Brother
God I need a cigarette. I can’t believe it’s been a year and a half since my last one – that’s the longest I’ve stuck at anything. I should feel good about that, I should feel proud, but right now all I want to do is tear open a soft pack, pull one out, light it and breathe it into me. Even though I know it would taste disgusting after all this time. Would it make me more of a loser if I’d started up again a month after quitting or now? It’s probably better not to think about it – there’s enough drama in my life without creating more. But that letter from my father is on the arm of the chair staring at me, taunting me, and I feel the need for all the moral support, the comfort a cigarette offers. I stare hard at it for a while, but I blink first and pick it up, dully consuming the dry information again:
Dear Son (nice personal start, Dad),
I regret to inform you that your brother Peter has passed away unexpectedly yesterday evening (don’t go getting emotional on me now, Dad – you have to maintain that stoicism at all costs). He came off a bridge, and the police tell us it was suicide (what else would it be Dad? An accident? He slipped and fell over a ten-foot high fence?). It seems he had some rather heavy debts as a consequence of some business dealings, and he had drunk a little too much that night before walking home across the bridge, and it appears that he jumped off (and how did that make you feel, Dad? The Chosen One is just as human as the rest of us, as flawed even as The Big Disappointment that came after him).
Needless to say your Mother is very upset (keep popping those valiums, Mum), and has instructed me to write and inform you of your brothers passing in the absence of a telephone (thanks Dad – have a shot that I have no money – you were right all along that I’d never amount to anything. It was my choice, though). The funeral will be next Tuesday, and we hope that this letter will reach you in time (and now I’m irresponsible for not having a phone), as your mother would like you to attend (and what about you, Dad? Would you like me there?). I trust that you will be able to find a way to call us and let us know if you will be able to attend (because you don’t know if I would attend my own brother’s funeral – thanks Dad).
Regards,
Your Father (and don’t I know it).
The Golden Boy is dead – and of his own hand. This is way too weird to deal with – he’s not supposed to kill himself; he’s the one with everything going for him – if anyone is supposed to commit suicide in this family it’s me. He was the good one – handsome, funny, athletic, talented, popular – people always wanted to be around him. He was that cliché – guys want to be him, girls want to be with him. He was even graceful enough not to seem to notice, or at least not to allow others to see that he knew. And then along came me, and the disappointment was painfully obvious from day one. I guess lightning doesn’t strike twice – I wasn’t like him, no matter how hard I tried. I was just shy, and tried to talk to people so they would like me like they like him, but it always came out wrong, and people became wary of me. But I had to have something – everyone’s got something - so I became the smart one. Not good smart though – not lawyer smart or doctor smart – but smart arse smart, sarcastic smart, evil smart. People became wary of me because they thought I would say something mean to put them down, and so I did that because it was expected, and it became a self-fulfilling prophecy. And, after this went on for a while, I could see I’d given them all reason to be wary.
It’s not easy growing up in someone’s shadow, believe me. When your brother is the most popular guy in school – captain of the football team, going out with the cutest girl in school (Rachel Palmer – she was probably the nicest, most decent person in school as well) – you can’t help but look … less. And people can never disguise their disappointment – the nicer ones tried, but you can always see it in their eyes, the look that says ‘if only he were more like his brother. He’s got the genes – how did they turn out so wrong?’
So I sat on the fringes of the school’s society, an outcast banished like I was in some latter day Lord of the Flies, and eventually some of the other losers gravitated toward me – like attracts like. We sat behind the library (such a small group, but at least I was the head loser – maybe the genes did kick in at last – I became the most popular unpopular guy in school), and we spent our time avoiding conflicts with those slightly higher up the food chain, chain smoking and talking about the things no one else cared about. And it bred a strange inferiority / superiority complex – I might be shit, but at least I’m better than all of those normal people. They’ll just never know because I chose not to show them.
And I spent all that time wondering why none of it was for me. He got everything – our parents loved him, but cultivated little more than disappointment for me. The teachers constantly told me how good he was, and wondered aloud why I couldn’t be more like him, make an effort to be more like him, and all of this in front of the class. Sometimes he tried to get me into the scene by bringing me to parties, not seeing the hatred (fear?) thrown at me behind his back. He kept this up until one night at the party at a house everyone called The Farm, when, while everyone else was getting drunk or stoned or both, some of his mates carried me around the side of the house and took it in turn to hold me or punch me in the stomach (clever – don’t want the bruising to be too obvious), and I always said no to his invitations after that. And it didn’t take long before he stopped asking.
After high school he went off to university to study economics, and I moved out of home to start a band. He walked into an internship with a prestigious broking firm; I scrapped a living on the graveyard shift at 7-11 hoping not to get robbed, while my various bands fell apart through arguments with future junkies. He moved to a four-bedroom house on the north side of town; I was ripped off by a constant stream of loser flatmates in squalid, windowless squats while I tried to avoid being ejected.
I ended up with the choice between getting into drugs or getting out of the scene, so I got out – sometimes I think the only reason I didn’t go the other way was because I couldn’t afford the gear. I got a job at a call centre and sat at my cubicle all day, talking to faceless no ones about nothing, occasionally giving out the wrong information to see if anyone would notice, and thought about the novel I would never write because by the time I got back to my tiny bedsit I was too mentally drained to do anything more than stare unseeingly at the flashing box in the corner and drink lukewarm beer from the case next to my chair.
I would only see him a couple of times a year – Christmas and Mother’s Day at the folks’ place, and on his birthday because his wife figured she should invite me over for the family dinner at their house to celebrate. I would try and keep quiet to avoid an argument until, as usually happened, my parents constant questioning became too much to bear and I’d head outside for a cigarette in the quiet peace of the neighbourhood. Once I brought over a girl I was sort of seeing, but after my mum kept on about what a wonderful girl she was and how wonderful we looked together I broke up with her. Fiona, she was called. I wasn’t really even going out with her; we slept together a couple of times – hollow, soulless sex after I had drunk too much. The morning after we slept together I would find an excuse to leave early, and I wouldn’t call her again until the next time I got drunk.
And of course it all looked even worse compared to him – married to his beautiful wife Patricia (he didn’t marry Rachel as we had all expected – they broke up amicably while at university; surely the only time that has ever happened in real life. Even more strange was that they remained best friends afterwards – how does that possibly happen after you split up with someone?), father to Joshua, floated up to full partner in his firm, world at his feet. It was Pillar of Society vs. One Step from the Gutter. Some of us look at the stars, apparently, although you can’t see them from my ground floor flat. Whenever I was with him I felt like a cautionary tale mothers told misbehaving sons – if you aren’t careful, that could happen to you.
So I go down to the corner and make the dreaded call (after a few quick shots for comfort), and it went pretty much as expected. I’ll spare you the details of the conversation, but mum was upset, broken, held together by scotch and pain killers; dad was stoic, the rock he thinks everyone needs him to be; and I was wary, always looking for what I’ll say that will set them off on another tirade against me. The usual argument didn’t come, thank god – they held off on the disappointed slant, I keep the replies monosyllabic, and we got the information we need from each other before the change ran out.
The next day I ask my boss – a kid five years younger than me and who actually wears the polyester tie they provide for the workers, whose pasty skin under the fluorescent lights only goes to highlight the excema scars on his face – for tomorrow off, and he gives me no end of grief until eventually, reluctantly, I tell him I have to attend my brother’s funeral. He looks as though I’ve punched him in the nose and he’s just swallowed a big clot of blood, the copper taste sliding down the back of his throat, but he knows there’s no possibility of telling me no. He still makes me promise to work an extended shift on Friday, and I agree just to get out of there. I feel the bile rising in my throat, and when I run to the toilets and bend over nothing comes out of my mouth, and it keeps coming. I go home via the bottle shop on the corner, and when I get home I take the top off the bottle and throw it away.
The next morning I feel like shit on the anti rush hour train to the suburbs – the trains headed back into the city are full of hollow people staring at nothing, flickering past like ghosts caught on celluloid which is skipping off its tracks, while my carriage has only two other people, both sitting at the opposite end to me. I made an effort to tidy myself up as much as I could this morning – I brushed my hair this morning, slicking down the few greys which are starting to peek through, and found my tie (I’ve only got one – Patricia gave it to me the first Christmas after we’d met – I gave her a bottle of local red wine) and a collared shirt, and I put my sunglasses on to hide my eyes.
I forgot how hot it gets out here in the suburbs, away from the bay – it hits me like a cargo net dropped from a height over me when I leave the air-conditioned cocoon of the carriage. By the time I’ve done the ten minute walk from the station to my childhood home my shirt is soaked and stinking of alcohol and sweat. It seems quiet on the street, and I wonder why until I remember that it’s a school day. Or maybe its that all the kids here have grown up and moved out of home by now, leaving a street full of old people and memories. The side door is open as always, and I walk into the living room to see my mother sobbing on the lounge, bookended by Rachel and Patricia – all the women of his life in a row in front of me. I look over and see my father on the phone – he nods at me and resumes his conversation – and Patricia says hello to me and keeps comforting my mother as I give her a peck on the cheek. We’ve never been much of a family for physical contact.
Someone drives me out to the crematorium as I watch the landscape of our childhood slide past – all of those red or cream brick houses full of dreams and horrors I’ll never know, the churches with their signs borrowing the logos of popular products and would be cool knowing slogans, desperately trying to pull in some new punters to replace their dying audience, to replace them with the kids who don’t even look up from their hand held video games to notice. Past street after identical street, looking like the ones he and I used to play on when the mood was right for sibling interaction, and the few farms left which had somehow held on against the forces of supply and demand in the housing market. And then we’re there and driving down that long drive and I think about my grandfather until I remember that this time we’re here for my brother.
And my brother’s friends are all standing around waiting to be told what to do, but there doesn’t seem to be too many from his office – maybe they think that bad luck is contagious – and the ones from school look at me with that strange mix of fear and contempt, and some things never change. And the hearse arrives and everyone steps on their cigarettes as my circulatory system screams for some nicotine bliss – I breathe deep, but get nothing but the stale stench of too full ashtrays. My father leads the way into the chapel while the girls help my mother inside, and everyone else follows, not looking around the side as the coffin is brought in by the crematorium staff. I take a seat at the end of the front row, and I watch as a priest who has never met him tells everyone about what a good person my brother was, and I think about something, but I just can’t seem to remember what, and then people take it in turns at the podium to talk about something I don’t seem to be able to hear. And as we leave I’m the only one who looks back at the black smoke from the chimney at the back of the building as we drive away.
Back at home my mother seems to be calmer than I’ve ever seen her as she welcomes people into the house and directs them to the cold plates and snacks that someone has laid out in the back room. I watch everyone attempting small talk, sneaking glances at their watches when they think no one is looking and not really knowing what is expected of them, as my father walks around with a bottle of scotch, refilling people’s glasses, and his own when he has a chance. And eventually he comes around to me, and as I hold my glass up he holds my hand to steady the glass as he pours me a few fingers and throw in some ice, and it’s just long enough for me to look up and see him looking back at me. And then he lets go and heads back over to the uncles and nephews and cousins at the far end of the room.
And, later, Rachel comes over with another bottle and an ice cube tray and pours us both a good drink, and she tells me some stories about him. And we drink. And then she hugs me, and I let her. And she tells me that she misses him, and I tell her that I do too. And I think of the shed we used to play in and pretend it was a fortress next to the vegetable patch in the back yard, and of climbing the scout hall roof out behind our house, and of riding our bikes through the new housing estate up by the school and tearing home in the rain and riding straight into the pool before the fence went up and laughing like drains, and of the time he came with me when I had a fight with that guy Kevin in a laneway a couple of blocks from home, and of learning to drink by stealing ice cubes from the grown-ups scotch at parties when they weren’t looking and sucking the bitter taste from them, and the tears slide silently down my face. And my tongue flicks out to collect them as I look around the room to make sure no one notices.
God I need a cigarette.
(July 2000)
Dear Son (nice personal start, Dad),
I regret to inform you that your brother Peter has passed away unexpectedly yesterday evening (don’t go getting emotional on me now, Dad – you have to maintain that stoicism at all costs). He came off a bridge, and the police tell us it was suicide (what else would it be Dad? An accident? He slipped and fell over a ten-foot high fence?). It seems he had some rather heavy debts as a consequence of some business dealings, and he had drunk a little too much that night before walking home across the bridge, and it appears that he jumped off (and how did that make you feel, Dad? The Chosen One is just as human as the rest of us, as flawed even as The Big Disappointment that came after him).
Needless to say your Mother is very upset (keep popping those valiums, Mum), and has instructed me to write and inform you of your brothers passing in the absence of a telephone (thanks Dad – have a shot that I have no money – you were right all along that I’d never amount to anything. It was my choice, though). The funeral will be next Tuesday, and we hope that this letter will reach you in time (and now I’m irresponsible for not having a phone), as your mother would like you to attend (and what about you, Dad? Would you like me there?). I trust that you will be able to find a way to call us and let us know if you will be able to attend (because you don’t know if I would attend my own brother’s funeral – thanks Dad).
Regards,
Your Father (and don’t I know it).
The Golden Boy is dead – and of his own hand. This is way too weird to deal with – he’s not supposed to kill himself; he’s the one with everything going for him – if anyone is supposed to commit suicide in this family it’s me. He was the good one – handsome, funny, athletic, talented, popular – people always wanted to be around him. He was that cliché – guys want to be him, girls want to be with him. He was even graceful enough not to seem to notice, or at least not to allow others to see that he knew. And then along came me, and the disappointment was painfully obvious from day one. I guess lightning doesn’t strike twice – I wasn’t like him, no matter how hard I tried. I was just shy, and tried to talk to people so they would like me like they like him, but it always came out wrong, and people became wary of me. But I had to have something – everyone’s got something - so I became the smart one. Not good smart though – not lawyer smart or doctor smart – but smart arse smart, sarcastic smart, evil smart. People became wary of me because they thought I would say something mean to put them down, and so I did that because it was expected, and it became a self-fulfilling prophecy. And, after this went on for a while, I could see I’d given them all reason to be wary.
It’s not easy growing up in someone’s shadow, believe me. When your brother is the most popular guy in school – captain of the football team, going out with the cutest girl in school (Rachel Palmer – she was probably the nicest, most decent person in school as well) – you can’t help but look … less. And people can never disguise their disappointment – the nicer ones tried, but you can always see it in their eyes, the look that says ‘if only he were more like his brother. He’s got the genes – how did they turn out so wrong?’
So I sat on the fringes of the school’s society, an outcast banished like I was in some latter day Lord of the Flies, and eventually some of the other losers gravitated toward me – like attracts like. We sat behind the library (such a small group, but at least I was the head loser – maybe the genes did kick in at last – I became the most popular unpopular guy in school), and we spent our time avoiding conflicts with those slightly higher up the food chain, chain smoking and talking about the things no one else cared about. And it bred a strange inferiority / superiority complex – I might be shit, but at least I’m better than all of those normal people. They’ll just never know because I chose not to show them.
And I spent all that time wondering why none of it was for me. He got everything – our parents loved him, but cultivated little more than disappointment for me. The teachers constantly told me how good he was, and wondered aloud why I couldn’t be more like him, make an effort to be more like him, and all of this in front of the class. Sometimes he tried to get me into the scene by bringing me to parties, not seeing the hatred (fear?) thrown at me behind his back. He kept this up until one night at the party at a house everyone called The Farm, when, while everyone else was getting drunk or stoned or both, some of his mates carried me around the side of the house and took it in turn to hold me or punch me in the stomach (clever – don’t want the bruising to be too obvious), and I always said no to his invitations after that. And it didn’t take long before he stopped asking.
After high school he went off to university to study economics, and I moved out of home to start a band. He walked into an internship with a prestigious broking firm; I scrapped a living on the graveyard shift at 7-11 hoping not to get robbed, while my various bands fell apart through arguments with future junkies. He moved to a four-bedroom house on the north side of town; I was ripped off by a constant stream of loser flatmates in squalid, windowless squats while I tried to avoid being ejected.
I ended up with the choice between getting into drugs or getting out of the scene, so I got out – sometimes I think the only reason I didn’t go the other way was because I couldn’t afford the gear. I got a job at a call centre and sat at my cubicle all day, talking to faceless no ones about nothing, occasionally giving out the wrong information to see if anyone would notice, and thought about the novel I would never write because by the time I got back to my tiny bedsit I was too mentally drained to do anything more than stare unseeingly at the flashing box in the corner and drink lukewarm beer from the case next to my chair.
I would only see him a couple of times a year – Christmas and Mother’s Day at the folks’ place, and on his birthday because his wife figured she should invite me over for the family dinner at their house to celebrate. I would try and keep quiet to avoid an argument until, as usually happened, my parents constant questioning became too much to bear and I’d head outside for a cigarette in the quiet peace of the neighbourhood. Once I brought over a girl I was sort of seeing, but after my mum kept on about what a wonderful girl she was and how wonderful we looked together I broke up with her. Fiona, she was called. I wasn’t really even going out with her; we slept together a couple of times – hollow, soulless sex after I had drunk too much. The morning after we slept together I would find an excuse to leave early, and I wouldn’t call her again until the next time I got drunk.
And of course it all looked even worse compared to him – married to his beautiful wife Patricia (he didn’t marry Rachel as we had all expected – they broke up amicably while at university; surely the only time that has ever happened in real life. Even more strange was that they remained best friends afterwards – how does that possibly happen after you split up with someone?), father to Joshua, floated up to full partner in his firm, world at his feet. It was Pillar of Society vs. One Step from the Gutter. Some of us look at the stars, apparently, although you can’t see them from my ground floor flat. Whenever I was with him I felt like a cautionary tale mothers told misbehaving sons – if you aren’t careful, that could happen to you.
So I go down to the corner and make the dreaded call (after a few quick shots for comfort), and it went pretty much as expected. I’ll spare you the details of the conversation, but mum was upset, broken, held together by scotch and pain killers; dad was stoic, the rock he thinks everyone needs him to be; and I was wary, always looking for what I’ll say that will set them off on another tirade against me. The usual argument didn’t come, thank god – they held off on the disappointed slant, I keep the replies monosyllabic, and we got the information we need from each other before the change ran out.
The next day I ask my boss – a kid five years younger than me and who actually wears the polyester tie they provide for the workers, whose pasty skin under the fluorescent lights only goes to highlight the excema scars on his face – for tomorrow off, and he gives me no end of grief until eventually, reluctantly, I tell him I have to attend my brother’s funeral. He looks as though I’ve punched him in the nose and he’s just swallowed a big clot of blood, the copper taste sliding down the back of his throat, but he knows there’s no possibility of telling me no. He still makes me promise to work an extended shift on Friday, and I agree just to get out of there. I feel the bile rising in my throat, and when I run to the toilets and bend over nothing comes out of my mouth, and it keeps coming. I go home via the bottle shop on the corner, and when I get home I take the top off the bottle and throw it away.
The next morning I feel like shit on the anti rush hour train to the suburbs – the trains headed back into the city are full of hollow people staring at nothing, flickering past like ghosts caught on celluloid which is skipping off its tracks, while my carriage has only two other people, both sitting at the opposite end to me. I made an effort to tidy myself up as much as I could this morning – I brushed my hair this morning, slicking down the few greys which are starting to peek through, and found my tie (I’ve only got one – Patricia gave it to me the first Christmas after we’d met – I gave her a bottle of local red wine) and a collared shirt, and I put my sunglasses on to hide my eyes.
I forgot how hot it gets out here in the suburbs, away from the bay – it hits me like a cargo net dropped from a height over me when I leave the air-conditioned cocoon of the carriage. By the time I’ve done the ten minute walk from the station to my childhood home my shirt is soaked and stinking of alcohol and sweat. It seems quiet on the street, and I wonder why until I remember that it’s a school day. Or maybe its that all the kids here have grown up and moved out of home by now, leaving a street full of old people and memories. The side door is open as always, and I walk into the living room to see my mother sobbing on the lounge, bookended by Rachel and Patricia – all the women of his life in a row in front of me. I look over and see my father on the phone – he nods at me and resumes his conversation – and Patricia says hello to me and keeps comforting my mother as I give her a peck on the cheek. We’ve never been much of a family for physical contact.
Someone drives me out to the crematorium as I watch the landscape of our childhood slide past – all of those red or cream brick houses full of dreams and horrors I’ll never know, the churches with their signs borrowing the logos of popular products and would be cool knowing slogans, desperately trying to pull in some new punters to replace their dying audience, to replace them with the kids who don’t even look up from their hand held video games to notice. Past street after identical street, looking like the ones he and I used to play on when the mood was right for sibling interaction, and the few farms left which had somehow held on against the forces of supply and demand in the housing market. And then we’re there and driving down that long drive and I think about my grandfather until I remember that this time we’re here for my brother.
And my brother’s friends are all standing around waiting to be told what to do, but there doesn’t seem to be too many from his office – maybe they think that bad luck is contagious – and the ones from school look at me with that strange mix of fear and contempt, and some things never change. And the hearse arrives and everyone steps on their cigarettes as my circulatory system screams for some nicotine bliss – I breathe deep, but get nothing but the stale stench of too full ashtrays. My father leads the way into the chapel while the girls help my mother inside, and everyone else follows, not looking around the side as the coffin is brought in by the crematorium staff. I take a seat at the end of the front row, and I watch as a priest who has never met him tells everyone about what a good person my brother was, and I think about something, but I just can’t seem to remember what, and then people take it in turns at the podium to talk about something I don’t seem to be able to hear. And as we leave I’m the only one who looks back at the black smoke from the chimney at the back of the building as we drive away.
Back at home my mother seems to be calmer than I’ve ever seen her as she welcomes people into the house and directs them to the cold plates and snacks that someone has laid out in the back room. I watch everyone attempting small talk, sneaking glances at their watches when they think no one is looking and not really knowing what is expected of them, as my father walks around with a bottle of scotch, refilling people’s glasses, and his own when he has a chance. And eventually he comes around to me, and as I hold my glass up he holds my hand to steady the glass as he pours me a few fingers and throw in some ice, and it’s just long enough for me to look up and see him looking back at me. And then he lets go and heads back over to the uncles and nephews and cousins at the far end of the room.
And, later, Rachel comes over with another bottle and an ice cube tray and pours us both a good drink, and she tells me some stories about him. And we drink. And then she hugs me, and I let her. And she tells me that she misses him, and I tell her that I do too. And I think of the shed we used to play in and pretend it was a fortress next to the vegetable patch in the back yard, and of climbing the scout hall roof out behind our house, and of riding our bikes through the new housing estate up by the school and tearing home in the rain and riding straight into the pool before the fence went up and laughing like drains, and of the time he came with me when I had a fight with that guy Kevin in a laneway a couple of blocks from home, and of learning to drink by stealing ice cubes from the grown-ups scotch at parties when they weren’t looking and sucking the bitter taste from them, and the tears slide silently down my face. And my tongue flicks out to collect them as I look around the room to make sure no one notices.
God I need a cigarette.
(July 2000)