Our childhood was both difficult and easy. It was easy because Father was a successful businessman with a direct line of connection to the Monseignior of Piqay, so we were a wealthy family with many of the attributes of advantage and comfort and influence. We were educated privately, at first by a series of governesses, later at a private school on the other side of the island, and all three of us attended Piqay University.
But our lives were also difficult because of Chas’s dysfunctional behaviour. He was taken several times to see doctors or analysts, and these people made various efforts to find remedies: allergy treatment, dietary control, psychological testing, and so on. He was almost always given a clean bill of health, with the general consensus that he was going through the growing pains of youth, which would resolve themselves in due course. Chaster himself, I feel sure, somehow manipulated things to achieve these non-interventionist verdicts.
When Chaster wanted to be charming he could bring down the birds from the trees, as our mother used to say. But when he was not in a mood to believe there was anyone in the universe apart from him, he was awful to know. He could be angry, sulky, threatening, selfish, deceitful, and much else . . . all those childish tantrums everyone knows and which are fairly normal, but in Chas’s case he could resort to them all at once, or switch between them, one after the other. I was often — usually — the target, and if it was not me then it was my sister, Suther, and if it was not her then it was both of us at once.
If these were growing pains we could hardly wait for the process of healing to begin, but with Chaster the progress was in the opposite direction. When we were small, his difficult nature only appeared briefly, almost undetectably: a likelihood of tears if he did not get his own way, a period of sulking, and so on. But these were always short-lived. Chaster’s real difficulties began to emerge only as he headed through his teenage years, and every year it grew worse.
By the time he had reached his twenty-first year he was almost impossible. The least worst manifestation of his odd behaviour was his prickliness, the quickness with which he would take offence, his inability to warm to others, even briefly in a social setting. More disconcertingly, his behaviour was eccentric: he was always straightening or cleaning objects around the house, or counting things aloud, pointing to them pedantically, as if expecting those of us around him to check or confirm his result. Much worse than that were his rages, his threats of violence, his aggressive physical demeanour, his controlling behaviour, his attempts to undermine everyone around him, his constant lies.
He got through his university years somehow, perhaps by curbing this behaviour as by then we knew he could, at least to some extent, but he left university with only a poor degree. He blamed everyone except himself.
Then, several months after leaving the university, he suddenly announced that he had been offered a job and was intending to take it up. To be candid, my reaction, and that of the rest of the family, was relief. We all felt that a break with the family environment, fresh horizons, working with other people, might well induce a change in him.
There was no indication at all at this time that he might one day become a writer. He had never been particularly bookish, often declaring he could not be bothered to finish a book once he had started it. Nor did he have any apparent facility with the written word — indeed, for a time at school one of his teachers had thought a serious and lasting problem with literacy might be underlying his behaviour. However, this turned out to be a false alarm, possibly related to one of his darker behavioural periods. If Chaster had any ambitions at all, we assumed they would lie in the direction of Father’s business. This of course has been my own route through adult life.
We were surprised to discover that Chaster’s job was not on Piqay. It was in fact in a part of the Archipelago none of us had ever heard of, in the north, a small group of islands close against the northern continent, at least two weeks’ sailing from home with many ports of call on the way. He would tell us little about the job, but he said he would be working as an assistant manager in a theatre. No sooner had he told us this than he announced the ferry was sailing that night. He hastily packed a couple of bags, our driver took him down to the port, and then he was gone.
He stayed away for a long time without any contact at all with his family. Naturally, we were concerned for him. It was all too easy for us to imagine this irascible, unpredictable, moody, short-tempered, sarcastic young man provoking something with strangers, and coming off much the worse for it. But it has always been our parents’ method to allow us to make our own way in life, to learn by experience, while keeping a distant watch on us. In Chas’s case, when he first went away, my father employed a private detective to locate and then to observe him.
The first report came back a few weeks later: Chaster was working every day in the town’s theatre, he appeared to be happy and productive, he had found somewhere to live, he seemed to be looking after himself. My parents allowed another six months to pass before asking for a second report — it was much the same as the first. After that, they asked for no more observations. Perhaps they should have done.
The first sign that something had gone wrong was an urgent email from Chaster to me, not long after we had read the second report. He demanded I sail immediately to join him. A few minutes later a second message arrived, and in this he made me swear that on no account must I leave Piqay. He said he was returning home, but would not say when.
Then a third message. He warned me that people — he did not say which people, nor how I would recognize them — might come to the house asking questions. He pleaded with me that if they did I was to pretend to be him and to swear I had been on Piqay for the whole of the time he had been away. He told me nothing more.
Both parts of this request were in theory easy to fulfil. I could say with complete truth that I had been here at the family house on Piqay, and if necessary I could produce witnesses to confirm it: my parents, servants in the house, friends in the town. The second part was also not a problem, or not in practical terms. Chas and I look alike, and we had grown up with people constantly mistaking each of us for the other.
But to maintain both of these amounted to a lie, one made worse because I had no knowledge of what Chas had been up to, nor even a clear idea of where he had been.
I had hardly any time to think about this, because the morning after I received Chas’s last email two officers from the policier seignioral came to the house, demanding to see him. With great trepidation, and with feelings of doubt and misplaced loyalty to a brother who for the past several years had been little short of a monster to me, I went down to meet them.
I lied as little as possible to them. They assumed I was Chaster, so I did not disabuse them: a lie by omission, but still a lie. I told them, truthfully, where I had been during the last few months. No lies there, except in what I again omitted. The officers remained respectful to me — which brought home to me the influence my father continued to have on the island — but it was clear they were suspicious of everything I was saying.
I was questioned for at least two more hours and everything I said was recorded, as well as being noted in writing by one of the two officers. They told me nothing about the reasons for their questions but gradually the mysterious unspecified spaces behind the interrogation began to take on a definite shape. I was able to piece together some idea of what might have happened, what must have happened, and my brother’s assumed role in it.