CHAPTER 6

JIM

It was awful. Horrific. I watched, open-mouthed, as Jim staggered through the garden gate, his hands clutching his abdomen. It soon became clear what was going on. The knife handle protruded from his stomach, and there was blood all over his hands.

‘Muuuuuuum …’ he called out as he finally made it to the back door.

She rushed to him, a look of horror on her face as she looked at the crippled form of her ten-year-old boy. ‘Jim, what’s happened?’ she cried, as he fell into her arms.

‘I … I found this knife handle in the street.’ Jim showed Mum the knife handle and the tomato ketchup he’d smothered his hands with, grinning like a loon.

She was bound to find it funny. Eventually. There was probably a point where Jim must have thought shit, I wish I’d really impaled myself on a knife, as Mum beat him to within an inch of his life.

I thought it was funny. I didn’t tell her I thought it was funny. But inwardly, I was laughing my rocks off.

Jim and I had the typical sibling relationship for brothers who were separated by a year. He’d play with me if his mates weren’t around. I’d be obnoxious and get him into trouble as and when I could. That said, there was a solidarity there. It was okay for Jim to beat and torture me indiscriminately, but woe betide anyone else who had a go.

I was in the square round the back of our house. No surprise there really, that’s where I spent the vast majority of my early years. The Colgates were a family relatively new to our street. This meant that the existing and well-established pecking order had to be er … renegotiated. Brian was a year older than Jim and Shaun was a year younger than me. I had already demonstrated to Shaun, nonverbally, that his place in the food chain was substantially lower than mine.

Brian had not taken exception to the placings, just at how strongly I might have put my point to his younger brother. He was now explaining to me, through the medium of a good kicking, that he’d rather I hadn’t been quite so vehement in putting forward my views to Shaun. He had me cornered between a car and a wall in the street and I had reached the point where I was hoping he was going to tire a little.

It was then Jim noticed my plight. Being a mathematical sort, he swiftly calculated that the sum of the force of the Young brothers would be greater than that of a single Brian. With this in mind, he joined the fray.

Being a mathematician and not a psychologist, he had not taken all extraneous variables into account. The most important of these variables was that I’d had quite enough physical activity that day, thanks, and decided to bravely leg it. Thus leaving Jim to enjoy Brian Colgate’s full wrath.

That isn’t entirely accurate. It became clear to me as I fled that the Colgate boy had found reserves of anger and energy he didn’t realise he had, borne of the fury and indignation of the attempted rescue. I think Jim got a bigger beating than the one originally intended for me.

I’m sure we all learned a valuable lesson that day. ‘He who fights and runs away – and leaves his brother to get a good pasting – lives to, er … ’

On top of this, Jim also suffered the indignation of me cuddling him every night as we shared a bed. I had some notion that I’d fall off the earth or, at the very least, everyone else would bugger off and leave me if I didn’t have at least one hand on someone all through the night.

As we grew, Jim’s ability to misread situations continued to get the better of him.

There had been a fair at West Glebe Park – a large swathe of greenery containing a number of copses, a pitch-and-putt golf course, and a bunch of football pitches. Jim and I had spent our fair money really quickly on a variety of shitty rides and stalls. We still had ages to play so we went to the play park at the edge of West Glebe.

We were magically drawn to the monument that was an old steam train. It was painted bright green in some local authority attempt to make it look like fun. It was fun. We would spend hours playing train tig.

You would be correct in your assumption that I am going to use two tried-and-tested phrases here: ‘Had I been paying attention’, and ‘Look away now.’

Train tig involved clambering all over said train while playing tig. If you were tug, then you’d give the tigger five seconds to get away.

Hutch had suffered the same fate as us. He’d run out of money and didn’t want to go home yet. At this tender age – eight or nine – Hutch had not yet become a fully-fledged nutter and was still a fun guy to hang out with. He joined in with the train tig session.

Look away now.

Hutch had been tigged and was looking for revenge. Had I been paying attention, I’d have noticed that standing with the funnel of the train’s chimney behind me was not the wisest thing for me to do. Hutch stood on top of the train, facing me.

Which way should I go? I hadn’t really thought this out. If I moved too quickly I’d fall off the train and onto the concrete below. I was just putting this down to experience – thinking something along the lines of, ‘I don’t think I’ll stand here again’ when Hutch lunged at me, shouting in his broad Scots accent. ‘Tig!’

I remember nothing after that. Jim went home. The walk from West Glebe to our house took about half an hour, so it gave Jim some time to think as to what he should tell Mum.

In a Bruce Forsyth, ‘What’s on the conveyor belt tonight?’ style, Jim exclaimed, ‘Guess where Christopher is.’

Mum went through a variety of friends’ houses and places where I could have been, until Jim got bored with his game and called out the answer. ‘No – he’s in hospital!’

I woke up in the ambulance to find Hutch staring at my prone form. Even when he sounded concerned it still sounded like he wanted to do me some damage, so I chose unconsciousness again. When I finally came round properly a day or so later, Hutch told me how he’d watched as I’d vanished backwards over the chimney after the impact of his somewhat firm tig. Both he and Jim went round to the front of the train, fearing the worst.

It was okay – I’d landed on my head. I bled a lot and had a most splendid wound on my left cheek. The good news is that they replaced the concrete around the train with sand. It was great to know my sacrifice had not been in vain.

Why am I telling you all this? Why do you need to know about Jim the Impaled, Jim the Colgate Slayer (Not), and Jim the Comedic Deliverer of Messages?

It’s because, dear reader, after Mum died, we lost an awful lot of that boy. Sure, there was the usual sibling rivalry stuff – the, ‘Christopher, why don’t you just fuck off, can’t you see I’m playing with my friends?’ moments, and the racing-each-other-up-the-streetto-the-house-so-we-could-get-to-the-toilet-first stuff going on. There was nothing out of the ordinary until …

After we got back from our Scottish holiday, Dad absolved himself of all housekeeping duties by giving Jim a sum of money plus the family allowance (now called child benefit) to get the groceries. Dad would pay the rent and the gas and electric bills. Sorted.

Well … not really.

One week, Jim had been unable to get the shopping in and had put this responsibility onto my youthful and eager shoulders. ‘I usually just spend £6 on the shopping,’ he said, handing me the rather small wad. I went to the shops and bought the small amount of food that this meagre amount would buy. Gradually it became clear that this was why we never had anything to eat in the house.

In home economics, the teacher ran a class experiment. We were all to find out how many calories we ate in a day, how many sweets and sugary drinks we had, and how much we spent on the week’s shopping. There was much excitement as we compared and contrasted our calorific intakes. Some folk in the class appeared to live purely on chocolate; some folk ate a medium amount of shite. I ate none.

This, I felt, immediately put me on the moral high ground. All these folk were eating things that were bad for them – and I didn’t.

It was the comparative cost of the groceries that was of most interest to me in this little bit of research.

‘Martin?’

‘£20.’

‘Tracey?’

‘£25.’

‘Paul?’

‘£30.’

And so it continued around the class. The highest was about £30 and the lowest around £20.

Until it got to me …

‘Christopher?’

‘£6.’

And then, by way of explanation, I said, ‘We eat really well.’ Which wasn’t remotely true – unless of course you took into account all the food I got from a variety of friends’ houses. Derek’s mum, Willie Irvine’s mum, Kev’s mum and Gary Ilko’s mum all got the same treatment: ‘Oh, I’m sorry – are you having your tea? Oh really? That would be lovely, if you’re sure it’s not too much trouble. In retrospect I’m sure they all knew what was going on – it was a wonderful conspiracy of silence where I flattered them mercilessly in return for a meal.

Oh, and of course I had the infamous batter bits. But none of that cost any money.

There was a bit of murmuring and the teacher quizzed me on everything from the accuracy of my accounting to the size of my family. She concluded that I must be mistaken.

When I recount my sorry tale to friends and professionals a common question bubbles to the surface. ‘What did the teachers do?’

Well I guess the word ‘nothing’ kind of covers it. What should they have done? They’d been presented with a child who’d been a real high flier in primary school. He’d come to senior school, hardly attended at all in his first year and had, unsurprisingly, academically fallen on his face. By second year he was back on course and was put in the top class for the rest of his school career. He could have tried a bit harder though.

Maybe they just didn’t know. I assumed Dad would have informed the school – certainly, a couple of the teachers appeared to know, but no one really said anything or did anything about it.

Mr Booth, the woodwork teacher, was the delightful master of this craft. To say I wasn’t particularly good with my hands is a bit of an understatement. It seemed that every week I took it upon myself to break a hacksaw blade. Mr Booth rewarded me for this by whacking me across the arse with a small cricket bat that he’d lovingly made for the purpose. This week, Mr Booth was demonstrating some tricky task on a jigsaw or some such thing. We all stood around the wonderful machine, enjoying the banter with our mentor, when I demonstrated my love for his art by passing out.

Mr Booth rushed me outside where I duly came round and puked up on the pavement outside the craft block. I remember I hadn’t eaten for a while so it was mainly yellow bile and water that came up. Being a curious sort, Mr Booth asked me what I’d had for breakfast.

My mind raced. If I said ‘Nothing’, he might get concerned and ask Dad to come into school. Then they might realise just how shit things were for me and put me into care.

If I said, ‘Bacon, eggs, sausages, fried bread, baked beans and black pudding, all washed down with fresh orange juice’ he might have noticed that none of these items were in my vomit, realise I was trying to cover up and … put me into care.

I said ‘Cornflakes and a glass of milk,’ thinking this might keep him off the scent. He paused. He didn’t believe me. What was he thinking? He got me to go back inside and sit quietly for the rest of the class.

Nothing happened. He didn’t say anything about it again.

And that was the pattern of it all. At some point, Jim and I had got our small heads together and concluded that if anyone were to discover too much about our situation, we’d find ourselves in care. Whatever ‘care’ might be.

So we covered up, lied and fabricated our way through school. Which takes us back to the question, ‘What did the teachers do?’

What could they do if, apart from a few subtle clues here and there, they didn’t know anything?

While Jim was doing a pretty good job of looking after himself in challenging circumstances, I was developing some pretty strange behaviours. Some of them were harmless. I released my pent-up anger and testosterone by masturbating, which was only fun when Jim or my dad didn’t walk in unexpectedly and catch me in the act. Some were less harmless. Suffice it to say, I threw myself into the task of pugilism with great gusto. I don’t think this served to endear me to many folk.

As time passed I became more and more introspective. I think I was being attacked by a particularly effective two-pronged assault.

There was the assault from the outside world. The people around me must have seen a change from the happy-go-lucky eccentric in training, to an unkempt, ill-disciplined, angry young man.

Then there was my inside world. I hated what I had become. I felt like an outsider. I relished this label that I’d given myself, but at the same time I despised it. When I was using my wit and charm, it was great to be me. I could see humorous opportunities where others saw nothing. Using my imagination, I could take people to some of the fine places I frequented. Gradually though, I became less keen to share. I’d go to my little inner spaces on my own.

The first time I really remember doing this was on a school trip to Edale Youth Hostel in Derbyshire. This was essentially a rambling holiday where we were to explore the many and varied walks in and around the start of the Pennine way. I loved the hills. The feeling of freedom, of vast openness, filled my teenage heart with joy. Being fitter and abundantly more enthusiastic than many of my schoolmates, I was always involving myself by helping others at the back, by joining the leading pack, by showing great interest in the route, and so on. God, I must have been a pain in the arse.

It was on one of these excursions that something a little odd happened. We’d stopped by a river to enjoy our packed lunches of damp sandwiches, squashed up fruit, and a hot beverage that tasted like whatever had been in the thermos on the last trip. I took myself to a spot along the bank to eat mine. I remember feeling a little sad and that I found the sound of the river soothing, possibly even therapeutic.

Then nothing.

I was suddenly surrounded by the teacher, Mr Long, and a few of my friends looking quizzically at me. Where had I been?

The troops had all moved off, en masse, on the way to some fine hill or other. Because I was so involved with a variety of folk on the way, everyone assumed I was with someone else – until the coin finally dropped. No one had seen me since lunch – and that was an hour ago. So, the above folk retraced their steps and found me where they had left me.

I was sitting on the riverbank, staring into the middle distance. I had vanished into my own inner world. When asked, I had absolutely no recollection of what I’d been thinking about or whether or not I’d heard everyone go off. I hadn’t been asleep. This was to be start of me ‘zoning out’.

It took me a little while to refocus – to fully appreciate what was going on around me. Folk were nervously laughing. Perhaps someone said, ‘What’s wrong with him?’ but I’m not all that sure. I re-joined the throng and rambling recommenced. No further questioning. No further comment. It all served to reinforce the view that I was a little odd.

On that same school break things got even weirder. We’d been marauding around outside the youth hostel playing a game that was a hybrid of football and Terminator 2. We’d been asked to come in because it was late and we had an early start.

Gary Ilko and I chose the hiding option. We legged it around the back and waited for our hiding place to be sprung. We were both panting and laughing. I remember my skin felt cold in the evening air. While we were looking at each other, Gary suddenly sounded alarmed. ‘Chris, what’s wrong?’

He told me later that the colour had drained out of my face and I’d lost all expression as I gazed straight through him. From my perspective, something altogether stranger was happening.

Gary Ilko’s head changed into my mum’s.

It was absolutely shocking. I felt light-headed; my mouth dry. She was vaguely smiling. I was terrified.

She vanished as quickly as she’d appeared. I think the whole experience lasted for about 30 seconds. Shit, now I was really bonkers.

I told Gary what had happened. He was great. He was just concerned about me. Was I okay now? Was I scared? Should we tell someone? No, that was it. We never told anyone.

Years later I discovered that this was probably a hypnogogic hallucination. When I say ‘probably’, I mean ‘definitely’. I mean, if Gary Ilko had really developed the skill to morph his head into heads of his friends’ deceased parents, we’d have seen him doing it on TV by now. A hypnogogic hallucination is borne out of stress, combined with an incredible desire for that person to be there.

Now that was a really odd school trip. I returned home and life went on.

I spent more and more time on my own. I hated to be alone and yet, in many cases, I was choosing to exclude myself from the world. I felt terrible about my appearance – about my clothes mainly. This gradually spilled over to other areas of my appearance; my face, my hair, my body. All this gave me a heightened state of arousal. I felt anxious and angry so much of the time.

I hid myself away. I started to display my ‘polar bear trapped in the zoo’ behaviours.

I would take one of the chairs from next to the dinner table and put it in the corner of the room, the front legs of the chair facing out into the room. I then took a tennis ball and would bounce it off the wall and header it between the chair legs. Every time I did this it was a goal.

I drew up a list of every team in the English first division. I set up league and cup games. I would choose a team and start scoring goals. When I missed, that meant it was time to start racking up the score for the other team. Yes, as you can imagine, there were some most interesting scores like West Ham 1 – Chelsea 72. The thing was, I documented everything. I used every bit of paper in the house, including my sports day certificates, to keep an accurate account of how all the teams were doing in my own fantasy league.

Hour upon hour. Day after day. Thankfully, I never thought to record top goal scorers or I’m sure I’d still be scribbling my records today.

In a similar vein, I raced small round sweets called Wordies. Our coffee table had a slight incline in it. I would release two sweets at the top of the incline and the first one past Dad’s coffee cup would be the winner. For those of you who are concerned about the rainforests, you’ll be delighted to hear I didn’t document these races.

There was one Wordie that stood (bloody hell, I nearly wrote ‘who stood’ – no unresolved issues there then) above all of the others. It was lime green and had ‘Cat’ printed on it in purple letters. Cat won everything. Other Wordies would come and go – but Cat was there for good.

Oh god, this sounds really loopy.

As time passed I had less and less to eat and spent a lot of my time hungry. It was okay to eat the others – but Cat endured. About two years after this all started, Cat was the only Wordie left. It was tatty and frayed around the edges. The once bold lettering had faded now; only some of the purple colouring was left.

Jim’s shopping regime had been in place for some time. The cupboards and the fridge were empty. There wasn’t even a margarine and mustard sandwich to be had.

I was so hungry. So hungry.

I ate Cat.

I was devastated. I remembered all the times we’d had, all the races he’d won. Sure, I’d contrived to help him win a few, but he was head and shoulders above the rest. But now, at my hand, he was gone. I’d become attached to a sweet for fuck’s sake!

I did have a real cat that I was also pretty attached to. Ginger the dog slayer would give me the love and affection I needed. (I’ve just had a thought. We always had food for the cats. Clearly Jim felt that it was more important to keep them fed – and they could catch mice and birds and the occasional mole.)

Even when I was angry, this (well-fed) furry friend would come and see me and purr. She’d fetch little paper balls that I threw for her. She’d sleep on my bed. She was just there.

One day I came home from school – angry and alone. As usual she’d come to see me. Everything would be okay. Not this time. Fuck.

I took hold of that little cat and threw her. She had no idea what was going on. I caught up with her and hit her around the body, then around her head. I grabbed her and shook her. I threw her onto one of the armchairs. It was there she had a seizure.

My anger vanished immediately. What had I done? I’d just battered the one thing in the world that showed me love. There in front of me her eyes rolled and her legs kicked out at some unseen assailant. ‘I’m sorry, I’m sorry,’ I repeated again and again as I stroked that same body and head that I’d been beating only seconds before.

After what seemed hours she came out of it – dazed, but happy to see me. She purred as I stroked her and tickled her under her chin. She sat on my knee for pretty much the rest of that evening. We both sat in a kind of shock. What the fuck was going on?

It never happened again.

In the world of psychology, there’s a belief held by many that you can’t just get rid of a behaviour – you have to change it. You need to replace it with something else. At 13, I wasn’t terribly aware of any psychological theories. That said, at 13 I was going some way to proving these fine people right.

It’s a bit like trying to squash an unburstable balloon. Every time you squeeze it tight, another bit pops up through your fingers.

My anger was still alive and well. In my mind, it was still okay to fight with – and threaten and aggressively posture towards – people at school and people I played football with. They were sentient, thinking beings who were more than able to look after themselves – or work out ways to not piss me off. For some, this proved impossible. For some, simply breathing and existing were attributes sufficient to cause me to fly into a rage. I’d work on that later.

With beating up Ginger there came guilt. With guilt, there came self-hatred. With self-hatred, there came inwardly turned anger. With inwardly turned anger, there came self-harming.

It wasn’t quite as simple as that though. The self-harming actually provided me with respite from the psychological turmoil in my head.

It started one day with pins. At school in needlework, many of the boys (including me) thought it would be an absolute hoot to push a needle or a pin through the dead part of the skin of our fingers. The result? A finger that had the appearance of the old ‘arrow-throughthe-head’ illusion. Girls would scream and boys would cackle evilly.

I was practising this at home one day when I accidentally pushed the pin into some living flesh. Not being someone who ordinarily relishes pain, I guess I must have hopped about manfully, running my finger under the cold tap until the bleeding subsided. It was here the two-pronged attack of my wonky thinking came into play.

First of all – this was pain I deserved. I was horrible. I had done an awful thing to my cat. Once I put my mind to it, I could find loads of reasons as to why I deserved to hurt myself. Hitting people did eventually come into it – but that came after not doing my homework and hating my dad.

Secondly … secondly … fuck, how do I describe this without sounding completely bananas?

At the tender age of 13, I had more nasty stuff going on in my head than I could easily tolerate. My mum had died of cancer. My dad had revealed his alcoholic credentials. Everyone – that is, all the other grown-ups in my life – had vanished without a trace and Jim was spending the family fortune. The mixture of isolation, upset, anger, and just plain old sadness filled my thoughts so much of the time.

I found that sticking needles into my fingertips took away some of the focus from the psychological pain.

The dense gathering of nerves there provided just the right amount of distraction at the right time. Momentarily, the clutter in my mind cleared. All the competing thoughts fell by the wayside as the white-hot pain came to the front of my mind, screaming for attention.

I felt calmer after the pain subsided. I became hyper-aware of my surroundings and I drank it in.

The problem with finger-stabbing is that the pain goes on for much longer than you would want it to. After the sensory heightening moments of watching the blood blob and flow along the contours of the ridges and whorls of my fingertips had passed, I was left with bloody sore fingers. I found it hard to write or pick my nose.

No, this just wouldn’t do.

We had a black comb that had a long and pointed metal handle. I decided that this would do the job. Self-harm is one thing, but dying of some horrible infection borne out of sticking a metal spike into my arm was not high on my agenda. I sterilised the comb handle by holding it in the beautifully cleansing flame of our gas cooker.

It wasn’t terribly sharp, so pushing the handle into my left forearm took quite some force. The first time I did it, the pain was fantastic. I could feel my breath shorten, my eyes water, my nose stream. My mouth was wide open as I silently pushed the full four inches in, then through, my arm. I clenched my teeth as I saw my skin whiten and bulge at the promise of the point breaking through.

All the shit in my head just evaporated. I was addicted. I couldn’t do it all the time – someone might notice. How do you explain this away? As far as I can remember I was unaware that this was practised by others. I was alone in the world in my little world of minor self-mutilation.

There was hardly ever any blood. There were times when there was hardly any pain. Very occasionally I’d have another shot. This was rare because it took a lot for me to build up to the point of the assault. That said, there were strange experimental times when I wasn’t stressed, when I didn’t have the driving belief that I was worthy of punishment. I just did it out of boredom, curiosity … I’m not sure what. I just did it.

No one ever found out. It was my little secret.

As Jim grew through his teenage years, he developed that cruel egocentric streak sometimes exhibited by this group of humanity. Dad had given Jim some money to buy me some trousers. Why he didn’t give the money to me is anyone’s guess – he gave it to Jim.

Jim went for the cheap option: a pair of the most ludicrous brown flares that I’d ever seen. Added to that, they were about three inches too long for me. No matter, I had nothing else to wear for school club, so I wore them.

I spent my evenings playing table football and then going on to play five-a-side football in the gym hall with my mates. As you can imagine, playing table football with clown’s trousers on didn’t pose much of a problem. Me and Shaun Hannah continued to defeat everyone who stood in our path.

The five-a-side was altogether different. Football was something from which I gained my little bit of kudos. I fell all over the place, tripping over the hems, my feet and the ball. It was awful. I remember looking across and seeing my brother and his mate, Andy Hadden, laughing uncontrollably at my plight.

What could I do? I didn’t do anything. I had some childish notion of dignity and I took all my upset and anger home with me and put it in a box for later. I’m still not terribly good at being laughed at.

Jim was a very popular boy in the sixth form. He was a bit of a bully with a caustic tongue that he used to belittle everyone. So perhaps for popular, read ‘feared’, with folk being nice to him because they didn’t want to look like an arse.

Yes, I’m being bitter. That probably wasn’t the case. There were folk who liked him for who he was.

I was different from Jim. Over the years I’d become a little crazy and folk appeared to enjoy my slightly offbeat humour. I liked to be liked. I liked to be the centre of fun and frivolity.

Jim and I were having a bit of a public argument in the common room. I can’t remember what it was about – but I do remember that he wasn’t faring terribly well.

He stopped the argument dead by stating, ‘At least I wasn’t voted the most hated person in the sixth form.’

I can still feel that lump in my throat, that lurch in my stomach accompanied with a complete inability to speak.

I didn’t cry until I got home. I spent all my time trying to fit in with normal folk in my crazy fucking world. And now … and now I’d discovered for what? For some bunch of bastards to democratically vote me in as … Fuck!

Dad, unusually for him, spotted that something was wrong. ‘What’s wrong?’

That said, it wouldn’t have taken the most gifted of counsellors to spot my distress. I was crying uncontrollably. ‘Ask him,’ I blurted as I pointed at my loving brother.

I took an emotionally charged swing at him – hitting him in the face. It was a bit shit and floppy. I felt defeated.

‘He’s not going to be happy until he’s beaten me up!’ Jim declared in his defence.

Dad explained that there wasn’t going to be any beating up. I told him what had happened and it all dissipated without blame and without further incident. Unresolved.

Jim threw himself into his A Levels and vanished away into Dad’s bedroom for hours on end. He’d complain if I sang while I was cooking, doing the dishes or tidying the house. I’d either been, or was about to be, chucked out of school. Just another thing to add to the growing pile of shite that was my life.

Don’t worry, this self-pitying diatribe finishes shortly.

Jim and I were standing in the kitchen. We were probably chatting about nothing much. He had his back to me. Suddenly he turned round and punched me squarely in the face. I hit the ground like a felled tree. Jim, upon realising that I wasn’t unconscious or dead or paralysed from the neck down, took the only sensible course of action available to him. He ran upstairs and locked himself in the toilet.

I lay on the checked linoleum, staring at the variety of brown stains on the ceiling. I could have been there for hours. I was probably only lying there for a couple of minutes. I felt wonderfully calm, almost serene.

I got up, walked upstairs and knocked on the toilet door. ‘It’s okay, Jim, you can come out now. I’m not going to do anything.’

Silence. ‘Come on, we’re grown up – we can talk about it.’

The door opened. I didn’t wait for second thoughts. I grabbed hold of Jim and dragged him out. I punched him in the head and face all the way down the stairs. I pushed him through the door of the living room and up against the sideboard. The sideboard that me and Mum had wrestled with all those years before.

I didn’t feel any anger. I didn’t feel anything. I was vaguely aware of Jim shouting and crying out as I repeatedly punched his face. He held up his arms to protect himself. I pulled them down with my left hand while I continued to punch him with my right.

In all my experiences of fighting – of being in them or seeing them – the participants make a noise, grunting and shouting as they trade punches. I was completely silent, quietly splitting his lip, chipping his teeth, making his nose bleed and giving him black eyes. I felt like an observer passively watching this scene of unfeeling violence.

Dad sprang up out of nowhere. Suddenly he was standing between us. He was shouting as well. It took a while for me to reconnect with it all. I felt nothing. I looked at the mess I’d made of my brother and I felt nothing.

I was aware of something horrible as I came back to reality. Had it not been for Dad throwing himself between us, I would still be hitting Jim today. I would have killed him. I would have continued in that silent trance until he was no longer moving.

That realisation really struck home, because I never chose the pugilistic option with anyone after that day.