I have always wanted to be a good role model to my younger brother. The difference between us is just one year. You see, over the years, my younger brother has always overshadowed me. Of course, he was more handsome, and girls liked him. He had more friends and was easily liked by family and friends because he could tell jokes and remember names and faces. I was lousy at all of these.
I was shy and introverted, and I never was able to recall names and faces, which I know often made people impatient with me. They would say, “So, you do not remember me? I was at… We went to St. Patrick together… I used to come watch TV at your house. I used to beat you at Ludo games. Why are you looking at me as if you have never seen me before?”
They were total strangers to me. But then, my younger brother, Tom would come, and he would say, “Ha, Billy, you do not remember Sam? He was your classmate at the college. He is Kingsley’s cousin…” only then would I remember who was standing in front of me…I mean to date. I am lousy like that.
Now you see why my brother was more fun than me?
Anyway, there was this day… and oh before I forget, my brother, Tom, could fight too. Well, he didn’t get into trouble often because, like I said, he had many friends. But because he was your typical boy, he knew a few tricks when it came to swinging punches and landing his fists at the right angle to make it hurt for a long time…one of the reasons I avoided picking fights with him.
He had beaten me a couple of times. My mum, in her wisdom, on one of the two occasions she applied TCP to my jaw after a scuffle in the dust with my brother, had advised me not to pick fights with him.
I was home…as usual. I did not have many friends. I read books and watched TV back-to-back. That was my thing.
I was, I think, about 16 years or so. I was cooking for my mum…since I did not have friends, my mother gave me plenty of housework…cook, clean…fetch water…while my brother played football or was with his friends fooling around town. She never complained about it.
My brother came home crying. He had fresh cuts across his forehead and there was a bit of blood on his elbow.
Trouble had come.
Somehow, I knew that if I did not solve this problem my brother came home with, my mum would return to ask me what I had done about it.
So I asked him, “Tom, what happened to you?”
He was crying…a strange thing for this overconfident spoilt brat.
He told me some senior from our school had beaten him for eyeing his girlfriend.
Huh?
“Why would you be eyeing a senior’s girlfriend?” I asked him.
He was not listening. He wanted revenge and, in his mind, the best person to get this for him was me.
“Are you coming to fight him or you will sit there and ask questions?”
“Fight?”
I didn’t think it had come to that, but I needed my brother to see me as his helper, you know, he came home, thinking his big brother would fight for him…I could see myself in my mind’s eye, like Kong in King Kong. I beat my chest, squared my shoulders and foolishly followed my brother to the senior who dared to beat a little boy. This senior would soon discover my brother had a big brother…being me… who can fight.
I followed Tom with righteous indignation out of the house.
He was still working up the tears as he took me to where he had been beaten…I mouthed threats that assured my brother that he had a big brother who could fight.
We got to the house of the beater of young brothers. Tom called him out with nasty names.
“Uchenna, come out, you big bully, come out, let my brother deal with you!”
“Come out!
With my heart thumping hard, I called out Uchenna…regardless of whether he was our senior or not. We were, after all, not on school grounds.
Then Uchenna came out…hmmn. Uchenna was taller and had more muscle than me.
The first thought that came to mind was mediation. Maybe I could talk this guy into apologising to my younger brother. I was not sure I could beat him.
But my younger brother wanted blood, so he kept shouting “Billy will beat you today, ehn, you will never forget.”
See ehn, younger brothers, in fact, your younger siblings can put you in trouble.
This is Tom who made fun of me at home. Tom, who boasts to our cousins that he could beat me silly and had done so twice…the same Tom telling a stranger I would beat him.
I looked around for an elder, a friend, anyone who could stop what I had now begun to see as a fight I would be disgraced in. There was no one but my spoilt brother braying.
What did I do?
I rose to the occasion. What else could I do? My brother would never let me live it down for the rest of my life if I fled. Better chop the beating from Uchenna and be done with it.
Ok, so, you know I stammer? So stammering, especially when I find myself in a tricky situation, works my temper up.
So, I began to stammer.
I tried to call Uchenna names…the words did not quite come out like I had wished…this annoyed me especially when Uchenna began to mimic me.
“yyyyoooouuu….ai, ai wuuuuuuuulll shhhhhsshhhh”
I lunged at Uchenna with a Bruce Lee-like kick…
Well, it was meant to be a kick; only that Uchenna caught my leg, leaving me hopping on one foot.
I felt disgraced already with my younger brother looking shocked at the spectacle before him.
Uchenna held my right leg in a grip and mocked as my hands faltered trying to punch his face.
I kept hopping on my left foot. Uchenna manoeuvred me to a plantain groove behind his house.
I heard Tom calling out, “…beat him up Billy, beat him up.”
I am not sure I heard Tom after that because I had to concentrate on not being further humiliated by this Uchenna of a person.
I couldn’t beg him to release my leg. I tried to hop closer, swinging my fists at him the way my younger brother once did to me, but it failed to connect with Uchenna’s mocking face.
I hopped along, ashamed of myself. I was more ashamed that I had failed my younger brother because it seemed Uchenna had other plans. You know plantain leaves contain sap, you know, the liquid that flows along the stem? We all knew back in the day that if your skin rubbed on this sap, you would itch like a madman. So, this thought made me panic. From the evil glint in Uchenna’s face, I knew that was what he meant to do to me. So, I fought harder to free my leg from his grip.
Suddenly, Uchenna let go of my leg and I toppled over but as I got up quickly, I grabbed a stick on the ground. I hit him with it but my blow was not well-aimed. But maybe he was surprised by it, maybe it really hurt, I don’t know but Uchenna paused, and that is what did him in. I knocked him down and immediately pounced on him in the dirt. I began to punch him hard and filled his mouth with sand.
I did this with a fear that if Uchenna got up, my brother and I would be dead, and we would be the laughingstock among our friends at school.
I hit him continually and Uchenna had had enough because I heard my brother calling out, “Billy let’s go before his friends come back…” that was all I needed to quickly get off him and run off with my brother.
We ran home and smack into my mother who asked us where we went.
Tom eagerly told her how I had gone to fight for him and ended up beating up a bigger boy who was in senior class at our school.
“You did what?” My mother asked.
“He beat…” I did not get the rest of my words out. My mother smacked me hard on the face.
“I am not raising thugs…you go to people’s houses to beat them up? Is that what you do now?”
But that did not bother me, my brother saw me as a hero and that was what mattered to me at that time.
