Not My Brother's Keeper

by Colette McCormick

The sound of his feet running up the stairs seemed to echo through the house, as did the sound of his bedroom door slamming.

  Michelle and I looked at each other and I saw that she was distraught. I put my arms around her and let her cry against my chest.

  ‘He hates us,’ she said softly.

  ‘No he doesn’t,’ I told her, though I thought that he might. ‘He’s just confused and maybe a bit angry.’

  ‘Yes,’ she said, lifting her head up so that she could look at me, ‘angry... with us.’

  I pulled her back into me. ‘He’ll come around.’ I tried to sound like I believed what I was saying.

  ‘I’ll go and see him.’ She tried to pull away from me but I held her tight.

  ‘No,’ I said, ‘leave him.’ I was relieved that she didn’t object so I suspected that she hadn’t really wanted to go to him, she’d just thought it was something she should do. ‘Give him a bit of time and then I’ll go and see him.’ She started to object but I said, ‘I was a sixteen-year-old boy once. I know how they think.’

  I knew I was stretching it a bit by that statement, because while I may have been a sixteen-year-old boy once, I’d never been told that my dad wasn’t my dad so I didn’t really know what Simon was thinking. I just didn’t want him taking his anger out on his mum.

  When she had recovered a little and stopped crying she pushed herself away from me and grabbed a handful of tissues. She stuffed the wad into each eye socket in turn and then blew her nose. Even with puffy eyes and a red nose she was still beautiful.

  ‘Did we do the right thing?’ she asked as she threw the tissues in the vague direction of the waste bin.

  ‘Yes,’ and I said it with conviction. ‘We did the only thing that we could.’

  ‘Maybe Robert really had no intention of telling him.’ I think even she knew that she was clutching at straws.

  ‘Maybe he didn’t,’ I agreed and as I said it Michelle looked horrified because she realised that we might have turned Simon’s world upside down for no reason. ‘But you know as well as I do that if Robert had thought there was something in it for him, he would have told Simon himself. Maybe not tomorrow, but it could have been the day after, or the next week, the next year. Would you really have wanted to feel like you were being held to ransom for the rest of your life?’

  Her mouth made the shape of No but no sound came out.

  We gave Simon an hour before I went up to him. I tapped gently on his bedroom door and said, ‘Simon? It’s me. Can I come in?’

  There was no answer.

  I knocked again, harder this time. I only had time to say his name before I heard him snap, ‘What?’

  Any other time I wouldn’t have suffered that from him, but he deserved a bit of lee-way that day so I let it go. ‘Can I come in please?’ I asked.

  He didn’t answer straight away but eventually he said, ‘Do what you like.’

  I opened the door cautiously and popped my head round. He was lying on the bed facing the wall with his back to me.

  Simon has a small desk that he uses for doing his homework and I pulled the chair from under it and put it next to the bed near his head.

  ‘Are you all right?’ I asked.

  He didn’t say anything and after a few seconds I went to put my hand on his shoulder but I’d barely touched him when he shrugged it away. I sat on the chair with my elbows on my knees and my hands joined between them. I settled down and prepared to wait.

  There is a clock on Simon’s wall and I watched ten minutes pass before he shuffled around, first onto his back and then onto his other side so that he was facing me. I could see that he had been crying. His eyes were dry but he couldn’t hide the redness. He pushed himself up onto his elbow.

  ‘Why?’ his voice croaked. There were so many things he could have been asking about that I had no idea how to answer it until he was more specific. ‘Why didn’t he want me?’

  I took a deep breath and chose my words carefully. ‘It wasn’t you he didn’t want. Like your mum said, you weren’t a person to him.’

  My heart went out to him because you only had to look in his eyes to see how he was struggling with what we had told him. There were the raised red veins that spoke of the crying he’d done, but more than that, his eyes were wide and a bit manic. And they were flicking around like he was searching for something. I knew he wouldn’t find his answers in the shadows so I waited for him to ask his questions, intending to answer them as honestly as I could.

  ‘How could he leave Mum like that?’ In that question he told me everything I needed to know about the way he felt about his mother. If no one else, he still loved her.

  It was a question that I’d asked myself a thousand times before but I’d never come up with an acceptable answer. I shook my head slowly and said, ‘I don’t know.’

  He pushed himself into a sitting position and lifted his knees towards his body. He wrapped his arms around his legs and rested his chin on top of them. He was taking long deep breaths. After a minute or so of silence he turned his head so that he faced me with his cheek resting where his chin had been. ‘Did you marry Mum because of me?’ He sniffed hard.

  ‘No,’ I said, ‘I married your mum because I loved her.’

  ‘But it must have bothered you, even if just a little bit.’ He sounded like he’d just lost about ten years in age.

  I tried to explain it to him by saying, ‘What bothered me was that Robert had left your mum. I couldn’t understand how anyone could walk away from her. Like I said, I’d known her at school but only as someone who was in the same year as me, someone that all the lads in my year admired from afar. After we left school I didn’t see her for a few years, then one Friday night we happened to find ourselves in the same pub. Unfortunately, my brother was there too and while your mum and I were chatting and I was plucking up the courage to ask her if I could buy her a drink, he got in there like a rat up a drainpipe and asked her out before I could. I was so angry with him. Then, after he left her in the lurch, I wanted to make sure she was all right. I didn’t go with the intention of stepping into his shoes, I just needed to know she was OK, but the more time I spent with her – the more I got to know her – the more I realised she was everything I’d ever wanted. I couldn’t imagine life without her. The fact that she was bringing you along with her was a bonus.’

  He smiled for the first time since I’d gone into the room.

  ‘So why has he come back?’ he asked, ‘What does he want?

  I shuffled right to the edge of my seat so that I was as close to him as possible. ‘I don’t know why he’s back or what he wants, but if it’s you, he’s going to be disappointed. You,’ I emphasised the word, ‘are my son as far as I’m concerned. I was there when you were born, and the first time that I held you I thought that my heart was going to burst with how much love I felt. You weren’t officially mine then, but in every other way you were. You were less than a year old when I adopted you, and that was a day we all celebrated. I have never loved you any differently to your brothers, I have never thought of you as any less a part of me than either of them, and to the day I die I will always think of you as my son.’

  He closed his eyes and asked, ‘I don’t have to be his son too, do I?’

  My eyes had a prickly feeling and I couldn’t trust myself to say anything. We looked at each other for no more than a second before I moved onto the bed and hugged him. I don’t know how long we sat like that but I could have stayed there for ever.

  At some point we heard the sound of Michael and Anthony coming through the front door talking excitedly, but we still didn’t move. I was willing to be there for as long as Simon needed me.

  ‘We’d better go and hear about this film,’ he said eventually, patting me on the back as he spoke.

  ‘Can’t wait.’ I nodded my head and tried to make a joke of it. I put the chair back where I’d found it and Simon pushed himself off the bed and checked himself out in the mirror. It was one thing dropping your gu
ard in front of your dad, but you couldn’t let your little brothers see that side of you. I watched him looking at himself. He seemed happy with what he saw but when he ran his fingers through his short hair my stomach turned. I had seen Robert do it just like that hundreds of times before.

  He saw that I was looking at him and he used the mirror to look at me. ‘What’s he like?’ he asked.

  I gave that a bit of consideration as I leaned against the door with my hand on the handle. ‘He used to be my hero,’ I said. ‘When we were little I wanted to be him.’ It sounded like a ridiculous notion now that I was saying out loud. ‘I felt like such a jerk beside him.’ I could feel a smile on my face as I thought about that other lifetime. ‘People always said that we looked alike and I suppose we did. He was a bit taller than me, but we weren’t really alike in any other way. He was the outgoing one, I was the one in the background. He was the one going out with his girlfriend and I was the one still hanging around with my mates.’

  I hadn’t realised that he wasn’t looking at me through the mirror anymore. He had turned around.

  ‘Am I like him?’ he asked.

  ‘No,’ I said, ‘not really. He was a cocky little sod.’

  I started to twist the handle but he stopped me in my tracks by asking, ‘Do I have to be nice to him?’

  ‘Not on my account,’ I said.

  We left the room and at the bottom of the stairs I went towards the kitchen, where I could see Michelle sitting at the kitchen table looking anxious, and Simon went into the living room where his brothers were. ‘All right,’ I heard him say, ‘which one of you is going to tell me all about it.’

  I heard both of them start telling him at once and that’s when I realised that Simon wasn’t like Robert at all. Robert had never given a shit about what I thought about anything.

  ROBERT

  I was pulling a pint when I saw Angie come through the door that led from our flat. I was surprised to see her because it was officially her day off and she avoided the bar like the plague when she wasn’t working. I’d handed the drink over, taken the money and dropped it in the till by the time she got to me.

  ‘Your mum’s on the phone,’ she said. She took the drink order from the next customer in line and I climbed the stairs two at a time. Mum had never called during opening hours before so I thought something must be wrong. Dad being ill again came to mind straight away and my heart was in my mouth. The phone was resting on the coffee table and I sat down, just in case, as I put it to my ear.

  ‘Mum?’

  She didn’t say hello just, ‘She sounds nice.’

  ‘Angie?’ daft question because who else could she mean. ‘Yeah, she’s good. You’d like her,’ I said.

  There was a bit of a pause and then she hit me with it. ‘So, you met Thomas yesterday,’ she said.

  It struck me as an odd thing for her to say so I reminded her, ‘You knew I was meeting him. You set it up.’

  The silence told me that she was huffed by my comment. I was sorry about that and I said so.

  ‘I hear that Michelle was there too,’ she said. I think she’d accepted my apology so I wondered if she sounded peeved because of Michelle.

  ‘Yeah,’ I said, ‘I hadn’t expected to see her so it was a bit of a surprise.’

  I think she was expecting me to expand on that but when I didn’t she had to force the issue.

  ‘And how was it?’

  In my mind my mother was standing with her arms crossed over her chest.

  ‘It was fine,’ I said. ‘Difficult in places but, given the situation, it was fine. It was never going to be easy. Too much has happened.’

  She made a comment about it not being fair that Michelle had come with Tom. ‘It should just have been the two of you,’ she said. ‘That was what was arranged.’

  ‘But she’s his wife, Mum,’ I said, and as I heard myself saying the words they sounded right. I realised that I was reconciled to their marriage. Michelle was nothing to me now other than a sister-in-law. To be honest, they did make a nice couple and, on reflection, she was much more suited to Tom than to me.

  ‘So, you know about Simon,’ she said after another brief silence.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Tom says that you want to meet him,’ she almost sounded like she didn’t believe what she had heard.

  ‘I said I wanted to meet all the boys,’ I clarified, though I’m sure Mum knew that I was hiding behind the younger boys. I mean, yes, I was interested in meeting my nephews but my son was my main concern.

  ‘Why?’ she asked. That also struck me as odd because I thought she of all people would have understood.

  ‘He doesn’t know about me,’ I said, though I couldn’t pinpoint why that mattered.

  There was a longer pause and when Mum finally spoke her tone was quiet and serious. ‘Tom has done a good job bringing him up, you know,’ she said. ‘He has never treated Simon any differently to the other two and there’s many a man that would have. There’s many a man who would have singled the lad out and thrown him back in his mother’s face every time they had a row.’

  I’m ashamed to say that the thought All hail St Tom ran through my mind at that point before I realised that Mum was still talking.

  ‘Simon loves Tom and he is the only father that the lad has ever known. Anyway,’ with the lecture over she gave a heavy sigh and said, ‘Tom was here earlier and he’s asked me to tell you that you can meet them here next Saturday.’

  I’m not going to deny that being told where and when I could meet Simon irked me a bit but, at the end of the day, Tom was holding all the cards. I told her I’d be there. ‘Bring that lass,’ Mum said. ‘I’d like to meet her.’

  The bar was busy when I went back down so it wasn’t until much later that I was able to tell Angie what Mum and I had spoken about.

  ‘She said you should come too,’ I told her. ‘She thinks that you sound nice.’

  Angie didn’t seem keen at first, citing the fact that both of us being away on a Saturday afternoon during the high season might be too much.

  ‘Please,’ I said, ‘I want you there. Colin and Danny will be fine, especially if we get his niece in to give them a hand. She did all right before and I’m sure she’ll jump at the chance of a few hours.’

  ‘I’d feel like I was intruding,’ she said. ‘Shouldn’t it just be family?’

  The words, ‘You are my family,’ were out before I realised it. They surprised me a little bit but they surprised Angie more. ‘You should feel honoured,’ I laughed, ‘Mum’s never asked to meet one of my girlfriends before.’ She started to protest again so I told her, ‘I want you there,’ and that was enough.

  ‘OK,’ she said with a smile.

  The upcoming meeting was on my mind pretty much all of that week. I wondered how I would react when I saw Simon for the first time. How could I not treat him differently from his half-brothers? He was different. He was my son.

  Angie knew me well enough to know what would be going through my head and she wasn’t afraid to give me her opinion.

  ‘I know finding out that you had a son must have come as a shock to you,’ she said the night before we were due to meet, ‘but your brother is his father. Tom has been his father for over sixteen years and Simon will love him... as a father. Do you really want to destroy everything that he has ever known?’

  That had given me some food for thought and I was still thinking on it as we set off the following lunchtime. I knew that she was right but it all came down to the fact that we all deserve to know where we came from, don’t we?

  As the miles passed, her words kept coming back to haunt me. Your brother is his father, she’d said. Well it was true that he had brought Simon up but it was my DNA that was in him. He was my son. Biologically I was his father.

  Father.

  The word sat there in my mind and made me think about my own dad. I remembered how I’d felt when I’d thought that Dad might have died while I’d been away. I don’t th
ink I could have forgiven myself if my fears had been true. I had been so relieved to see him coming out of the house that night and walking towards where Tom and I were eyeballing each other.

  We hadn’t always seen eye to eye and I was fully aware that I had ruined our relationship by my actions seventeen years earlier, but we had been close when I was growing

  up.

  He had been there, standing on the edge of the pitch on wet Saturday mornings, shouting me on even though I was never quite good enough to make the first eleven. When I fell out of a tree when I was eight years old he was the one who had taken me to the hospital and stayed with me while they reset the bone. He even bought me a remote-controlled car for being brave. When I had needed him, he had been there for me. When Simon needed his father, it was Tom he had turned to.

  Maybe the best thing that I could do for my son was to let my brother go on being his dad.

  SIMON

  It’s been ten years since that first meeting with the man that I had called Uncle Rob.

  He’d come into Gran’s with his girlfriend and even now I can remember the anticipation in the air. Was it anticipation? For my brothers maybe, but probably not for my parents. For myself, I’d been worried that there would be a connection between us, you know, some sort of bond between two people cut from the same cloth. I didn’t want to feel anything but... Anyway, I think Mum and Dad had been worried about it too because I could feel their eyes on me, looking for my reaction as soon as Rob appeared in the doorway.

  I was relieved when there wasn’t one. I looked at him and all I could think was so you’re the bloke who did the dirty on me and my mum.

  He was the one who introduced himself. Hello, boys. I’m your Uncle Rob, he said and the phrase Rob the knob popped into my head. Michael and Anthony both piped up a greeting but I didn’t. I looked at him and defied him to say something to me. Eventually he said You must be Simon. I said I was and he said he was pleased to meet me. He said he was pleased to meet us all but I wasn’t sure that I trusted him enough to believe him.