These things took

Our dear old brother has huffed his last. Heart weakened, he took a tumble on the stairs a week or so ago. In the dark of my room it feels like another life already – the one where old sallow-face would peek round the door, awaiting the offer of sweet tea and a cake. Always with the look of the moon deflated in luminescence – as if it had been told that street-lights were the new swinging thing by which lovers lay heads and dreamt. Brother worked late in secretive repose - an attic dweller creaking through the night. Now passed, I wonder if perhaps the continued sound from above my head is the lofts own eulogy. Certainly the measured squeak of wooden boards is more sorrowful now – like brother’s steps have continued to mark the pace, even in his absence. He would often orbit a problem with restless circles, breathing consistently from the low, right side of his mouth – a flapped jaw between muttered curses. The union occupied him, many limbed as it was, “all angles and no centre,” he would say, and the union-boys would nod sage-like – contemplating how best to pitch their proposal.

Standing in my socks, the attic is gloomed - a strange territory. There is a dappling of silhouettes; invited in by the skylight window, prompted orange by the halogen streetlight. I have got out of bed, unsure why now I am up amongst my dear old brother’s belongings. A desk, a bed, a bookcase – all seem solitary, disconnected from one another. A round table and three chairs centre the space – before brother’s death it had been an island of stoic faces, shuffled paper work, angry base words. Now it is all spectres, even the paper fussed away by colleagues. No doubt it occupies a union man’s drawer, or the bottom of a locked filing cabinet perhaps. No matter. I pull one of the chairs from under the table and seat myself. This was his space, always his – visitors were compelled into discomfort around my dear old brother, long before he assumed seniority within the organisation. Ten years a treasurer, he kept tight grip on the union’s purse strings – every face that climbed those stairs was in the position of having a cap in their hand. It’s not that he liked to see them beg, he assured me of that – insisted in fact. His main difficulty was that they saw him as some form of gatekeeper – the kind that admitted only the most elaborate of ploys. It seemed almost daily that some member or another would toddle up, only to reappear moments later – downcast or perhaps raging. It didn’t matter; they’d always come back. Politics took on the trappings of theatre at its root. They would come and go, the same crew and cast for ten years – the most weary of sitcom actors and actresses; knowing every line, every laugh and every last prat-fall needed to get through another week’s episode. A few would go harlequining off to other careers, other forms of self-flagellation – but most stayed put. There was a safety in the old vaudevilles, and while the world seemed to turn a new trick each hour you could be comforted that the blart and bluster of union-ways would remain forever circling, not coming close enough for the pressure changes the world invoked upon it’s collaborators.

My brother became head of the union after the other one retired. I forget his name, met him on few occasions. The two of them kept as much distance as they could manage. I remember a grin that suggested lockjaw, misjudged in its stroke-like spread across the face. The nervousness of the man set whole rooms into unease, he projected an aura of anxious megalomania; his eyes would frantically search for exits in any room, as if he feared he might be trapped at any moment. My brother, on the other hand, wheezed like a beached shark; long past the moment of lethality, he would snap half-heartedly and then roll a lazy, oxygen deprived glance round the place – daring anyone to come close. As union leader he struggled, most certainly. He never understood the concept of being well loved. The union men needed their bellies tickled; they had been conditioned into it after years of his grimacing predecessor. It wasn’t enough to be an orator, a financer, a bank manager, and a politician – one was to be a nursemaid as well. My brother was never much good at that. I loved him, but he was not a man who knew the soft touch. By his later years he was a pantomime villain who now flustered to play the dame. He spat at the children, tossed sweets into the orchestra pit, gestured obscenely to the old ladies in the seventh row. Any crisis and the union-boys flew up in arms - and rather than gathering them around the fringes of his apron, he could do little but administer a swift kick. Strikes would be followed by a cry for compensation; indeed, money was being lost hand over fist. He grumbled and rumbled his way through rhetoric – better times were coming, it was a temporary dip, stand fast my comrades and we will live to fight another day. This was the old school way of doing things, pulpit sermonising. When it failed he compromised, just flung money at the problem in the hope it went away. No-one ever told brother how people worked, that it wasn’t a question of navigating a system of double-entry with them. Whatever emotional credit or debit a person had outstanding, it could all be absolved with just the right degree of flair. It wasn’t charm as such; the grimace had proven that – more the capacity to act in accordance to your own dysfunction, maintain yourself within the confines of your role. The one thing that cursed my brother was that his aspiration led his away from his nature, forced him into strange new angles that felt uncomfortable, unfamiliar - nothing more complicated than that.

It is cold up in the attic. Dear brother liked it like that. The windows were always shoved open to let the night air in. Sometimes, when he thought the house was asleep he would puff on a cigarette. I know this because I would climb out on the roof to clear the dog ends away when he was out, anxious that they would block the guttering. He didn’t like me coming in his room, it was worse if he was there. Sometimes he’d twitch and shuffle paper, rushing wads of it into his briefcase, suddenly animated by the suggestion someone might see what he was up to. It reminded me of the times I caught him reading dirty magazines. Other times he seemed to be in some sort of torpor, eyes barely open – I remember an occasion when he had been asleep when I walked in - barely upright in his hard backed chair. He looked so tired, stretched thin to near translucency – never sweating, just ashen and waning.

When we were younger he had been the one who lead the games - a little Napoleonic in his execution perhaps, but always imaginative. We would duck under bridges and lead expeditions through the gloom. He never seemed to mind my company, despite a gap of several years. Barking instructions, playing it safe even in the dank – my dear brother would squelch with a certainty in his footsteps, practical enough to have worn Wellingtons. I would flounder and fall; muddying my shorts, scraping my knee, and he would tut and put me back on my feet. Unable to see him I could sense a strange warmth - we were never affectionate with one another, at least not to such an extent that I was used to him close to me. Down there, underneath the arches, he glowed where normally he would have glowered – soft cuckolding, a grip that firmed up each time I slipped. It was his territory, private, a great swathe of gloom for him to learn; all the variants of grey mud mapped out by instinct alone. It’s odd, but in the half-light is how I remember him best; indistinct and disembodied, a voice beleaguered by its own peculiar respiratory patterns – waxing, waning, struggling to catch itself a breath.

They bury my dear old brother tomorrow - The union, that is. Tonight, I am sat in his chair, running fingers across the grooves of his table. A wreath has been arranged, and I am assured the family have their own pew. I will put on my suit and my tie – perhaps I will borrow one of the several maroon ones he has left behind. They allow only one into eternity after all; it is a marvellous place where just a single suit and tie might suffice – even for my brother. Pleasure was a concept he only barely grasped when living, and I hope that perhaps they will afford him a small space into which he can burrow and explore. I’d like to believe that. They bury my dear old brother tomorrow, and I am not even certain that they will do that without rolled eyes. Death is an inconvenience the union has failed to understand. For them it is bold, brash men whose very names ring of eternity – not men that tumble down stairs. I push the chair out from under the table and it scrapes. Stepping across the loft I look about. Here his desk, here his bed, here his bookcase. The room is lit with street light glow; a tree outside casts its leaves in silhouette. Below my feet dappled shadows shimmy and sway in time to the breeze. Indeed, my dear old brother may have huffed his last.