The last time i saw Matthew

I remember him as this kid, white blond hair, scared of everything. He was born prematurely and once when we went camping with a friend of my dad who was in the US airforce, he pissed himself. Luis was telling a ghost story about a man who had a claw instead of a hand. Too much Tango said my dad, but Luis' stories were genuinely scary. Once when we were driving he talked about a friend of his whos head had been held to the tarmac out of a moving car. How the skin flaked off, his face ground down to the bone. Luis always had the latest films, things he'd pass to my dad, like 9 1/2 weeks or Basic instinct, often a full half year before they were out here. And others, that i could watch, like Arachnophobia. Although that was shit scary to a 9 year old kid.

I don't know what happened to luis. His marriage broke down after his wife maria discovered he had given her AIDS. He swore he never knew, blamed the 1980's, the army. whores, whatever, and was stationed in the gulf for a while. We got one postcard: Missing you from the biggest beach volleyball court in the world" and then nothing. Maybe the ilness progressed suddenly, and he's buried in puerto rico. Who knows? I know my dad stopped saying 'yo' when he picked up the phone.

For my dad Luis must have been a link to a past spent idolising americans, bell bottomed flares and 70's hairdo's. A life he gave up for my mum and me. For Matthew, Luis pointed the way to the future. The Army, coarse jokes, chain smoking and brutality. It always seemed such an unlikely course for such a sickly kid.

But then when he was 11, Matt looked 14. He was six foot two, and shaving the last time we went on holiday, to one of those woodland camps with an artificial rainforest in a big plastic dome, that spread accross europe like coldsores in the early 90's. I was just 15 and madly inlove with a girl who had taken to the bottom of the garden and taught me to kiss properly. It turns out she was a lesbian, and had been taught the same trick by a 19 year old windsurf instructor in Dorset the summer before. Interesting how even teenagers still repeat things to learn. Matt, was 6 months older but looked like a young man. His broad shoulders and wide aureoles, earned him the name Pizza Nipples in boarding school, but he was already smoking and fucking girls. He wasn't cold then, not yet, but bore the image that had been thrust upon him unasked for well - already then, playing up to the disparity between how others saw him and how he saw himself with a quietness that made him cool. I reacted, by smoking weed for the first time at 3 am on the crazy golf course with a sixteen year old in a dreamscape jacket who talked about pills and raves like they were an everyday thing. Before that on the same night someone had glassed me lightly on the dancefloor in the disco, leaving a bruise and a shallow cut on the bridge of my nose.

i digress.

The next year, after an abortive attempt at college, and 4 months spent working at his dad's electronics factory, Matt enrolled in the army as an NCO. Before when we talked about it, he'd go on about officers training at Sandhurst, but when he finally made the decision to go in, he did it at the lowest possible level. We stopped taking for years, when on a car ride i said that i wouldn't die for my queen, country or God, that all three of them were bullshit concepts designed to make people do things that normally they wouldn't. 6 months into his first tour of Northen Ireland he showed me his tatoo of a viking on his shoulder. 2 years later he was in Afghanistan, and then Iraq.

The last time i saw him was at my mums' 50th birthday. I had no idea that he was in the country, least of all towing a three year old kid behind him. She looked like the quintisential war child, with a bump on her forehead from where she'd fallen out of her bunk bed the night before. While she ran around, colouring on A0 sheets of paper i'd brought out, or mischeviously hovering around the kitchen, fingers full of raw cake dough or chocolate spread, Matt sat in a chair in the middle of the lawn, his back upright but his shouders bowed down as he sucked on constant cigarrettes held between his second finger and thumb. His eyes, when he inhaled looked past me over the smoke, the same blue eyes, harder, but every bit as big and wide.
He'd married a barmaid from Leicester, where his barracks were stationed and close enough to the town where he was from to believe that he was in love with her. He was 21 and she was 18 at the time. By the time i met his daughter they were divorced.

Elizabeth, was the only child i've ever met who've i've felt an instant kinship with. I loved how she'd react to her dads barked commands with faked obedience, and then go and do exactly the same thing 5 minutes later. Or how, when she looked at him and smiled innocently you could tell by the roll of his shoulders that his cold army heart was melting.

"You don't know what it's like there" was one of the only things he said, as we sat beside each other in the august sun, my stepdads godawful smooth jazz droning over us and into the sky. " There's no respect for life. It's not something i enjoy, but i'm going back. If i stay on then at least i get my pension, and in two more years i'll have a great salary"
He spoke his words without moving, only to light or drag from another cigarrette. Phrases he'd rehearsed to himself over and over, concepts that made sense through repetition. I admired his discipline and his daughter. And I miss him. My brother, Matthew.