More in Common

Despite everything, I didn’t want to like him. And so I didn’t.

That was that and we formed an uneasy arrangement which meant that we kept out of each other’s way as far as was possible. This arrangement was made all the more uneasy by my so-called friends.

But you’d like him.

He’s quite like you.

I really don’t know what your problem is.

I didn’t even know that I had a problem, and that was the way that it remained for quite some time. The entirety of secondary school, in fact. Then we went our own ways. Not exactly problem solved. More that the problem had gone away. This is a commonly used methodology with problems. A two step plan. Deny the problem’s existence. Hope it goes away.

Only, these things have a habit of following you around like a bad smell. I didn’t exactly think about him all the time and I certainly didn’t miss him. It was more that he haunted me. And what he haunted me with, was this feeling of unfinished business.

I had staved him off and he remained strange to me. I had wanted him to be a stranger, but instead he was a mystery. I had never behaved like this with anyone else. In my scrambled teenage brain there were myriad questions. I even wondered what the attraction was. I mean, I liked girls. I really liked girls. In particular, I liked the thought of them. The thought of them did things to me that were really quite wonderful. The trouble was that the reality of girls didn’t meet with those wonderful expectations. Truth be told, real girls terrified me and so I gave them a wide berth, but not in the same way that I had avoided him. 

Or at least, I didn’t think that was the case.

Six form beckoned and it was both a relief and a disappointment that he was not there. A mutual friend eventually mentioned that he’d gone to a nearby college instead. Someone enquired as to what he was doing there and it turned out that he was doing the same A Levels that I was. I resented that copycat act, but it also intrigued me. There was a meaning here, but I could not fathom it, nor did I want to. My reasoning for my A Levels was pre-ordained. My older brother had done the same A Levels. It felt right somehow that I should pick up his baton and do what he never had a chance to do. 

University was next, and I found myself looking for him in the crowds of freshers, after all, he’d copied my A Levels so anything was possible. Several times, I thought I saw him, only to suffer the disappointment of establishing that it was someone else.

In the first set of holidays, another mutual friend told me he’d gone to Liverpool Uni. My second choice after Manchester. Still he haunted me. Tracking me, but not getting in too close. I sometimes felt there was a wheel of fate that was slowly turning in an odd and counter-intuitive manner. That there was an inevitability to our crossing paths at a point where all would become clear. 

Then that moment seemed to pass. Something in the universe was misaligned. I dodged that particular bullet, or I missed out on a revelatory moment of enlightenment. Instead, what happened was the advent of adulthood. I got busy with being a grown up, largely missing the point to life. I think that is what your twenties are supposed to be. A head down, gung-ho charge at life in the idealistic belief that it’ll all come right. This is aided and abetted by an erroneous feeling of immortality. Not only are you invincible, but you also have all the time in the world. No pressure. Just do it. It isn’t a coincidence that sports stars are pretty much all in their twenties too. This phase of life is a frenetic engine room and good things will come of everything that we do. As belief systems go, it’s up there with the best of them.

I was still in my twenties when our worlds collided. By then I was police. The final step in the odyssey that was my older brother’s legacy. I still found it odd that I was older than him now. That he would forever be a teenager, his life cut short by a drunk driver who had pulled out on his motorbike and left him with nowhere to go, and so he had gone to that place that no else could go. Not until it was their time to leave this life. He was younger than I was now, and yet I would always be his baby brother. I was a baby when he died. But his legend cast a shadow upon me all the same. For my parents I seemed to be him reborn. They never said as much, but it was there all the same.

When the wheel turned and brought me face to face with him, it was as a result of a road traffic incident. I was sent to the address to break the news of a death in the family to the only surviving member of that family. I’d seen the details of the son and realised they were the same age as me, but that was as far as it went. The adrenaline of the pending house call took over, and my focus was on being professional and sympathetic. Somehow I managed to remain so, even as he opened the door and we were at last face to face.

It's true what they say. The training does kick in. He knew I was there to deliver bad news. This is a common occurrence. Instinct, or even a premonition. Likely as simple as there are few reasons why plod would come calling, so unless you’ve recently pulled a bank job, the chances are it’s bad news.

I offered to make a brew, but he did so instead, wanting to busy himself with something and allow the news of his mother’s death to sink in. As he left for the kitchen I found my feet and wandered the living room. I’ve never been one for sitting still and I’m also curious. Some would say nosey. I want to discern the meaning around me. I’m observant. I look for patterns. I found one right away and I knew it for what it was in the instant I saw it.

There on the mantlepiece was a photo of my brother. He was posing next to a blonde girl of a similar age to him. Arm around her waist. They were all smiles and they glowed with a vitality that hurt me. My brother and his mother.

I felt the ground move underneath me. A shift in my reality. Nothing would ever be the same again. The foundations of my life were sand and I was sinking into them.

“Take it you don’t take sugar?” he said as he returned to the room.

“Nah,” I confirmed, “that’s one vice I’ve avoided so far. That and smoking.”

“You and me both,” he said trying for a smile that wobbled and then faded.

We drank the tea and attended to business and that was that. I left and wished him well. I’d given him my number as a professional courtesy. Any questions and all that spiel, but I never expected him to call. They seldom did. Too much else on their plate, and few people want to deal with the police, let alone at a time like this.

The way he had previously haunted me now made some sense. Now I was haunted not only by him, but also by my brother. It seemed that there was more to the legacy than I had known. I came away from that house confused and yet strangely elated. Only as I drove away did I wonder why it was that I had not uttered a word.

This was a secret, but I did not know what kind of a secret it was. He did not know. That much was clear. I did not think that anyone knew, but my questioning nature reduced me to paranoia. That and frustration. The two people who could tell me the truth of it were now both dead. 

I laughed at the joke that seemed to be on me. I made it all about me for the next days and those days spilled out into weeks. His mother’s funeral came and went and I stayed away. I stayed away from the closest thing to my brother in this world, and this act of rejection heaped new shame upon shame I never knew I had.

I didn’t even think about the fact that I was his uncle. Born months apart, my brother had made me a secret uncle as a parting gift. A gift I hadn’t known what to do with for over twenty years. 

I suppose I was in shock. This was against the run of play. I didn’t have the words and I didn’t want to find them. I put my shoulder firmly back against the grindstone and I did what I did best. I kept at it. I worked and I played and I acted like everything was normal. I kept up the pretence of my former life whilst trying not to think about what my new life might hold. Fearful of an identity that might actually be me as opposed to my emulation of my dead brother.

It felt like driving past an ex-girlfriend’s house. Verging on stalking. I’d refrained from doing this for three weeks, but the pull of the place was too much. There were answers here and somehow I knew that were I to avoid them, they would come and find me and make me pay for my insolence. Worse still, I had a growing fear of losing the opportunity to ask my questions. This was a different proposition. The answers that awaited me would not align with those things that I wished to know. This was how life was. If I’d been in any doubt as to this universal truth, my time in the police had taught me that the quest for meaning was a treacherous one. The truth was out there, but so was a muck heap of lies masquerading as a trough of fine dining and there were always plenty of mouths at that trough.

As my car crawled past his house I felt a chill. Something otherworldly slithering over a grave that was not mine, but as near as damn it was. This was more than instinct. This was meant. I was pulling up and out of the car before I knew what I was doing. In the house before registering that the door was slightly ajar. In his bedroom and dragging him from off the top of the bed and into the bathroom, fingers down his throat. Rubbing his back as he vomited the pills into the toilet bowl.

Leading him downstairs and reversing roles this time. Making the tea. Giving him a moment to compose himself. Giving myself a moment to compose myself. 

I was angry. Furious. I wanted to shake him and ask him why he’d do such a thing. I was upset. I gripped the kitchen worktop and felt the first wave of a set of emotions that had been waiting in the wings all my life. This was a precursor to a transformation. I already felt lighter. Light headed. Intoxicated.

I carried the mugs of tea into the living room, still intending to ask him why? I never asked that question. It was the wrong question.

“Sorry,” he said simply.

I placed a hand on his shoulder and squeezed it, feeling a thrill of a connection I’d yearned for all my life, “never do anything like that again, OK?”

He looked up at me with wide, childlike eyes and shook his head, “never,” he said with a certainty and finality that I knew was the truth.

I sat down beside him. An act of familiarity. An act of solidarity.

“I’m sorry too,” I said quietly.

“You?” he asked, turning to look at me, “what for?”

Then I laughed. I hadn’t meant to. It came from nowhere. Took a hold of me. I laughed until I ached. Shaking my head, I tried to explain myself, “I don’t know where to begin,” I admitted.

He took pity on me, “I was a bit of an outsider at school. I wanted to be more like you. Popular. I never quite knew how.” He drew in a deep breath that made his body shudder, “you’re even a copper. My Dad was going to be a copper.”

“Your Dad…” I began.

“Died when I was still small,” he said, “I wish I could say I remember him.”

“Me too,” I said quietly.

His face was a question. I stood, retrieved the photo on the mantlepiece, “this was him  wasn’t it?”

“Yeah,” he nodded, “took a fair while to convince Mum to show me the photo, let alone have it framed. She didn’t like talking about him. Broke her heart when he died. Said she was never the same after that. Wished I’d known them when they were like that.”

I returned the nod, “he was my brother.” I hadn’t meant to say it. The words were in the room before I understood they were there. I was as shocked by them as he was. We sat in a revelatory silence for so long that our forgotten mugs of tea went cold.

The silence spun out before me and the quality of it warped into something less savoury. It became accusatory. A mirror held up to my guilty face. The pressure built until I had to release it, “I’ve been a bit of a twat, really,” I shifted in my seat and shrugged, “I want to say that I didn’t mean to be, but that would make me even more of a twat. Ignorance is no defence. I should know, I’m plod.” I grinned, as much for my own sake as his. I felt a sense of relief now that I was speaking. That relief was amplified by my audience. I looked at the photo and then at him, my voice caught as I spoke again, “you look a lot like him, you know.”

He smiled, “so do you.”

“I…” I began my grand confession, but he cut over me, having started to speak at the same time.

“Do you think on some level, we both knew that we were…” he shrugged, “you know… brothers?”

I laughed, “I’m not your brother!”

He looked crestfallen. I playfully punched his shoulder, “I’m your uncle, you numpty!”

There was a moment of confusion that sailed across his face, then the penny dropped, “bloody hell! That… that’ll take some getting used to…”

I agreed, “listen, we can do the brothers gig instead. I’ve always wanted a brother and I don’t think I’d cut it as an uncle to someone my own age…”

He nodded, “another secret. I can do that.”

I picked up my mug of tea, could see that it was no longer a viable beverage, “fancy a pint?”

He rubbed his throat, “I could murder a pint.”

“Better than murdering yourself, eh?” I quipped.

“About that…” he began.

“Unless you really need to unburden yourself? It can wait,” I smiled as reassuringly as I was able.

He thought for a moment, “it can wait. Things are different now. It was… a mistake.”

“We learn by our mistakes,” I said as I got up and took the mugs to the kitchen.

The nearest pub was a five minute walk. We made it in three. There was something like a celebration to be had. A moment to be shared. A ritual to mark a transformative point in both of our lives. We were on our second pint when I returned to my confession, I nodded to myself. It was time. “I said I was sorry…”

“You don’t need to…” he said.

I waved him down, “you’re as bad as me! I need to say this. To begin to get it off my chest. For so long I’ve held back. Put it off. Not wanted to face it,” I paused, drank some of my pint, “I made my brother into something he never was. An impossible standard that I could never live up to, but I tried all the same.” I looked across at him and shrugged, “I did something similar with you. Made you into something you weren’t. If my brother was my false idol, you were my scapegoat. An object of blame. I saw him in you and I couldn’t deal with that, I really couldn’t.” I took another drink, my eyes welling up, emotion surfacing from the depths, “I never grieved for him. I lived the grief instead. I created pain that wasn’t mine to possess. I took on the pain and grief of my parents and I owned it all. Pushing it deep down until it was the core of who I was. Then I chose to blame instead. Blame you. Blame the world. Myself. Everything. Nothing.” I sighed, there was more, but it eluded me.

“You never blamed the one person you really wanted to though, did you?” he said it as though it were a question, but really it was a statement of fact. A truth. My truth. His truth.

I grinned, raised my glass to him, experiencing the blessed relief of an epiphany, “and now I don’t need to. Blame’s a mugs game.”

He raised his own glass and tapped it against mine, “what’s past it past.”

I smiled, tears falling freely down my face “and we’re the future, you and I.”

He returned the smile and we drank to that bright future.