Brothers & Sisters - Charlotte Wood [25]
Nearby stood a building punctured by lights and I could see people moving around inside. I wanted to stay out of sight. A sea of tiny nuts lay around the tree facing us. My brother strolled forward, squatted in plain view and began eating them. He turned and looked at where I cowered in the bushes with a broad smile.
‘They taste good, Mike,’ he said.
I forgot everything and walked over to him. A man in an army uniform came riding past on a bike. When he saw us, he stumbled off his bike and ran towards us with a tight, focused expression. It was the kind of look that I’d seen on my stepfather’s face a hundred times. My brother was off. He yelled at me to run too. The man was surprisingly fast. When I felt his breath right behind me, I turned and tried to warn him off in a shrill tone. He seized me by the back of my shirt and carried me towards the building.
By the time my brother got home, it was dark outside and I sat at the dinner table with my mother and stepfather.
My stepfather shoved back his chair and looked him up and down. ‘Where have you been? What have you been up to?’
My stepfather was a large man, overweight, his hands stained with work and tar from the pipes he smoked. He had a way of standing right over us when he asked questions, his arms and shoulders locked as he waited for answers.
My brother glanced across at me. He had straight, dark hair and my father’s brown eyes that turned hard and flat in anger, though right now they were full of curiosity. He said that he’d lost me while we were out playing. My stepfather turned and I felt his gaze. We were eating sandwiches for dinner. I chewed on my sandwich and shrugged.
Later, as we lay on the separate levels of our bunk bed, I told my brother how I’d been made to sit in a room with fluorescent lights, a bunch of men in uniforms around me. The men had looked at me until I started crying. They had given me a glass of orange juice and a biscuit and told me never to come back.
‘I waited at the fence for hours,’ my brother said.
I thought that he’d pile abuse on me then for not having run quick enough, but he fell silent, and the silence grew long. It occurred to me suddenly that he was ashamed.
I knew that I had done the right thing by not telling. These were the important things; never to ask for explanations, never to talk about what we did. My brother and I shared a room. In the months after I was born, my brother had tried to bury me. He would scour the room for objects that he could pile into my cot: toys, clothes, footwear.
Later, he usually ignored me, but there were moments when he didn’t. My mother told him off once for carefully laying a packet full of drawing-pins, points upwards, in my bed. She said that it was his responsibility to look after me, that we only had each other.
My brother’s violence often came unexpectedly. He would turn with a sudden blankness in his eyes and punch me in the arms and the stomach and chest. Sometimes I would scream so that our stepfather would come in and hit us both, but often I kept quiet and so did he. I had seen my brother fighting at school. He beat people quickly and efficiently, no matter how much bigger or stronger they were, and while they were still nursing bloody noses, he’d be off doing something else, smiling like the whole thing had never happened.
It was the same with me. Not long after his attacks, he would come strolling back into view, preoccupied with something else, a pleasant grin on his face when he glanced in my direction. His whole expression would dazzle me, invite me to forget, and I would find it impossible to maintain my fury. But in the days that I spent alone with my father, I started to see the smile differently.
Towards the end of my stay, I bought a record with my father’s money. He had been giving me money the whole time as if neither of us really knew what else we should be doing together. I bought Queen’s Greatest Hits and