The Night My Brother Died

I’m not even sure that I want to write this post. I know it needs writing, and I know that sooner or later it will get written. On January 27th next year it will be the 30th anniversary of the events I am about to describe and so I can’t hope to avoid writing these thoughts.

Not that I want to avoid these thoughts. Talking about the dead is the only way in which we can breathe life into them. And it’s the only way that those of us still living can truly appreciate what an everyday miracle it is to wake up to whatever each day has to hurl at us.

No. My qualms about writing this post are not about evoking the events of that evening. They are about seeming maudlin, or twee, or pretentiously profound (especially that last, because that’s the one I know is most like me at my worst). They are fears that I will somehow simultaneously over-trivialise and over-dramatise an event that just was a part of my past and just is a part of my present and just will be a part of my future. If that happens, I apologise. But in an attempt to avoid it I’ll try to present it through the cliche-free perspective of the eleven year old boy I was that night.

In case you haven’t read my previous posts, my brother’s name is Paul and on the night of his death (and every night since) he was thirteen and three-quarters. The precision of that information is actually central to the story of his death, because Paul was a puffed-up member of the Air Training Corps that night; puffed up with the juvenile helium of every child who goes through a rite of passage. At the age of thirteen and three-quarters Paul was finally eligible to collect his long-awaited ATC uniform, his first step on the path to becoming a pilot in the RAF.

Paul was obsessed with things that flew. He could name birds and planes that were indistinct specks in the sky to me based upon the shape of their wings.

And Paul wasn’t alone. By happy (unhappy) circumstance he had with him his best friend Shaun who by happy (hideously unhappy for him) circumstance happened to be born barely a day apart. Two teenagers tantalised by the thought of their impending manhood: what could possibly go wrong?

I don’t even remember the last time I saw Paul (that’s a thought that has only just occurred to me for the first time in nearly 30 years). He always went to ATC on a Thursday evening and what three years younger brother waves off his sibling just in case he is going to die? And so I just did whatever I did when he left and whatever my final words to him were will never be known – I hope they were kind, or funny, or something like that and that he maybe thought about them as he made his way to his rendezvous.

The other thing I don’t remember is any sort of worry or panic in the house that evening. My younger sister, Julie, and I were watching a natural history programme in which David Bellamy was shrunk to the size of an insect in order to explain the biology of plants (how early evening entertainment has changed). My Mum – sorry, Mam – was in the kitchen ironing the shirts, trousers, tea-towels, and socks (yes socks) for the whole family. The reason why I remember no panic at a moment of lateness is that it never happened again in our house, with my Mam: from that night paranoia would be her constant companion.

And so when the bell rang it was no big deal. Maybe one of the neighbours bringing the Avon order? Maybe the window cleaner coming to collect his money? Maybe anything other than a hulking policeman with the words “Can I speak with your mam, son?”

I wish. I wish it was anything but that policeman almost as much as he probably wished that night that it wasn’t him. I still feel sorry for him (I’m welling up at the thought of his pain right now).

He took me into my own house and asked where she was. I pointed at the kitchen door and he asked me to go into the living room. Still in suspicious of his motives I did so and then he shut us into a room where the door had never ever been closed during the day. The sound of it closing just didn’t feel right and it was the very second I knew something was wrong. Seconds later that fact was confirmed beyond any reasonable doubt when I heard my Mam scream a scream I have never ever come close to hearing again in my life. It went on and on and on, and it was the scariest sound in the world because there were two locked doors and a hulking policeman between me and that scream. David Bellamy ceased to exist.

I can’t even begin to tell how long it took for that scream to die, or how long it took for those two doors to open, but eventually both did. I half-remember the policeman taking us to her rather than the other way round. I fully remember the incoherent snot-cry-convulsion of words that came out which all had the same ending; “he’s dead”. And can’t hope not to remember the cuddle, death-like in its grip, as if we were next to be taken from her.

I don’t even know what my first response was. Disbelief? Anger? Loss? Sadness? I can’t remember. I can remember the policeman, still a kid himself in an ill-fitting uniform now rather than the hulk I’d first seen, although he was well beyond thirteen and three-quarters. He seemed not to know what to do next, especially as we didn’t have a phone, but he just about managed to bring over a barely-known neighbour before making his exit and leaving us to our newly three-quarter family life.

And then it all blurred for me. In the course of what seemed like minutes everyone arrived. The house filled up and we were wrenched from our Mam again as she disappeared to the hospital to see her eldest son for the last time. I have no idea what we did in those hours but gradually the details filtered though. That he and Shaun had left the bus and ran across the road without looking. That Shaun had made it across in time to see his best friend knocked into the air. That the driver hadn’t stopped but had reported himself to the police hours later. That the ambulance staff could to little but that he had a pulse until the hospital. That it was instantaneous and isn’t that a blessing of sorts.

Eventually, though, eleven year old eyes start to droop regardless of the excitement and eleven year old spirits start to flag in spite of the false cheerfulness of well-meaning adults. And so I was put to bed in the room I used to share with Paul; a vast expanse of utter loneliness. The dropping eyes and flagging spirits were no match for the Paul-less, Paul-ful room I had been shut into. It was then that I knew what had happened and what it meant: that I would be without him forever (sorry, I said I wouldn’t be maudlin and here I am crying the tears of an eleven year old – fibber that I am). And so I cried deliberately loudly until someone came and rescued me from that room, which I never slept in again as a child.

By that time my Mam had returned home from what I now know more than ever must have been the hardest thing ever – fatherhood taught me the one last lesson about Paul’s death. She saw me to sleep, her leftover son, before braving the sympathy once more. I woke only once more that night, when she came to bed and held me. I’ve never been held like that before or since, and I don’t ever want to be because however beautiful it was, it was a product of a perfect pain.

I’m not sure now how to end this post. I could do my usual about how it’s made me who I am. I could talk about how remembering the events of this night keep Paul’s memory alive. I could draw out of it something beautiful in spite of the awfulness of the situation. But I won’t.

Instead I’ll just say that the presence of death is what makes living so special. It’s what makes waking up an everyday miracle. It’s what makes mundane moments with moaning family members things to hold onto. It’s what makes our children, nephews and nieces, and grandchildren the supernovas of our lives.

I’ve had thirty years of life without Paul. If I don’t live every second of that like its my last, then it is only half a life and it might as well have been me that died that night. Instead I can try and live double the life that I’ve been lucky to have, one for me and one for my brother.

In memory of Paul Bartle 1969-1983

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