Not My Brother's Keeper

by Colette McCormick

  Sometimes, especially in the early days, I knew that Michelle was thinking about him too. It was understandable I suppose. She never said anything, but there was something in her eyes that gave her thoughts away.

  We had a party on Simon’s first birthday. Well, party might be a stretch, but we had a cake. Michelle made it in the shape of a car and she used sliced Swiss roll for the wheels. I can still see Simon with a fistful of cake in each hand and a big grin on his face. Obviously, he hadn’t a clue what was going on. He was just happy.

  It wasn’t long after that birthday that my mum put her foot in it. It wasn’t the first time that her foot had been in whatever ‘it’ was but it was the biggest faux pas she’d made to that point.

  We’d gone around to my parents’ for Sunday lunch and after we’d eaten we were all in the living room chatting while we had a cup of coffee. Simon was on Mum’s knee and he was gurgling as she chatted to him. It was just the usual sort of thing, you know who’s a lovely boy then and that sort of thing, but then she said, ‘You’re the spit of your daddy.’

  You could have heard a pin drop.

  It wasn’t that we’d been listening to what she was saying in particular but we all heard that comment and we all, as one, looked at her.

  ‘Janet,’ Dad mumbled.

  ‘What?’ Mum’s voice was raised and you could see her expression change. The colour seemed to drain from her face as she realised what she had said. She quickly regained herself. ‘Well he is,’ she said, nodding her head towards me. ‘He’s the image of Tom.’

  I’ve chosen to believe that that was what she had meant all along, but another part of me thinks that it was just lucky for her that I look so much like Robert.

  Michelle wasn’t quite so forgiving and within minutes she was making noises about leaving.

  ‘Are you OK?’ I asked her as we walked home. She was pushing the pram where Simon was now sleeping soundly and I was walking beside her with my hands in my pockets.

  ‘I’m fine,’ she said but in a way that really meant that she was anything but fine. She walked on a couple of steps and stopped without warning which meant that I walked past her. When I turned around she was looking into the pram.

  ‘What’s wrong? I asked.

  She didn’t say anything at first. She leaned in towards Simon and pulled his blanket away from his face. I looked at him too. He was moving his lips as he slept and dribbling down his chin.

  ‘He does look like you, doesn’t he?’ she said.

  ‘Poor bugger,’ I laughed and that made her laugh too.

  When Simon was about eighteen months old, Michelle told me that she was pregnant again. We were sitting on the sofa in our living room and Simon was playing on the floor in front of us.

  I didn’t say anything immediately because I wanted to take a second just to get the idea of it straight in my head. And then I smiled.

  Later, in bed, while Michelle was sleeping beside me, I lay on my back and stared at the ceiling. I’d been staring at it so long that, in spite of the dark, I could clearly see all the little cracks that had been there since... well, since as long as we’d been there. We’d mentioned it to Michelle’s aunt and she’d said that she would get it checked out but somehow she’d never got around to it.

  I replayed the scene where Michelle had told me she was pregnant over and over again in my head, and every time I did it felt as good as it had the first time. I asked myself how it was possible that Robert had not felt this way when Michelle had told him that she was expecting. It was amazing. I tried to imagine the feeling that would make me up sticks and leave everything behind, but I couldn’t.

  Robert had been gone for just over two years by then and – other than thinking he was a stupid sod – I hadn’t actively thought about him much in recent months. I thought about him a lot that night though.

  I eventually went to sleep and woke just before seven to the sound of Simon crying in the next room. I started to get up but Michelle, as always, was up first. It was like she was expecting his crying to happen and was ready for it. The alarm was due to go off in three minutes so I lay where I was and waited.

  While I waited my eyes were drawn once again to the crack in the ceiling. I know Paula had said that she would get around to fixing it but she had shown no signs of doing so, maybe now that there was another baby on the way it would be the perfect time to start looking for a place of our own. We didn’t have a lot of money but whatever we had left at the end of the month we saved and that, added to the bit I’d managed to save when I was younger, might be enough for a deposit on a house. It wouldn’t be a mansion but it would be ours.

  I suggested it to Michelle over breakfast and while she was all ‘can we afford it?’ and that sort of thing, I’d seen the light in her eyes and that told me she was keen.

  ‘It wouldn’t be much,’ I told her, ‘but it’ll be a start.’

  I made an appointment to see the bank manager a couple of days later. We were in luck because he explained that they did something called a hundred per cent mortgage which meant that we didn’t need a deposit at all. They don’t do that sort of thing now so I guess those of us who bought our first homes in the eighties were lucky. I wouldn’t like to think that I had to come up with a deposit for a house these days. They gave mortgages out like sweets back then, so once I’d proved that I had a regular income that was that.

  Anyway, going on my salary, he offered us a fifteen thousand-pound mortgage and Michelle set about looking for houses like a woman possessed.

  We spent the next few weekends looking in estate agents’ windows and viewing houses. One or other set of grandparents looked after Simon while we spent hours trying to find what we were looking for. I thought we’d found it on Elm Avenue until we went to view the house and Michelle took an instant dislike to the woman selling it. There was nothing rational about her reaction and, if I asked her what her issue with the woman was, Michelle couldn’t have told me but it was enough to stop us putting in an offer. To be honest I didn’t much fancy it either, but that had more to do with the state of the back garden than anything else.

  So, we kept on looking.

  A few weeks after that viewing we went to see a house on King Street and as soon as we walked in we both knew that we had found what we were looking for. It had a decent sized living room and kitchen downstairs, with the bathroom, a biggish bedroom, and two smaller bedrooms upstairs. There was a small garden to the front and a slightly larger one to the rear and we’d felt at home as soon as we walked in. We could see our furniture sitting in the rooms and we could imagine what the children’s rooms would be like, with colourful walls and toys on the floor.

  The price was within our budget and the best thing of all was that the vendors already had a house that they had moved into and had essentially been paying two mortgages for six months, so they were as keen as we were to make the deal. I rang the estate agent on the Monday morning, the offer was accepted by lunchtime and that evening, once Simon was safely tucked up in bed, Michelle and I started making plans.

  We moved in at the end of July. The decorating might not have been to our taste but we decided we could live with it and change things as we went along, so we moved in and started to make the house into our home. Michelle has a real flair for that sort of thing and had the place looking great in no time.

  Simon’s room already had white walls so they were easy to paint with very little preparation. It was the same in the smallest bedroom, the one that would be the nursery, which we painted in a pale yellow sort of colour. These days, new parents get to know what the sex of their baby is but back then babies were a surprise, so we had to go for something that we could adapt.

  That first Christmas in our own home was amazing. You should have seen Simon’s face when Michelle brought him into the living room the morning after we’d stayed up till one o’clock trimming the tree and decorating the room with streamers and balloons.

  I’d gone downstairs and switched o
n the tree lights and I was ready with a camera to catch his reaction. It was priceless. The poor kid actually stopped breathing for a second. We didn’t have much money to spare but what we had went on buying presents for Simon.

  Michelle went into labour on the first Wednesday in January.

  I was still on holiday until the following Monday so I was there when it started this time. Michelle calmly explained to Simon that he was going to visit Granny Jenkins while she went to the hospital to ‘get the baby’. I don’t think he understood that but he was happy enough to go to Granny’s.

  Michelle was a bit teary on the way to the hospital. She hadn’t liked leaving Simon. I told her that he’d be fine but it didn’t seem to make any difference.

  Her second delivery was much quicker, and just three hours after getting to the hospital she was holding our second son in her arms. He was healthy, he was perfect, and I was the happiest man in the world.

  It was after eight when I got to my in-laws and Simon was already in the bed that Michelle’s parents kept at their house. We didn’t get many nights out, but on those rare occasions that we did, Cathryn and Davy would babysit for us.

  While Cathryn made me something to eat I crept into the bedroom, knelt down by the bed and looked at Simon through the bars of the guard rail. His lips were pursed and though his eyes were closed they were moving. I reached over and stroked his soft blond hair.

  ‘You’ve got a little brother, mate,’ I told him.

  Davy suggested that I stay the night and I accepted without hesitation. I wanted to be there when Simon got up in the morning.

  I slept well on the sofa and woke up to the sound of ‘Daddy!’ being squealed in my ear. I pretended to be asleep and I felt Simon climbing onto the sofa. I grabbed him and he giggled. I lifted him onto my chest and we lay with our faces just inches apart. I told him about his baby brother, but I don’t think he really understood what it meant until I took him to the hospital that afternoon. Michelle’s parents waited outside the ward while I took Simon in. He ran to the bed where his mum was holding his baby brother in her arms.

  ‘He started to cry,’ Michelle said, as if she was apologising to Simon for having someone else in her arms.

  ‘See, see,’ Simon said and he stood on his tiptoes to try and get a glimpse of what she was holding.

  I took his shoes off and lifted him onto the bed so that he could get a closer look.

  ‘Who that?’ he asked.

  I sat on the bed too, pulled Simon onto my knee and said, ‘That’s your baby brother.’

  He had a puzzled look on his face as he looked at the newcomer and then he did the sweetest thing. He pushed himself off my knee, leaned over and kissed the baby.

  It was our first moment together as a family.

  Simon and I brought them home from hospital two days later. As Michelle carried the as yet unnamed baby out to the car, Simon carried a teddy bear that Michelle had taken to hospital with her. She’d read somewhere that it would help to avoid jealousy.

  As it turned out we didn’t need to worry. Simon never appeared jealous of the baby Anthony. We were careful to make a fuss of Simon – we didn’t want him feeling left out – but the truth is, he took to his role of big brother like a duck to water. He would go and get nappies for his mum and wave toys at Anthony to try to make him laugh. However, I always made sure that when I got home from work I gave Simon a hug before I went to see the baby. We wanted him to know that he was still as important as he had always been.

  We settled down as a family unit and life was good. I had a wife that I loved and two beautiful children.

  I think it was in the November after Anthony was born that we decided to take the boys to a professional photographer for a portrait. We took them along one Saturday morning and the photographer, a prematurely grey-haired man wearing a garish green shirt, set the boys up on a sheepskin rug in front of a blue background. He chatted away to them as he clicked his camera, using toys and props to get the boys to smile.

  ‘There’s no mistaking them for brothers,’ he said as he moved from one knee to the other so that he could get a different angle. ‘They’re like two peas in a pod.’

  He was right, they were.

  A week or so later, I watched as Michelle placed a parcel on the kitchen table and carefully pulled tape away from the brown paper that was covering it. I looked over her shoulder as she lifted one of the portraits up and looked at it. Her hands started to shake and she rested the frame on the table top. She stroked the image of Simon as he smiled out from the canvas and then she did the same to Anthony’s.

  I put my hands on her shoulders and asked her what was wrong. She said that she didn’t know. She laid the frame down flat and turned around so that she was facing me. She wasn’t sobbing or anything but I could see a couple of wet trails on her cheeks.

  ‘Thank you,’ she said, though I didn’t know what for. ‘For everything,’ she explained and I hugged her and told her not to be daft.

  Later, when the boys were in bed and Michelle was having a bath, I sat in the living room and thought about what had happened. What had she meant when she thanked me for everything? Did she mean for agreeing to the photo shoot that I hadn’t been sure about? I thought probably not. The reality was that I was the one who should have been thanking her.

  I was still going over it when Michelle came into the room wearing a terry towelling dressing-gown and a towel around her head. I held my arm out and invited her to join me on the sofa. She sat down, curling her feet beneath her and resting her head on my chest.

  ‘You know when you thanked me earlier on,’ I said, ‘well... it’s me that should have been thanking you.’ She didn’t say anything but she did push herself further into my side. I kissed the top of her head but I doubt she felt it through the towel. ‘You and those two little fellas upstairs are my world.’

  She pushed herself up and with her face close to mine said, ‘I love you so much, Tom,’

  We made love on the sofa.

  ROBERT

  I spent my twenty third birthday alone in my flat and, as I sat there nursing a glass of single malt that I’d brought up from the bar, I had nothing else to do other than think about my previous birthday: the night Michelle had told me she was pregnant.

  The following day it would be a year since I’d got in my car and driven away from everything and everyone that had ever meant anything to me. Did any of it mean anything to me now?

  Of course it did. There were days when I could’ve killed for one of Mum’s steak and kidney pies, or gone for a pint with my dad even though he did go on a bit sometimes. I even missed my kid brother from time to time.

  Tom was a good lad at heart, a bit like a puppy sometimes – you know, hanging around for any crumbs that you might throw him – but I liked him. Poor bugger had spent all of his life wanting to be me but I was willing to bet that wasn’t the case anymore. I thought he was probably the golden child now, the one that could do no wrong, the one that didn’t do a runner as soon as he got a lass in the family way.

  I know that he had wanted to be me but, the ironic thing was that sometimes I wanted to be more like him. There was a reason that I’d asked him to keep a look out for Michelle, and that was because I knew that he would. I was willing to bet that he was the best uncle a kid ever had.

  I drained the best part of half a bottle of whisky that evening and I don’t remember how I got to bed.

  The second season that I was at the pub passed in pretty much the same way as the first one except that I knew what to expect, my job was more secure, and I was living alone so I could sleep with whoever I wanted to without worrying about it. Not that I ever really worried about Tanya, but you know what I mean.

  Do you know, this is the first time that I’ve ever put what happened into words and I realise how bad it makes me look. I wasn’t a nice person. I’d done Michelle and the kid a favour.

  There’s not a lot to tell about my early twenties: I went to work an
d I had casual sex with a lot of women. I knew it was a dangerous game I was playing because you have to remember that this was back in the days when hysteria about AIDS was at its height. I watched those adverts with the gravestone on them and I knew that I had to be careful, but careful to me meant a condom, not abstention, and luckily for me there were enough girls around that felt the same way.

  I spent two years living that way. And then I met Diane.

  Diane came into the bar one evening in the third summer after I’d left. What we euphemistically called the function room had been booked for a seventieth birthday party and Diane was the grand-daughter of the birthday girl. I popped into the room a couple of times during the evening to check that everything was all right and I’d noticed Diane almost as soon as I’d gone in the first time. She was the only one dancing on the tiny dancefloor and I smiled at her when she looked my way.

  She was standing at the bar the second time that went in, and she said hello when I checked on Danny who was working the bar in that room. She must have heard him call me by name because she used it as I walked away and I turned around.

  She smiled at me and from that point I was putty in her hands.

  Diane was different to the girls I normally went out with. I found that my sole intention of seeing her wasn’t to get her into bed, and that scared the hell out of me. I enjoyed her company and I liked being with her. We slept together, but not until we had been going out for a couple of months. Not counting Michelle, it was the first time that had happened to me.

  Diane moved in with me a couple of months after that and we settled into life together. From time to time I would think that this was how things could have been with Michelle but it wouldn’t have been the same really, would it? If I’d stayed and settled down with Michelle there would have been a baby to consider. There would have been a baby tying me to her. Nothing tied me Diane: even though she shared the flat above the pub with me, there was nothing to keep her there if things didn’t work out.