It was there every time I looked at the calendar or opened the laptop. “Events in May”. Days lengthening into Spring, getting longer and warmer, and then the diary entry “Roger’s funeral”. A fact, a date. My younger brother is dead.
Once, having panicked myself awake at three in the morning, I thought maybe his death was some sort of scam, like those emails from a mate who really wants you to click a link but is also emailing from Kazakhstan. Or those mysterious texts from “Bank Security”. Or the chummy robocall -“Hey! You all right?” The neurotic mind will find any shortcut to denial, any thought in a storm. But he was gone.
Once I’d accepted it was real, it was wrong. The chronology was broken. I’m the eldest of three. I die first – that’s basic, that’s obvious. Now Rog, four years younger than me, had queue-jumped into first place. It’s ballsed up, mate. All jumbled and jangled.
The nearer the funeral, the more I dreaded it. I’d be fine for a while, then sideswiped into tears by the stupidest memory of him, the way everyone is when this happens.
Teenage him, a massive Marvin Gaye fan, in a woollen jumble-sale hat on which he’d crocheted “MARVIN”. It was somehow, improbably, the coolest hat in the entire world of young adult fashion.
