THEN
When I was little, I was bullied by an older boy named David, on the school bus. David’s dad was the head joiner on the estate where ours was the head forester. Tom, six years older than me and a year older than David, had graduated to secondary school by then, and we went our separate ways each morning. Tom went to Carnoustie and the swanky new secondary school, while I went to Monikie and the tiny Victorian stone primary school where there were only six people in my class. The bus I rode looked like something left over from the Second World War, and indeed it was. It was a big, hulking, dark blue military-transport type of thing, with two long benches that faced one another across a vast stretch of floor. The thing about that layout of course was that you could never look away from anyone. Everyone saw everyone else and everything that went on, all the time.
Every afternoon on the way home, and some mornings, I was kicked and pushed and slapped off the seat, my ears twisted back and forth, my books flung around and trodden on, the straps of my schoolbag held so I couldn’t get away, and all the while, through my cries of pain and fear, his taunts that I had no big brother now to protect me were ringing in my (red and sore) ears. Luckily the journey back to the estate gates was a short one, and as soon as the bus stopped I leapt off and made a terrified bolt down the drive, much to the amusement of my tormentor and his little brothers.
It was all very Lord of the Flies, and I was Piggy.
David was a nice enough boy, and I realise now that his bullying of me that summer was just his way of establishing the new world order of the Monikie school bus. My brother had been the undisputed leader till he had ascended to secondary school, and so by terrorising me, David was not only defining himself as alpha male, but also as the new Tom Cumming. How better to show that your former leader’s power is nought than by making his little brother cry?
But then I was mad as hell and I was not going to take it any more. I told Tom. Nothing much was said. Just a tearful confession after he asked me if everything was going okay at school without him. I almost forgot about it until one night we were cycling home from Cub Scouts. David and his siblings were in a gaggle ahead of us. Tom shouted out to David to wait up, and then told me to carry on home.
“What are you going to do?” I asked, suddenly alarmed.
“Just go home, Alan. I’ll be there in a wee while.”
I did as I was told, pedalling fast and whizzing through the estate gates and down the driveway, through the sawmill yard to our house and into the bike shed. My heart was racing; my mind a whirl of what awful torture or bloodshed might be taking place at that very moment on my behalf. My parents didn’t seem to pick up on my nervousness. My mum looked up from her ironing and asked where Tom was when I entered the living room, and my dad kept his gaze on the TV. Minutes later Tom arrived, cool as a cucumber, and gave me a stony look that I knew meant we must never speak of this again.
Five minutes later, the doorbell rang and I raced out to answer it, my heart now in my mouth. I opened the door to find David, weeping and clutching his already bruising eye, being held up by his irate mum.
“Get your father!!” David’s mum yelled.
My father ushered them in. Suddenly out of nowhere our living room was a courtroom, and I was both the smoking gun and the cause of the crime.
“Your son gave my son a black eye,” David’s mum shouted.
“Well, Tommy, is this true?” our father yelled, even though I could tell he was secretly proud.
“Yes, it is!” Tom said, pulling himself up and embracing his sins. “But David’s been bullying Alan on the school bus for months now.”
Everything stopped. David’s teenage shame was now exposed for everyone to see. I felt so sorry for him, this skinny adolescent who had shoved me off my seat and thrown my books around and held me down and whacked me countless times. He had never made me feel as mortified as I knew he now felt.
Suddenly I was shaken from my sympathetic reverie by the realisation that the adults had stopped shouting, David had stopped crying. In fact the whole room had stopped and was now looking at me, waiting for me to bring the whole sorry mess to some sort of conclusion.
“Well, Alan,” my dad said. “Is this true?”
The room fell quiet. I could feel my cheeks burning and everyone’s eyes boring deep, laserlike into mine.
“No,” I said meekly.
Much as I wanted to defend Tom’s tribal quid pro quo, I also felt so sorry for David, snivelling away, the bruise around his eye colouring darker by the second. It was just too much to deal with, and I chose what I thought was the lesser of two evils. As soon as I’d denied he was my tormentor I’d burst into tears, and the adults mercifully realised they were putting a nine-year-old under too much duress, especially when there came no protestation of innocence from David. The Clarks went home, I was comforted, and the matter was never mentioned again. In some way there was an agreement between us all that justice had been served. An eye for an eye. Or more like a black eye for a series of bruises and stinging ears.
I told this story at my brother’s wedding. (His third, incidentally. We Cumming boys love a wedding.) For me it is emblematic of our relationship: Tom always the protective big brother, me in awe of the enormity of his devotion and screwing things up.
FRIDAY 21ST MAY 2010, 8 P.M.
Almost forty years later, Tom is sitting across the table from me on the roof terrace of my flat, visibly shaking and seemingly incapable of beginning the speech that he knows is going to blow my world apart. He stammers and makes several false starts. I beg him to just say it. To just tell me. I am going mad with the waiting.
At first he apologises because he has already told Grant. Again I can’t process what that means. He says he didn’t know how best to tell me and so he called Grant for advice. Everything was whirring—my thoughts, Tom’s voice, the skyline of Soho all around us. He finally manages to get out that our father had called him ten days ago.
“What did he say?” I whispered. I was shaking. I had started to cry. I was in hell. “Please Tom, please . . .”
Tom looked up at me, his blue eyes filled with tears too. He gulped, and finally he said it.
“He told me to tell you that you’re not his son.”
I learned something about myself that night, something I had no idea about. And about a month later, one sweaty afternoon on a terrace in southern Malaysia, I was reminded of it again: when I get really shocking news, my entire body tries to get the hell away as quickly as possible.
Before I had really processed what Tom had said I found myself propelling backwards, knocking over the bench I was sitting on and careening away from my brother. It felt as though I needed to push this incredible information back, give myself the space necessary to even contemplate contemplating it. Downstairs, Sue and Dom thought the sound they were hearing was Tom and me fighting, and that a body had just been flung to the floor.
“What do you mean?” I kept asking.
Tom was holding me now, trying to calm me down. This information was so far from left field it was not even in the field. To say it was the last thing I expected to hear was an understatement of an understatement.
“You’re not his son,” he said again.
Tom was crying too now, but he could see how overwhelmed I was, how much I needed more information, and fast.
“He called me a week ago, weeping . . . ,” he began.
“Dad called you . . . Dad called you weeping?!” I spluttered. Nothing was making sense.
“Yes.