““Marc would simply emit something, I suppose, an unconscious, lithe signal that was contagious. A sign that was invisible to us.””
Ever since we were kids, long before he ever hurt himself, people had told me my brother was dangerous. Marcus would be the one whom other parents would warn their kids from playing with or listening to, even being in the same room with him was to be avoided. And this meant that we, too, by association – we Frasers –were the family our neighbours and friends became wary of. Not that Marcus was dangerous dangerous. He never got into fights or broke windows, and as far as I know he never sneaked anything from a school drawer or even borrowed one solitary item without returning it. He never robbed a drugs cabinet, either, if you’re asking, and smoked as much a joint back then, unlike me. Was never cautioned by the police or jumped from his bedroom window and ran out at night, going in no particular direction, until he couldn’t walk anymore and his parents found him huddled in a bush, covered in webs of dew the next morning. Those were all my little crimes, whereas my brother’s misdemeanours were more nuanced. In fact, the only discernible skill that could be deemed at all dangerous was my brother’s malign influence on others. Marcus was the boy other kids played up around, and wanted to impress. I suppose a bad counsellor, and we both saw a few, would say he had a magnetism about him, a way about his manner, a quiet superiority that made you feel you had to match him somehow, always knowing that you couldn’t, of course. He seemed to us to exist at a higher register, and one not to be followed or emulated, if you had any sense.
Infectiously alchemical, when other kids were in his presence their personalities seemed to change, and the thing was you could never tell why. There were no clear signs of his ever trying to inspire an effect. His manipulation of others was accidental, or seemed to be. It wasn’t as though he went around like some cheap Machiavelli whispering lurid commands into kids’ ears. All he had to do was smile at a joke or nod in agreement and in that brief, hard-won moment you’d notice something loosen inside you, deep down, and you felt good, recognised, liked. I’d seen it for myself more times than I can remember, and not just with close friends, but also with children he’d only just met: a timid little thing staying in the next caravan to us in Fort William in the year before my father left, say, or a German wallflower by the pool in some Costa Brava hotel on our one and only foreign holiday, when Marc was eight and I was eleven. They didn’t even have to speak the same language. Marc would simply emit something, I suppose, an unconscious, lithe signal that was contagious. A sign that was invisible to us, like a dog whistle aimed solely at our subconscious, restless egos, but one that was shrill and unappealing to any grown-ups in the vicinity. Only my mother, amongst them, was deaf to it, by choice or nature. Anyway, the adults were mostly wrong, because that magnetism, that energy wasn’t the thing that got you, you see – although he was, when young, the most frantically happy little boy you could ever see – but no, it was the stillness that they never noticed. That was the real power. Because it was in the small, satisfied silences that you knew you’d been seen.
He was a pretty boy, it’s undeniable. Just look at the photographs. But it wasn’t just how he looked, not merely the fact that he had this angelic thing about him – although he did. Blonde, blue-eyed, skin like marble until he was twelve and the acne ruined it all. Adolescence was hell for him –was hell for us both – but before then, before the hormones kicked in and greased his hair, scaled his skin and made his lips so chapped they bled at night, before then he was probably the most beautiful thing I’d ever seen. Really, he could have stepped out of some medieval painting of androgynous, beckoning angels, although that didn’t stop the parents being suspicious of him and, thinking back, perhaps the beauty only made it worse. ‘They’re jealous, that’s all,’ our mother used to say when he would come home confused and upset, not sure why he’d got sent away again from a friend’s doorstep or ushered into the street after an aborted attempt to play. Which was often. The kids loved him, were enchanted, moonstruck in a way that was queasily precocious, almost bordering on infatuation, but the parents to a man and woman disliked him on sight. There’s something not right about him, was what we were told most, or at least when the other kids were brave enough to let on what they’d overheard at home. ‘They can say what they like, but it’s not him there’s something wrong with.’ This was our mother’s argument, which wasn’t entirely untrue. She’d repeat it while standing at the kitchen sink, watching as, outside, Marcus would play by himself, content again as he knocked a ball against the door of the garden shed, while inside, framed by the shed’s dim, quarterpane window, our father pretended to be fashioning a chair or a stool or a sewing table on his bench and ardently ignoring the clatter and pop of the hollow plastic ball.
‘It’s them. I’m sure one or two of them fancy him.’ She wouldn’t look at me while she said it, and I could never be sure if her words were ever intended for me to hear or just scratching thoughts that needed to be voiced. My eyes, watchful, alert to her changing moods, would move to her hands, thin-skinned with knuckles as red and shining as blisters, swimming in the constant bowl of hot water, the smell of washing up liquid and jay fluid sharp and citric in the stale air of the place. ‘Not just the women, either,’ she’d add, sucking her teeth. ‘Not just them.’
This was the day he drank bleach. I watched him as he did it, not quite believing. He was a trickster, you never quite knew whether he was joking or not, and anyway he was smiling as he did it, as though to say, Just watch me. He had a very good sense of humour, loved to play pranks, although they weren’t cruel pranks, not aimed at others, more at himself. He became the joke, the centre of attention, which was odd, because in some ways he was very shy. Our job at the weekends was to bleach the shoes, or at least wash bleach that we’d dilute with water in a black plastic bowl our mother would hand us especially for the purpose, pouring it over the soles of all our shoes with a beaker, making sure they were clean, then rinse them with bowls of water. We’d do it hunched over the exposed drain in the back garden by the garage. The drain always smelled of bleach, as did the large cast iron rubbish bin. And once we’d finished our chores, our hands would smell of bleach, too. This very mild scent that we got used to and even liked, because it smelled like our mother’s hands. We were careful not get any on our clothes, but Marc had always been more careful than me. I was the clumsy one, I’d drop the bowl or splash the diluted bleach onto the cloth uppers of the shoes, which could ruin them altogether if you weren’t quick to soak them in water. I was a heavy-handed child, so even though he was younger than me it would be Marc who would take charge of pouring out the bleach. Well, this one day, I’d noticed he’d brought a beaker with him. It was the tall, green plastic beaker we’d store the toothbrushes in in the bathroom. He poured some bleach into the cup, and then a little water. Then he smiled at me and raised the beaker, as though about to make a speech, some joking speech about something or other, imitating scenes we’d see in the films on the television. We were outside, and there were the sounds of children playing somewhere, our neighbours, the chime of an ice cream van. I just sat there and watched as he drank it.
Afterwards, when I asked him, when he could speak, he told me that it tasted fizzy, that he could smell it before he tasted it. In his nose and in his head, like something fizzy moving through his skull. He told me it didn’t really taste of anything. He was very matter-of-fact about the whole thing. My mother blamed me, at first, but you’d be surprised how quickly the whole thing blew over. Nobody asked whether he’d tried to die or whether he wanted to hurt himself, people didn’t tend to ask those questions back then. We were too young, perhaps. Nobody could imagine a kid so young might have such thoughts, might be so unhappy. And sometimes I wonder if even he knew, at the time, I mean. Part of me believes he did want to kill himself, even if it was just out of curiosity, because he was always interested in trying things, plotting out ideas and experiences, just to know what something felt like or how it tasted or sounded. And the thing with my brother, is that you couldn’t explain to him, he had to do it himself, always did. He had to know what something was like, not just be told. Right to the end, I believe. Right to the end.