August 1988
Dan was almost seventeen when, one August Sunday, he rode a motorbike a hundred yards down the road to the pub. He hit a car and destroyed his future as an athlete. His right leg was smashed, the bone splintered into tiny pieces. He came home from hospital six weeks and seven operations later in a plaster cast. His leg, though damaged, was saved, but complications and fifteen further operations followed, and for years he limped a fine line between amputation and recovery.
I rang him in hospital the day after the accident, struggling to keep my voice steady as I listened to him. ‘I hate it here. I want to go home. It hurts so much and I can’t sleep. Everyone else here is old and one man just died in the bed across from me.’ Dan sniffed, melancholy and alone.
I had not seen him yet and I could not imagine my tall, strong brother hemmed by plaster into a hospital bed. Dan had never stopped growing. He was still the baby of the family because he liked to be the baby, and Poppy wanted to be grown-up. He would perch on Mum’s knee, cracking the chair and falling with her on to the kitchen floor, but every afternoon until his accident he trained for three hours with the Junior County football team. Dad was very proud of this. Mum struggled to scrape the money together for a specially made pair of football boots (Dan’s feet were too big for regular ones), and Dan and Dad sat in the sun and got brown while discussing football tactics.
Dad insisted that he too had played top-class football, although Brodie and I, jealous of Dan and Dad’s exclusive sport, doubted it. Stung by our scorn, Dad produced a photograph, small, sepia and crinkled, of young men with voluminous shorts and Charlie Chaplin smiles.
‘Which is you?’ But before Dad answered I saw Flook’s face in the team. At nineteen they were identical, the same bones building the same features, more than fifty years apart.
Dan could never play again after his accident. His pride and his easy-going, happy nature made it impossible for the rest of us to see how much he minded. We guessed, and heaped guilt upon ourselves, secretly offering our own sound limbs to the gods in exchange for the return of Dan’s. We had to make do with visiting him after his operations, bearing three Big Macs at a time. They vanished in seconds.