by Moannie
We were three, though for a long time, it was just Mick, my older half-brother and me.
I was Pollyanna [well, Mollyanne a] always smiling, not a great thinker, a follower, his shadow. He could make the sounds of instruments with his mouth; drums of all types, a flute a Saxophone. I sang 'Money is the root of all evil' and he played along, all jazzy, like the music we'd only recently discovered. He was wound tight, St. Edith's had done that to him. He kept secrets the way he kept his sweets in their paper bag, all screwed up in his pocket so that he had to suck the paper off. Never shared. I would eat my weekly twopenny worth of Bulls-eyes, or Humbugs or toffees in one go, stuffing my cheeks and sussing up the streaming saliva, then beg 'G'us one,' but he never would.
After St. Edith's it was just him and me...playing Dick Barton:Special Agent in the hidey hole under the eaves, or we'd play shops with the meagre contents of mum's kitchen, or Jazz bands. We'd sprawl on mum's divan bed with the tapestry cover of a jungle scene with lions and tigers and he'd be Tarzan to my Jane, or we'd play mum's few records over and over and he would copy the instruments until I could not tell if it was the record or him playing the snare drum or the trumpet. When Harry was there, before mum married him, we would leave the house and run, always run - to the park, or to the bridge over the railway where we would gaze in fascination as the snorting black and shiny monsters chuntered along the tracks.
He grew up to be tight-lipped, quick to quip, holding nothing dear. If St. Edith's was the cause, he never told me...he grew a moustache and a goatee beard, and he grew away from me. He wanted no ties of love, or emotion, not even for his mother who died with just me there, holding her hand. He came to her funeral, then left. We have not met since then, thirty years ago.
When Tony was born I was ten and Mick twelve. I fell in love instantly. At first I was forbidden to go near him, then gradually I became useful. He was the Prince-the chosen one, the wartime baby who needed the butter and the orange juice, eggs and milk and sweets [candy], all rationed, but he blossomed and thrived even though his baby teeth grew out in blackened and decayed stumps he was still beautiful and I adored him, which was just as well as he became my shadow as soon as he could walk. Mick dropped me like a hot potato and it was then Tony and me.
But there was something in him that curdled, like milk left out in the sun, and the loving brother grew up and became someone else, self-absorbed, a braggart, an opinionated - the French have the perfect word which translates as near as dammit to- a...hole.
When mum was dying I called him-he turned over and went back to sleep.
We tried, many times to get back to something resembling family, but it was false and finally failed and it has been many years now since there was any contact.
There are many and valid reasons why they became what they are-and why I am who I am. Mick never knew his father, adored his mother and watched her abandon us then make a disastrous marriage and cling to it, even though we, the reasons why she married were anathema to the man and we hated him. He escaped through National Service in Suez and never went back home to live. Tony was wanted and loved and spoiled, but was born of Harry's gene pool. He loved his father, had no reason not to, but he was left alone with mum when I left home at eighteen and she began her long fight with Multiple Sclerosis and he despised her as weak.
I had no spine, no backbone, I wanted the fairy story, the loving father and mother, the laughing playing siblings, the gingerbread house, the happy ending.
I do not miss my half-brothers-they only ever made me unhappy, bringing JP to anger and me to agonise over each visit.
And in the end I made my own fairy tale.
