Half of Simon wanted to slip away right now. He’d done his duty and seen Tim – if only from a distance – and he could say his brother was alive and now he could quit, and go back to his son and the au pair and his wife and pretend that Tim didn’t exist, pretend that Simon’s whole family didn’t have this same mad blood in their genes, pretend that the father didn’t look briefly at the son at least once a day and think…Do you? Will you? What have you inherited?
‘Simon?’
Tim looked very pleased to see his sibling; Simon hugged his brother. Tim’s heavy white thighs looked oddly vulnerable in his blue nylon soccer shorts.
‘You look good, Timothy. How are you?’
‘Oh, good, good good, excellent game, isn’t it!’ Tim was grinning impetuously.
Simon checked his brother’s face; the hair was greyer, the cheeks were even fatter and yet Tim never seemed to really age. Did madness keep you young? Or maybe it was his image of Tim that was frozen in his own mind: the image of Tim with a knife in his hand, hacking at Mum, in the bedroom. All the blood. Pints of blood.
‘You played very well,’ said the journalist again, trying not to hate his older brother. It’s not his fault.
‘Oh yes. Very good sporting chances. Are you here long there is a…yes. Ah yes doubtless. Yes.’
They both made a proper effort to chat, but sentences defeated Tim at every turn, and within a few minutes the dialogue had dwindled. Tim’s attention had wandered elsewhere: gone a-blackberrying. Simon knew the distracted and pained expression all too well: his brother was hearing his voices. There were little roils of anxiety about his features, tics and blinks. Tim was trying to keep smiling but he was hearing things, all those confusing orders.
The pity welled in his brotherly heart, pity and hatred and love all at once. The sadness was drenching. He wanted to go; Tim would be here the rest of his life.
‘OK, Tim, I have to go now.’
Tim offered a reproachful stare.
‘Not long then? Didn’t stay too long we must be busy. Busy as ever. Yes busy until…’
‘Tim?’
‘I’m busy too working of course. Excellent…inside the system.’
‘Tim, listen. Dad sends his love.’
Tim’s eyes seemed to mist with grief, standing here in the mild autumn sun by the lunatic asylum. Was his brother, appallingly, going to cry?
‘Simon…?’
‘Tim.’
‘Rather, you know, doubtless, Mother and Father in South Africa. Simon. I…I…I made something. For you.’
‘Sorry?’
Bill Fanthorpe had wandered over and was observing them from a couple of yards away.
Tim reached in the pocket of his nylon shorts. And pulled out a small object, crudely carved from wood.
‘Gusty. Awfully fun. Remember Gusty remember him? I made a dog hope you like it.’
The younger brother examined the miniature wooden toy. He understood now. When they were kids, the family had owned a springer spaniel, Augustus – ‘Gusty’. Simon and Tim had spent hours and days, entire holidays, playing with Gusty, going for rambles on the Heath. Running down sunny beaches.
It was a symbol of happier times, before the darkness of Tim’s schizophrenia.
‘Thank you, Tim. Thank you…very much.’
He had an urge to throw the stupid toy into the bushes. He also wanted to cherish the object, fiercely. There was an unbearable poignancy in the toy’s small, pathetic crudeness.
Bill Fanthorpe stepped closer. ‘Tim was doing craftwork. Thought you might like it…’
‘Yes,’ said Simon. ‘It’s lovely. Thanks.’
Bill stepped back; the journalist hugged his brother one more time – and then Tim beamed his mad wide anxious smile and the younger sibling got the usual horrible sense that his brother resembled his own boy, Conor – it was the same smile, the very same smile.
Girding himself, Simon resisted the urge to sprint down the lane; he shook hands with Fanthorpe, and slowly walked to the car. And as he walked back to the car he felt his soul keening with grief. He still held the little toy in his hand. He took out his wallet and slipped the toy inside, next to the clasp of hair he kept: from when Conor was a baby.
The sadness was so intense that he was relieved to make it to the car – and relieved to be stuck in traffic thirty minutes later; stuck in the eternal gridlock of the North Circular. The reliability of this horrible congestion was somehow soothing. So utterly predictable.
His car had been stationary ten minutes, spattered by some September