Poor Brother

My brother ceased to exist last week. Or at least, he ceased to
exist in the form that I knew. He perished after the vehicle he was
driving left the northbound carriageway of the M3, about a kilometre
north of the Winchester services. No one seems to know where he was
headed, or why he lost control of his 1971 Volkswagen, ploughing it
directly into a four-year-old pine tree. The impact caused major head
trauma, as his head crashed into the shallow windscreen. His seat belt
was unbuckled and, I presume, just drooped across his lap, as it always
was. He was pronounced 'dead on arrival' at Winchester hospital. His
blood registered traces of alcohol, but he was under the legal limit at
the time of impact. I'm glad about that. There were no witnesses, and
the Police are making further enquiries into the 'accident', that took
place some time between midnight on new years day and 3am on the 2nd of
January 2002. Until their enquiries are completed my brother remains on
a piece of cold stone, twelve miles north of here.

I have placed the word accident in inverted commas, as I know that what
happened was no accident. You see, my brother left me a letter.

I wouldn't say that Scott left me a suicide note. Rather that he left
me an explanation, and a farewell. And I'm glad about that too.

One ironic thing is that it was only a few hours earlier that I had
said to Scott that I would like him to speak about me if he was there
at my funeral. The thing was, we had cremated our maternal grandfather
on the morning of the 31st, and it was on my mind what I would want to
happen when my time comes. "As long as I'm spared," he had said,
laughing.

This isn't me trying to return the favour that he would have done for
me. This isn't a funeral or cremation; this is me trying to sort things
out for myself. I want to talk about him, I suppose.

Oh Scott, how do I go about describing somebody? You would have been
much better at this than me.

Eyelashes. My brother, on the living sculpture of his face, had a set
of eyelashes that were the first thing you noticed, especially if you
caught first glance of him at profile. They would have been more at
home on a girl. Or at least they were the sort of lashes that a girl
craves for, but that makeup can never quite create; long and dark, as
the thick individual lashes curled up, thinning as they reached the end
of their wave.

And he would flash them at you, as he turned, seeing you there,
altering his image from the melancholy to a cheeky grin, acknowledging
your presence. Then there is his cigarette. Scott was always with a
cigarette, in his lips or fingers, hand rolled straighter than I can
make them in a rolling machine. He always said it was the only thing he
was any good at, rolling cigarettes, and that he could never give up
smoking them for that reason. Because he would have to stop doing the
only thing he was any good at.

His other habits that first come to mind are telling tall stories and
drinking. I wouldn't say he was an alcoholic. He could do without a
drink during the day, but in the evening he either couldn't or didn't.
I'm much the same to be honest, so I will not cast a negative opinion.
I guess though that Scott was a borderline alcoholic, and he was aware
of it, so most of the time he kept it under control. He would say that
he would never let himself become a proper alcoholic, because then he
would have to give up completely, and that he would hate to give up
drinking. There's a bit of it in the family really, so he could see
what it could do to you, if you let it. I mean, if there's an imaginary
line that you cross to alcoholism our elder brother stumbled over it,
with blurred vision and slurred speech a long time ago.

When I said before about Scott telling tall stories I didn't mean that
he told lies. Quite the opposite really. He hated people who lied. But
what he did do was invent the world around him in a parody of what it
was, of what he was. He made his world all grand and important, telling
ridiculous stories, in an attempt to show us, I think, what an
appalling mess he thought he had made of things, by describing them as
the perversely opposite.

But through all this he did one thing; he made us laugh. And he did
this the most when he was down, when he thought all was gone, caused by
another one of his mistakes, making him reinvent everything.

If my brother was a tragedy, which I don't think he was in the sense
that he thought, it was regarding love. Things happened to Scott that
were tragic, but where I think he got it wrong was in always seeing
himself as the problem. It was all cause and effect with him. He was
the cause, and the effect was his broken state.

He would say that he didn't believe in love, and I can see why. It
never seemed to treat him particularly well, but the contradiction
about him was that he never stopped looking for the thing he didn't
believe in. And the more it hurt him the more vigorously he looked,
with added importance every time he suffered a set back. Perhaps he was
trying to prove his own point, and perhaps he succeeded.

I have to say that woman treated Scott in a way I didn't understand.
Woman loved him, and he had many affairs with woman. Some were
beautiful, some not. Some were intelligent, some not. But there was
always something in common about them all, and that was the way they
were at opposite poles to my brother. Whether they were posh or working
class, they always seemed politically, and ethically, completely wrong
for him. Perhaps he was testing the concept of love, that it can build
bridges and cross borders.

Woman seemed to love him most when he was depressed. Perhaps they saw
something in him that interested them, something they couldn't quite
put their finger on. And they offered him love, teasing his eager and
trusting affection from him, and then once he was under their spell,
caught up in their web of circumstance, they would pull away from him.
They wanted to have him, but not to ultimately be with him.

There are only so many pieces to one's heart, and each of Scott's girls
took their piece, returning it in time, but never quite in the
untarnished condition that it had been given in. In the end there were
no more un-dented pieces to be taken, and I presume this left Scott
feeling lost.

I wish that he could have just stopped, but for Scott life was not a
choice between two opposing things. It wasn't a case of 'shall I have a
glass of red, or a glass of white?' Just because red gave him a
headache he couldn't simply switch to white, even though he loved
white. He couldn't give up what was bad for him, what he didn't trust,
because I think he saw the problem within himself, and not any external
factor.

His personal failures though were very different from his professional
one's. As I have said, he possessed no confidence at all that he would
ever find success in his personal life, yet that recognition seemed to
spur him on. Whereas in his working life his lack of confidence almost
stopped him competing altogether. Whatever he tried for work, and there
were many different things, he would find that he was good at it. He
was an adaptable person, with a wide range of skills, yet at the
slightest sign of success, he was frightened to death. He always said
that if he was going to do something, he didn't want to do the best he
could; he wanted to be the best. Otherwise he said he would be a fraud,
and I guess he just never had the nerve, or the commitment to be the
best, and he would bolt from wherever or whatever he was doing.

As I mentioned earlier, Scott wrote me a letter. He told me that he
loved me and that he respected me, but that he wanted me to do one
thing for him. He wanted me to achieve where he had failed; he asked me
to accept that life wasn't always a bowl of cherries, but to realise
that sometimes it is a pot of gold. He said that he wanted me to learn
to be happy, and not to make his mistake of creating his own personal
Hell, preventing him from accepting himself and properly loving others.
Scott said that love is not the answer, but that letting yourself love
is, because if one ever truly allows love a place, there can be no room
for grief.

His letter finished with him remembering how many years before, when he
drove a refrigerated van as a his job, he had been deliriously tired
one night, and how the trees that lined the road almost drew him into
them as they appeared in his headlights. He had dreamed of driving off
the road and into the trees, just because he was so so tired. He would
get saved by a passing motorist, who would call an ambulance, and then
in hospital he would just sleep as much as he liked. And then when
awake he would be cared for by a pretty nurse, with steel rimmed
spectacles. She would be a soft looking woman, with fair hair, and an
unassuming manner, not reproaching him for his accident, but caring
that he never did a similar thing again.

In the end I think it was the tiredness that got to Scott, but that
this time he was so so tired in a different way, for different reasons,
and there was no passing motorist, no ambulance, no pretty nurse to
save my brother.