The Other Brother Read online

  “Say my goodbyes,” he said, “won’t you?”

  “You’re leaving?”

  “Yes.”

  “Not stopping the night?”

  “I hardly think so. I’ve booked a room at a hotel nearby.”

  I was about to protest the idiocy of this, not to mention the insensitivity, but then I tried to picture him—Denny Springer—sleeping in the bedroom he’d grown up in, and the picture didn’t work. I’d seen that room before, of course, unchanged since he’d left it over twenty years ago to try to make it big, which he had. That room with its posters of Einstein and Robert Johnson, twin evidence of where his mathematical/musical aspirations lay; the impossibly narrow bed. A few times since moving out of my own parents’ house, I’d had cause to sleep in my childhood bed and had never minded, despite the strangeness. But the idea of Denny Springer doing the same—it was beyond incongruous. He had a point, but I hated conceding it to him.

  “Why did you even bother coming here today anyway, Dennis?” I asked.

  He winced at that last, and it occurred to me that maybe I should start calling him that on a regular basis, but he recovered quickly.

  “Well, I broke up with my girlfriend, didn’t I?”

  I couldn’t say I was sorry to hear that. Not that I had anything against the girl, his latest long-term squeeze, a high-fashion model named Lalaina LaLani; Lalaina LaLani—a name that’s almost impossible to say without sounding like you’re stuttering.

  So even the great Denny Springer, on the heels of a breakup, sometimes needed the comforts of family and home, even if he couldn’t be bothered to learn the details of the lives of the former, even if he’d never sleep in the latter again.

  “Did you not know I broke up with my girlfriend?” he pressed. “Don’t you people read the magazines?”

  It’s not accurate to say I didn’t know who Jack Springer’s brother was when I first met Jack. Of course I did. I just didn’t know he was Jack Springer’s brother.

  I first fell in love with Denny Springer in the summer of 1975, the year I turned thirteen. Well, me and every other girl in England, followed shortly by every other girl in the world. Actually, it was probably more like ninety percent of the girls and ten percent of the boys, if you make mathematical adjustments to allow for the guestimated population of gay people, and I see no reason not to. After all, I wouldn’t want to overestimate his appeal.

  • • •

  They say you can tell a lot about a person by looking at the friends they have, the company they keep. I’ve sometimes thought that looking at my lifelong circle—Stella, Bria, and me—what it says about us is that we’re lazy and perhaps watch too much TV. Roll back the clock just a bit further, to 1968. There’s us, our first day at school. Everyone else, after briefly checking each other out, is pairing off or forming small groups of instantaneous best friendship. Some of these won’t last the week, some might not even last the day, but at least they’re all making the effort, choosing. Now, look at Stella, Bria, and me. We’re hanging back, watching what the others do, in my case waiting—hoping—someone will pick me. But before long, everyone else is matched up and there remains the three of us. Stella gravitates over toward Bria and for a moment I’m left all alone. Thankfully, it’s not for long. Soon, they drift over to me and we all look each other over.

  If there could have been a microphone attached to each of our brains at that point, I’ve always imagined the output would read something like: Yeah. We can make this work.

  And we did, I think in part because we’d all been watching the same TV shows.

  Here’s the thing: Stella is tall, has blonde hair and blue eyes. Bria is short, with curly red hair and green eyes. Me, I’m dark hair, dark eyes. Back then, TV shows and movies were always throwing together three girls with those coloring combinations. You know, three actresses trying to make it in the city or three stewardesses who share a flat? There was that one show in particular, the famous one we all watched, where the girls were all sisters, as if that made any kind of genetic sense. But of course we didn’t think about that at the time. What kid ever does?

  Not having anyone else pick us first was what we had in common. That show was what we had in common.

  When you’re young, you live inside TV shows. This meant, in our case, that we playacted what we saw on the screen. As we got more creative, we’d come up with our own episodes. But by then, what we saw had formed who we were, perhaps as much as any genetics of our own or things we’d learned from watching our parents. Stella, like the blonde on TV, became the vain, loopy one. Bria, true to her prototype, became the crazy tomboy. And me? I was the smart, practical one, like the dark-haired girls always are.

  Honestly, there were times, looking around the classroom, considering how some of the other groups had re-formed, I’d count myself lucky that Stella and Bria hadn’t swapped me out for one of the other dark-haired girls. After all, my type was the most common, the easiest to replace. Perhaps, I thought, they were lazy too. It took me years to accept the fact that no matter our initial reasons for forming our triangular relationship, they’d come to love and value me all the same.

  If kids start out living inside TV programs, before too many years pass, they find themselves living inside music instead. You graduate from fantasizing about an episode in which—surprisingly—your dark-haired character for once gets the man instead of your blonde sister, to doing the math on the age difference between yourself and famous rock stars. Only nine years’ difference? OK, maybe not today then, not when I’m still thirteen, but, in time, you think, this could still work. I mean, you tell yourself, it’s not like I’ve got a thing for someone really old, like Sinatra. It’s not like I’m effing crazy.

  So yeah, by the time we were thirteen, we were still together but had traded our celluloid fantasies for vinyl ones. And somewhere along the way, as friends will do, we’d abbreviated our names. I think, sometimes, that people do this to be cool, nicknames being a badge to prove to others how super close you all are. It certainly can’t be for the verbal savings of a syllable here and there, the time saved in not having to write out a few extra letters. Somehow, if you have a nickname, it makes a person feel more special, it makes a person feel less lonely in the world.

  Unless of course that nickname is something derogatory.

  So Stella had become Stel. Bria was Bri. And me? I became Mon. I loved this when I’d see it written out, when we passed notes in class: Mon—it made me sound like I might have a hidden Rasta side to my practical personality, like on holiday you might find me jamming with Bob Marley in Jamaica or something, even though I couldn’t play an instrument or even sing particularly well.

  This all went along fine when we stuck to using our nicknames in private notes, but when we started verbalizing, that’s when the trouble started. You can see what would have happened, can’t you? Stella and Bria’s nicknames—written or verbal—were exactly the same. But what’s the first syllable of Mona sound like when you say it out loud? Right. It’s Moan, isn’t it? Picture being thirteen years old, feeling pretty cool, and then one of your two best friends shouts down the hall something that sounds like, “Hey, Moan, you coming to lunch or what?”

  Well, of course the group of boys standing next to you starts to snicker. Of course you start getting the rep of being a bit of a whinger, even though you most emphatically are not. And just when you think the fuss is finally dying down, you get your first real kiss in a closet during some basement kissing game at a party and the kisser—Peter Prawn, the prat—christens you “Moaning Mona” to all who will listen and you’re back to square one all over again, only worse, because instead of a whinger now you’re too loudly hot to trot.

  I can take a lot, but that was a bit much even for me. I yanked Stella and Bria aside and told them if I couldn’t be Mon pronounced in the Rasta fashion, I wouldn’t answer when they called me and I’d go back to using their full names, and then where would we all be? I
mmature, I know, but you try being Moaning Mona for a week when you’re thirteen and then we can talk about fair tactics.

  So yeah, we were thirteen and living inside music. And the best place to do that? Stella’s basement. Bria and I had basements too, of course, but not like Stella’s. Bria’s dad had a shop and mine worked in the law. Stella’s did something indefinable in the business world by day, but that wasn’t the good part. Her parents were both heavily into music themselves, among other things, so their basement was kitted out like a rock star’s dream, or at least a thirteen-year-old’s version of a rock star’s dream. Everything was red and black, there was a special organ on which you could do whole songs because it had buttons for other instruments as well, a massive sound system, giant pillows everywhere, and the whole place was soundproofed. Oh, and it also had a huge wine closet. Always well stocked, and the Bradfords never counted the bottles.

  Here’s the thing about the Bradfords, Mr. and Mrs.: even though it was 1975, they were still going through their “groovy” phase. When Mr. Bradford would come home from work, he’d rip off his tie, change into moccasins, and he and his wife would practice transcendental meditation as a smoky haze settled over whichever room they were in. By this point, Stella was getting high on a regular basis. Mrs. B used to say it broke her heart. But she’d never ground Stella or yell at her. Instead, each time Stella got busted with dope in her room, Mrs. B would get all sad and give her the “I’m so disappointed” speech, which probably would have been more effective if it wasn’t Mrs. B’s purse and Mr. B’s sock drawer that Stella was always getting her dope from.

  Still, those speeches always got to Stella, who could be quite sensitive in her loopy kind of way. She’d break down; she and Mrs. B would have a good cry in each other’s arms, both promising to do better. Then Saturday night would roll around, and Bria and I would both be back down for a night in the basement, music blaring, wine bottles open, the occasional spliff to draw on, and no worries of having our little slice of heaven disturbed. After all, the Bradfords didn’t believe in intruding on children’s privacy, did they?

  • • •

  We were lying on our stomachs on the floor in Stella’s basement, listening to the new album by our favorite band while religiously studying the album cover, which was what people did with a new album back then. I can’t imagine how kids do it with CDs now—that must totally suck. Anyway, it wasn’t destined to be the band’s best album, not by a long shot. In fact, for years people would make fun of it for its too-psychedelic music and the fey costumes they all had on. But still, even their worst album was better than most bands’ best. Plus, this was before all that criticism started, and we didn’t care.

  It was my album—my mum had taken me to the shops earlier that cold Saturday afternoon—so I was situated in the middle.

  We were playing one of our favorite games, a game we’d be red-faced embarrassed if anyone else ever caught us out at: which one do you most want to end up with?

  “Lex,” Stella said right away. Well, we all knew she was going to say that, didn’t we?

  The Bradfords had gone on holiday to Switzerland two months previous. The Glasses—Bria’s family—and my own tended more towards holidays in Dover, or perhaps the Cotswolds if our parents were feeling really exotic. The Bradfords tended to stray further afield, and Mr. B had heard tell of some sort of Swiss maharajah he was hoping to confer with about his om. Anyway, one afternoon, Mr. and Mrs. B were doing that, leaving Stella to her own devices, which in this case entailed Stella wandering the streets of Zurich alone.

  And that’s where she saw him: Lex, lead guitarist for our favorite band, just walking down the street like anyone else. She said she went into hysterics so bad when she saw him, she couldn’t speak, the tears just rolling down her face; she said she was surprised she didn’t outright pee herself and that she wasn’t entirely sure she didn’t, at least a little bit.

  Considering Lex’s reputation, he was very kind to her. Believe me, having seen Stella in hysterics before, I wouldn’t have blamed him one bit if he’d just kept walking right on past her as fast as he could. But Lex didn’t do that. Instead, in big, looping handwriting, he scrawled a personalized autograph for her on a scrap of notebook paper on which he’d apparently crossed out some lyrics that failed to please him: To Crying Girl, from Lex: Rock on. He also gave her a guitar pick that was chewed off on one end. Apparently, he’d been using it to clean his teeth. We would have doubted her story. She had no witnesses, after all. But she did have that chewed-off guitar pick. We all knew about Lex, his teeth, and his guitar picks.

  And of course the note and the pick were now framed behind glass, adding one more layer of cool to Stella’s already cool basement. So really, she had to say Lex, didn’t she?

  I could see Bria’s eyes staring at Denny, so I was sure that’s who she was going to say—in fact I was sure Stella would have wanted to say that too, if only the pick hadn’t made her say otherwise—but the name that came out of her mouth was: “8.”

  8 was the drummer. Diehard fans of the band knew that his real name was the all-too-common Jimmy Jones, but no one had called him that in years, instead referring to the enigmatic number he’d chosen to go with his enigmatic persona.

  The other two looked at me: my turn.

  Why hadn’t Bria said Denny? I wondered. It was the obvious choice. And if she’d done so, it would have made my decision so much easier: we could have both gone with Denny, leaving Stella her chewed-up pick. And Bria should have said Denny, for so many reasons, like the fact that her cousin, while holidaying with her parents in Rome, had seen Denny in a bar. Supposedly, he was nice too, although he hadn’t given away any chewed-up items as proof.

  So my friends, or in some cases at least the cousins of my friends, had gotten to meet members of the band. But not me. Not when I was thirteen.

  If only out of family loyalty, then, Bria should have chosen Denny. Plus, he was the best one. Even my mum could see that.

  When we’d gotten home from the shops earlier in the day, my mum had demanded to see my purchase. She was like that with my albums, inspecting the outsides to make sure there wasn’t anything subversive to corrupt my forming mind. I could have told her she had to actually listen to the words to get to that part, but she didn’t ask me, did she?

  “I just want to see what all the fuss is about,” she’d said, grabbing the album out of my hands when I tried to balk. Then we sat down side by side on the sofa, since I was even more eager than she was to study that cover.

  “Huh,” she snorted at the costumes they wore. “They look ridiculous.”

  I, in turn, silently rolled my eyes at her snorting. She just didn’t get it, did she?

  But then her finger came to rest near Denny’s face, so tiny on the cover, as though she were caressing his cheek. “That one,” she said, tapping her finger, and a sigh came out of her then. I don’t think I’d ever heard my mother make that exact sound before. If I’d had words for it at the time, I suppose those words would have been wistful, desire, wanting. “That one really has something,” she said, “doesn’t he?”

  I felt a surge of strange pride then that, in that moment, even my mother could see the legitimacy of what I felt.

  It would be many years before I’d return the favor. Having spent most of my life laughing at her fascination with Frank Sinatra, one time I was helping her clean out the attic when she came across her own old albums. She put one on for a listen and made me look at the cover with her, as we’d done with mine so many years before. I listened and looked at the cover. For the first time, I saw what she was seeing, heard what she was hearing. This wasn’t the pathetic Frank, it wasn’t the Frank with bad hair plugs. It was peak Sinatra, with all the idiosyncratic phrasing that name implies.

  People talk about “Can you separate the singer from the song?” but that’s not really it, is it? It’s that some people, some very few people, have something. They have an it th
at no one else has. At university, I’d studied charismatic authorities: Kennedy, Martin Luther King, Hitler. That’s the problem with charismatic authorities: you don’t know what they’re going to use it for, only that they have something no one else has. When they talk, it’s not a speech; it’s truth. When they sing, there’s nothing else like it. It’s not an exaggeration to say that there are a million voices in the world that are technically better than Denny Springer’s, and yet he’s where he is. Where are they?

  Charisma.

  I’ve never been a religious person, but if I had to pick one thing I think is close to being a miracle, it’s charisma. It can’t be bought, it can’t be learned, it can’t be practiced into being. It just is.

  It’s what Denny Springer has and Jack Springer does not.

  • • •

  “Trey,” I said back down in Stella’s basement.

  “Trey?” Stella and Bria laughed, with Bria adding, “How can you possibly pick the creepy bass player? No one picks him!”

  I just shrugged. I mean, I hadn’t had any choice, had I? If they were both insistent on picking anyone but Denny, I had to do the same. But we all knew the truth, and I knew they knew it too:

  Denny was the best one.

  In so very many ways, Denny was the only one.

  Denny looked down with a mixture of shock and puzzlement at the restraining hand on his forearm. It was my hand. I had to admit, I was shocked too. In the twelve years since becoming his sister-in-law, it would be reasonable to assume that in that time we’d have had some physical contact, however minimal. Kisses on the cheek in greeting? Perhaps a hug? At the very least a handshake the first time Jack introduced us? But none of that had ever happened. It was the first time in the twelve years since I’d met Jack that I’d touched Denny.

  It occurred to me then that I’d never seen the others touch him either. Not his parents. Not Jack. Sure, fans were always trying to get a touch in, hence the two bodyguards. But his own family? The people who presumably knew him best? It was like there was a no-fly zone around him.