing, more loading, more junk. I can’t even imagine what the place looked like the first time Dad got here to get Will’s suit for the funeral. Probably
takeaway
containers as far as the eye could see, porn, and catalogues for theatre lighting equipment. Dad stayed at the apartment overnight that time; probably cleaned the place up as much as he could, so Mum didn’t have to see it all. She certainly wouldn’t have been able to handle the porn.

Every once in a while, Dad stopped and stared at something: book, a shirt, a hat… something that reminded him of Will. I kept quiet; I didn’t want to get sucked into the gloom. I know it hurts him a lot, but I didn’t do it. I didn’t kill Will, and I shouldn’t always have his ghost haunting me.

Don’t know how much I’ll forget, though.

And then, Will’s old room, stacked with boxes I hadn’t had a chance to go through yet. It was easier when Mum was off selling homes. I could sneak out trash, keep the saleable stuff and put the pictures to the side. I knew what really would mean memories to the olds, what they could live without and what we could just throw away.

Mum, on the other hand, didn’t have any idea what was worth saving and what was trash. She would have bought another house to keep everything. ‘No! It was his!’ Like throwing anything out was like throwing away a precious memory.

Mum pulled at the painting. I let it go, not wanting to deal with the fallout if it ripped. It was finger paints on paper, ragged on one edge where Will tore it out of the big pad of paper. The head on the dog twisted impossibly off the black and grey stick figure body, blue ears and yellow teeth and not much else. Next to it stood a kennel, straight and tall with perfect angles and perspective, drawn in fine-lined ink. Under both pictures was Will’s illegible scrawl of a
signature, sloppy even for a seven-year-old boy.

Mum brushed it smooth, placing the painting carefully in a manila folder. This, she set aside, just like the sloppy fired clay pot, the sloppy tie-dye T-shirt Will made at a party as a kid, and the sloppy first draft of his university thesis written in four different pen-inks and stained with soy sauce. She didn’t care where she set it aside, not even noticing that it was in the way. I had to sort all of this, and get all the stuff sold, but that didn’t matter to her.

‘Mum, we don’t have the space for all of this…’

‘Nonsense,’ Mum shushed me, ‘I’ll find a spot. I always find a space for everything.’

‘What, so we can live in a house sale? Mum, there’s too much stuff to keep…’

Mum sat down slowly and rested her head in her hands. She shuddered and then cried, her head shaking. I stepped away,
not sure what to do. At the funeral, I hadn’t been able to get my head around the idea of hugging Mum, or holding her hand, or anything, really. Still can’t do it now after these few months. It just doesn’t feel right for me to do it. Like I said, I never really was a touchy-feely person.

I didn’t even notice Dad in the doorway of the room. He moved quickly to Mum, wrapping his arms around her. She turned to him, holding on, shaking and sobbing.

Why couldn’t I understand this? I just didn’t feel the same way about them as they claimed to feel about me. I thought about hugging them, or saying I cared, but then realised that I couldn’t say any of those things. How do you care about people that don’t care back? How do you care about people who always had a favourite, and it wasn’t you, not by a long shot? You don’t. You go, and to places where you are wanted, to people who want you just as much as you want them.