Pact

by admin

September 18, 2019

904

A while ago, I got well and truly hammered one night. Emotions were running high, I felt on the edge and out of control. My best friend was with me though. I had someone to keep watch, to protect me from myself. Maybe that’s why I let myself go a little crazy. I knew my friend had my back.

It’s the same way with siblings. We fight, we don’t always like or love each other but most of the time, we are in for the long ride together. It is an unspoken pact, to watch over each other, to grow old together, when parents are gone and we the only links left to memory and innocence.

My brother and I were a mismatched team but still fierce defenders and cheerleaders of each other. Truthfully, he was more my defender and cheerleader than the other way around. I would cheerfully snitch on him if the price was right. Eight years older than me, he could give it back as good as he got but his heart was never in it. He loved me too much.

Some memories of him are becoming hazy with time but so many more are still vivid in my mind.

Mom, Dad and I returning home late one evening to find him sitting on the porch, loose limbed, leaning artistically against the wall and seemingly unconcerned. Inside, candles had been lit, dinner was ready and music playing. His eyes, though, spoke volumes of his worry and anxiety.

His knee high leather boots and shiny black clothes that took our little backwater town by storm. He fronted a band, a gaggle of thirteen or fourteen year old boys. I had a kid sized crush on the lead guitarist. They practiced their set in our garage. When they landed gigs in even smaller towns, my brother convinced my parents to let them travel unsupervised by train. Innocent times and they came back safely, full of horror stories of power cuts and rodent infested rooms. They had the time of their lives and were the acknowledged rock stars of the neighbourhood. The frontman’s following amongst the neighbourhood girls took on operatic overtones. There were accusations of treachery and wild declarations of love. They were crazy for him and in true rock star style, he loved them all.

Those boots accompanied us to the big city. This is where his singing came into its own. Another band, a couple of different line ups, a series of shows. The last one he played in, I was allowed to attend. Sitting in a row full of giggling girls, all sisters and cousins of the band, we got even gigglier as the joints lit up around us. My brother, strutting that stage, belting out Hotel California, bringing the house down. Backstage, there were meltdowns and the kind of moments every rock band deserves. My brother thrived on drama, flaunting relationships and love interests quite blatantly.

The obsessions. Boney M. That LP with Sunny and Daddy Cool was played till the needle wore out, the record itself was scratched and we all begged for mercy. A few years later, it was Careless Whispers and George Michael. I learnt to slow dance to that song. I still can’t hear it without feeling just the slightest bit anxious – you would too if at an impressionable age, you had been forced to hear it over and over again for a couple of weeks.

The pineapple upside down cake. He wanted to be a baker and this was the unfortunate recipe he chose to perfect his skills. Also, it was the eighties and people were crazy for quiche and upside down cake and other weird stuff. He baked one cake every day. Like Pavlov’s dog, we obediently ate each one, giving nuanced criticism on crumb and lightness and flavour until he suddenly lost interest. He had already moved on to other things but the family took much longer to digest all that syrupy cake: for a while we looked positively yellow around the gills. It’s been three decades – I have never baked a pineapple upside down cake. Or eaten one again. Ever.

I was 13 years old when I was invited to my first dance party. Gawky and awkward, but I also had the smoothest mover on the dance floor for a brother. And he had a rep to protect. The garage became our dance studio and he taught me to jive, some smooth disco moves and how to slow dance. This last was very important. You wanted to be grown up and look blasé when a guy (nervous as all hell and sweaty too) asked you to dance to a slow song, but you had to know the tricks. How to keep his hands from wandering, how to maintain that crucial distance.

My brother glowered at me and quickly dispelled any illusions I might have had about these mysterious rules. Arm’s length at all times. Hands at waist or nothing. Very disillusioning and comforting at the same time.

He supervised my wardrobe in a clinical manner, collaborating with my mom to get me out of old jeans and kurtas and into dresses and skirts. He was categorical about my shortcomings in the fashion department, frequently reducing me to tears with his sarcastic and accurate assessments of my self styled looks. ‘No sister of mine goes out dressed like a frump’ became his battle cry. He supported my dad in his old fashioned and wildly patriarchal preference for my waist long hair, directing my mum when she tried out different hairdos, the stylist to her hairdresser.

Memories of my brother counselling my friends, most of whom harboured a secret crush for him. He kindly brushed away their overtures, and at the same time, advised them on matters of the heart. He knew he wasn’t interested, they only knew that he was the kindest big brother of any friend in the group. He braided their hair, gave them fashion tips, all in his signature laconic, ironic way.

Smoking up the house with fumes of melting wax – his new hobby of creating frosted candles. Very eighties and a bit twee for my taste which is why I don’t own a single one of those beautiful creations.

His baggy red pants. Which he insisted on wearing on his first day to an all-boys college. He came back, bruised and terrified by the ragging he had been mercilessly meted out but he was nothing if not stubborn. He wore them again and again until the novelty wore off, even in that fuddy-duddy place full of boys who wouldn’t have recognised fashion if it bit their arms off.

My brother, my hero. I’d have died before I told him that. But he went and died on me instead, leaving unsaid things and unmade memories to last forever. The pact was broken, the team defeated. That year was my coming of age movie. I passed out of school, chopped off my hair, snagged a boyfriend whom my brother had heartily detested and began to live a life my family knew nothing about. It seemed like fine revenge then, for abandoning our pact. Except it wasn’t revenge at all because he was gone.

Thirty three years later, I could have continued down that road; writing about his unhappiness. His struggle with himself. The letter in green ink. The red twine stitches on his scalp. But I’ve already lived through that many times over. And all that angst and anger of the early years without him has mellowed into a wry sense of an adolescence lived too far, too fast.

Today, I choose to remember the little things that made my brother a whole person, a life of twenty two years, a boy who meant so many wonderful things to so many people. I choose to remember his life and not his death. Maybe later, I may listen to Careless Whispers and do my best to not grit my teeth. But pineapple upside down cake? He cured me of that taste for life.