The Brother

'C'mon, if ya push i' doon the stairs, yu'll be able ta see all the wee men inside i'. This little piece of manipulative drama was going to define my relationship with my big brother for the rest of our lives. It was a formative moment too. It marked me out as a gullible dupe. The scenario was to be repeated throughout my life. Different actors, different products being sold to me, only my capacity to be taken in remaining unchanged.



I was five and he was six. Christmas morning 1968 and a kind person had bought us each big handsome, chunky Tonka trucks. Mine was a tipper with a red cab and had a clever latch and lever that raised big yellow dump-bed. I was so looking forward to taking it out to the back garden where I would load with earth and stones and haul them over to the castle I was building by the fence.



Jeremy got an elaborate, red painted fire engine. It had ladders and pumped water from smartly wound, white pressure hoses. Being Jeremy, he thought it would be a great idea to push his fabulous new toy down the stairs. Of course it was smashed to smithereens by the time it hit the floor.



The loss of his fire truck was bad, but it was to rub salt in the wound that I was joyfully playing with my fully intact tipper truck. He had an intuitive grasp on the manipulative arts, even at that age. He was also keenly aware that I was a credulous little twit. Playing on this weakness and my childish curiosity, he told me that if I pushed my truck down the stairs I would see all the amazing bits inside it. I wanted to see the amazing bits. 'Are there wee men in there that drive it? Yes, and y'll be able tae see them when it hits the bottom', he enthused. I knelt beside my freckly, red haired brother on the top landing and pushed.



Much later my brother became a fundamentalist Christian evangelical preacher. The skills that he developed at that moment on the landing, getting the credulous to kneel and to believe that magic can result from broken things, served him well. In an ironic twist of fate, with the collapse of his preaching career, he ended up driving trucks in America, and spent the next ten lonely and frustrating years in the cab of his Freightliner, his only company being Christian radio. His life collapsed around him to the soundtrack of an apocalyptic procession of venom-spitting evangelical radio-preachers.



I was dismayed to behold the broken bits of my wonderful tipper truck scattered on the door mat at the foot of the stairs. It was a bitter lesson that others might be jealous that one might be happier than they are and in their efforts to rebalance, will do all they can to drag you down to their own level of abjection.