The journey out of London was torturous, the traffic unrelenting. Tara had given me the bare details; my mind extrapolated the worst. The drive to Tom’s house took an age.
Tom was four years younger than me. As children, we had played together, fought together, gone on adventures. When I was ten and Tom six, we went exploring a forbidden building site. There were a dozen of us, but the policeman who caught us picked on the littlest. ‘What’s your name, son?’ Tom looked at me and said, ‘Ask him.’ That’s how things were. I was good at coping; sweet, innocent Tom could never quite get to grips with the world.
What he lacked in practical skills, he made up for in good nature. His imagination was sparky; his humour made you smile and groan. For years he worked as a printer, but his passion was sculpture, bending metal into original, unexpected creations. He wrote quirky, striking stories. But he didn’t recognise his own gifts. I think Tom found people intimidating, the natural world and animals more straightforward to deal with. He loved his children but had himself remained a naïf, wandering through life with eyes wide. He put on a brave face, but the world scared him.
Tara’s message had shaken me. Tom had always needed someone to look after him. Our parents had done it while they were alive. Then Tara took on the task. I wondered if she was regretting it.
When I pulled into the drive the house was in darkness. Tara came to the door and switched on the light. She had been a nurse for twenty years and she rarely lost her outer calm.
‘I came home from work last night and I couldn’t find him. That wasn’t too unusual. Since he lost his printing job, he’s been acting quite strange. And drinking. I texted him and he said he was okay. He came home at midnight and went straight to bed. When I went to work this morning he still hadn’t woken up. Then this afternoon I got a text from him and it said something like “Goodbye”. I was worried, so I came back to the house and he wasn’t here. I looked in the garden and found him in the shed. He had blocked up the windows and the door and lit a barbecue . . .’
‘Oh, Christ. How was he?’
‘Alive. The shed was full of fumes and he’d obviously drunk quite a lot; probably taken pills as well.’
‘Could he talk?’
‘Yes. He was woozy. He said he wanted to kill himself and told me to leave him alone . . .’
‘And do you think he was serious? About wanting to kill himself, I mean?’
‘Who knows, Martin? I’ve been dealing with cases like his all my life and I’d still struggle to tell you which are the serious ones and which aren’t.’
‘But was it out of the blue? Or have there been warning signs? He told me about the Prozac and getting lost, but I had no idea it was as bad as that.’
‘He’s been very unhappy. At first he kept busy, cutting the grass and keeping the garden tidy. And he was making his sculptures. But he gradually stopped doing all that and he started drinking earlier and earlier in the day. When I’d get home from work he was usually sitting in the garage smoking or he was asleep. It has been really tough for us all.’
‘But what happened this afternoon was much worse than anything he’d done before, wasn’t it? What did you do when he told you to go away and leave him?’
‘I wasn’t going to leave him to die. I rang 999 and the police came with an ambulance. There were four or five of them, big blokes. They wanted to take him to hospital, but Tom kept arguing and saying he wouldn’t go. So they ended up having to wrestle him to the ground and force him into the ambulance.’
I pictured my brother being manhandled, a scared little boy maltreated and humiliated because he was unhappy with his life, because he had no one to soothe his hurt.
‘They took him to A&E and pumped his stomach,’ Tara said. ‘He’d taken sleeping pills, right enough. But he kept trying to leave, insisting on discharging himself. They’re holding him under the Mental Health Act.’
I was taken aback.
‘God almighty. I saw him for lunch just a few weeks ago and he didn’t mention anything like that. He spoke about some stuff that was worrying him, but nothing serious . . .’
‘Well, you know Tom. He doesn’t open up. He’s always been good at disguising when things are wrong – in public, I mean. He can seem so lovely and so normal to everyone else, but at home he’s a complete nightmare. His behaviour has been so extreme.’
I wanted to see Tom but it was late and Tara said there was no chance of visiting until the morning.
‘But couldn’t we try and ring to see how he is?’ I said. ‘I need to know he’s all right, at least . . .’
‘The problem with mobile phones is that they confiscate the chargers in case the patients use the electrical cord to hang themselves. So I don’t know . . .’
‘But if he has his mobile on him, surely there will be enough battery for us to talk to him, won’t there?’
I rang Tom’s number, not really expecting a reply. He answered after a dozen rings. His voice sounded tired and distant, but his manner was disconcertingly normal.
‘Oh, hiya. Are you ringing me? I’m not at home, you know . . .’
I slept in the spare bedroom of my brother’s house. Before I switched out the light I looked around the room, which doubled as Tom’s study. The walls were lined with his paintings and with photographs of our parents. One showed Dad in his khaki uniform somewhere in the Middle East and there was a display case with his dog tags and medals. I loved my father and mother and I was sad when they died five years ago; but it struck me that Tom’s sense of loss was a continuing one, an ongoing absence in his life. I dreamed of my brother that night and in my dream I resolved to hold him close, to see him more and to hug him to me.
In the morning there was a text from Ayesha on my phone, apologising for her behaviour after the meeting at the Foreign Office. ‘I was ill-mannered,’ she wrote. ‘It wasn’t your fault and I shouldn’t have burdened you with all my problems. I think it’s because I miss my father and I’m finding it hard to come to terms with him being dead. In any event I’ve decided you are right. We need to go to Pakistan.’