No Saints or Angels

I offer to put the kettle on.

'No, no, I'm used to doing everything for myself. But you could fetch some water. The tap's in the passage.

He hands me a kettle and I go out into the passage for the water. I don't know what I'm still doing here or what I can talk to him about.

'What did Dad die of?' he wants to know on my return.

'He had a tumour.'

'And you're a doctor!'

'Only half a one,' I say, as I usually do when my profession is mentioned.

'I know, Mum told me. I never saw my father,' he adds. 'So don't be offended that I'm not sad about his death. I expect you spent more time with him.'

That's for sure. But it wasn't quite the way he probably imagines. Even so I suddenly feel a sense of guilt towards him.

'I wanted to be a doctor too,' he says, 'but this happened to me.' He indicates the wheelchair. 'So I gave up the idea.'

'How did it happen?'

'I dived into the river and hit a rock.'

'I'm sorry.'

'I've started painting.' He points at the pictures. 'They're all my work.'

'I recognized they were by you. They're. . they're interesting.'

'I used to design toys for a craft workshop, and textiles too, but I can't get any work these days. It's a shitty awful world. They'd

sooner send cripples to the gas chamber! They'd save money and could give the able-bodied a tax cut.'

The kettle whistles. He wheels himself over to it, tips some tea into a strainer and pours the water over it. The mugs he fetches are large and don't look too clean, but why should he have clean mugs here?

'Sugar or rum?'

'I don't take sugar.'

He heads for the dresser and brings out a bottle of rum. He pours some into my tea and then into his own. He treats himself to more rum than tea.

'I'm sorry it happened to you,' I say. 'Do you have anyone to look after you?'

'I look after myself I detect in his voice Dad's grim determination. 'Mum used to take care of me before she died. That's a picture of her over there.' He points towards the table, on which a small photograph stands in a frame.

I get up and go over to look at it. The woman in the photo could be about my age, maybe a little younger; the portrait is obviously old, some time from the end of the sixties, to judge by the hairstyle. I stare at the face but find nothing interesting in it. I don't know what I'd say about the woman that Dad secretly loved.

'My girlfriend used to visit me too,' my half-brother tells me. 'But she got married and now she has children. I've got other friends,' he quickly adds, 'they just look in on me and do me the odd favour, but they don't have time to look after me. Dad never came, not even after my accident. He ruined Mum's life and mine. I dived in that water just to show I was somebody, even if I didn't have a dad. Sometimes a single stupid act can decide your whole future.' He has drunk his tea and now pours just rum in his mug.

He depresses me. I sip my tea and think about the fact that this man is my brother. I ought to feel something towards him, but I doubt that I can.

'I imagined you differently,' he suddenly says.

'How did you imagine me?'

'Uglier, I should think,' he says with unexpected bluntness. 'So you have a daughter?'

'Yes.' But I won't tell him anything about her. I don't intend to let him in on my suffering, or my joys, for that matter.

'Bring her to see me some time.'

I remain silent.

'That's if you ever fancy visiting your crippled brother.'

'That's not important — the wheelchair,' I say. 'I'll come any time you want, or if you need anything.'

He doesn't say yes, but he doesn't refuse either. 'How's your work? Plenty of patients?' he asks.

I tell him I have as many as I can cope with.

'And you're earning!'

I tell him it's no great shakes, but enough for us to live on.

'I needed a bridge,' he says, opening his mouth slightly and pointing at it, as if intending to display someone else's dental work, 'and my dentist wanted fifteen thousand to do the job. For a few minutes' work! And I had to save two years to pay for it.'

I tell him I never charge as much as that. If he came to me I'd do him his bridge for free. What I don't tell him is that it would certainly do him a lot more good than writing me threatening letters.

'I didn't know how you'd take me,' he says. 'I wasn't part of your family, was I?'

'We didn't know about you.'

'Listen,' he then says, 'I ought to warn you about me. I'm strange sometimes. I imagine strange things. Such as I'm a powerful dictator. Or a concentration camp commandant. A concentration camp for women. There are loads of women in front of me and I can do what I like with them. Do you know what I mean? Absolutely anything I like: I can tell them to take their clothes off or I can torture them to make them admit to some crime, and then I imagine it.'

'You're saying it to put the wind up me,' I say, and I really do have a feeling of uneasiness, although it's more like revulsion.

'No, they're just things I imagine. I've never hurt a fly. Maybe when I hit my head on the rock that time something happened inside me, like brain damage. For heaven's sake, a concentration camp commandant in a wheelchair, it doesn't make sense.' He laughs briefly. 'But it would make a great gag in some horror serial. Can you imagine it? The commandant in a wheelchair with a red-hot poker in his hand and he comes up to these women who are standing there naked in a great long line and. .'

'Don't go into any more details,' I request him. 'I don't want to hear.'

'You think I'm crazy or a pervert, don't you?'

I remember Dad's sister Venda. 'Maybe you inherited something,' I say, 'something genetic. It ran in Dad's family.'

'I didn't know that. I thought Dad was normal. Or at least not crazy.'

'No, he wasn't crazy. But he knew how to hurt people. After all, you discovered that for yourself

'Yes, I certainly did. Would you like some more tea? Or a drop of this?' He raises the bottle.

'No, no more, thanks. I just wanted to find out if it was really you. There was nothing definite in Dad's diaries.'

'I apparently look like him.'

'You do. A lot.'

'I was afraid I might.'

'I understand.' I get up.

He accompanies me to the door and when I offer him my hand I have the impression that he has tears in his eyes. Maybe he is moved at finding his half-sister after all these years. But he knew about me before; he found me long ago. More likely he regrets losing the image he had of his enemy.

As I say goodbye I cannot bring myself to repeat my invitation for him to call me if he needs anything. He knows my address well

enough anyway. If he weren't in a wheelchair I'd say to him, Don't send me any more of those letters! To let him know I knew. But I shouldn't think he'll send any more anyway. He'll find another way of exercising his sadistic fantasies.

I don't go back to the metro, but set off in the opposite direction. I don't feel like being among people. The river bank can't be far away, but between me and it they've built a four-lane carriageway fringed by a fence. I cross the road and quickly make my way along by the fence, even though there is maybe no end to it. Cars rush past me. Above the fence there are billboards with inane advertising slogans and above them all there hangs a bluish haze of hot smog.

So I've found my kid brother, who abused me because I had a dad who never visited him. I expect he imagined me standing naked in his concentration camp while he burnt me with a red-hot poker because I enjoyed his father's affection.