Off Minor

Twenty-six

When Michael Morrison’s brother, Geoffrey, was not so many days short of his third birthday, he came across a large animal living in the back of his parents’ wardrobe. It was made from soft, white, cuddly material and had yellow beads for eyes and pieces of black thread to mark its mouth and nose and paws. Geoffrey tugged it from the plastic bag in which it had been nestling, through the jumble of his mother’s shoes and out into the light. It reminded him of the big white dog their friends, the Palmers, used to take for walks and which they had encouraged him to sit on when he was even younger. At first, little Geoffrey had been terrified, insisting on clinging to his father’s hand; the animal twisting and barking beneath him, struggling out from under his weight. But as Geoffrey grew bigger, the dog got smaller and Geoffrey started to enjoy it more, balancing on the dog’s back with his toes scraping the ground, striking the dog with his little fists, shouting and screaming with excitement.

It had been then that the Palmers had lifted him off and refused to allow him back on. “Sorry, old sport, too big for that now.” Just when it had been fun.

So now Geoffrey hurried down the stairs, traveling backwards, bouncing the new toy after him.

“Oh, Geoffrey,” his mother said, looking up from the book she was reading, “wherever did you get that? Darling, look what he’s been into now.”

“Hmm, Geoff,” said his father, coming through from the adjoining room, glass in hand, “up to a bit of exploring, eh?”

“Dog,” Geoffrey said, giving it a shake.

“Bear, actually. It’s a bear.”

“Dog.”

“No, bear.”

“Dog!”

“Darling, I do wish you wouldn’t argue with him.”

“Look, Geoff,” his father reaching down, “it’s a polar bear. You must have seen them, on the box. Those programs you watch. No? Mummy, we ought to take him to the zoo.”

Mummy winced and eased herself round in the chair. No matter what position she got herself into, she was uncomfortable within minutes. “Anyway,” she said, “better get it back from him before it gets filthy. Your mother will never forgive us if it isn’t squeaky clean for the cot.”

Cot? Geoffrey thought. Whatever would it be doing in a cot? He didn’t use his cot any more; he slept in a real bed with his favorite toys all around his head. That was where this new one was going to sleep too.

“You’re quite right,” his father said and took hold of the bear’s arm. Geoffrey ground his teeth and clung to its legs. “Come on Geoff. Don’t want to hurt him, do we? Not before the new baby’s even set eyes on him.”

Geoffrey still refused to let go of the bear. What new baby? There wasn’t any new baby. There wasn’t.

“You see, darling,” his father said, “we should have told him before.”

His mother groaned and swiveled slowly round to look at her son. “What does he think I’m doing, bless him, all puffed up like an ocean liner?”

Geoffrey’s father tutted and laughed and knelt down alongside his wife, stroking the swelling beneath her loose, gray dress. “Look, Geoffrey, come over here. Come and feel Mummy’s tummy. Come and feel where the baby lives.”

Biting down into the inside of his lower lip, Geoffrey walked to where his mother was sitting. He didn’t believe it. He didn’t believe there was any baby living in there. How could it? Like a toy bear in a plastic bag at the back of a wardrobe. That was different. The bear wasn’t real. Babies were. Geoffrey swung the bear up and back and hit the mound of his mother’s stomach as hard as he could.

So it was that Geoffrey Morrison’s nose was first put firmly out of joint; dark-haired Geoffrey, well and truly three and relegated to the sidelines of adult activity and adoration.

“Who loves his baby brother, then?”

Not, Geoffrey would have been moved to answer, bloody me!

But time is a great healer and smoother; Geoffrey came to realize that younger brothers, like the large white dogs of family friends, do have their uses. And pleasures.

“Geoff’s so good with the baby,” his father would say, “He really is.”

And, the incident in their neighbor’s plastic paddling pool aside, Geoffrey did treat his younger brother with a great deal of care and consideration. One result of which was that baby Michael grew up worshipping his brother and would mope and cry forlornly whenever Geoffrey was taken from his sight.

“Michael Morrison,” Geoffrey would say, years later, in the course of an interview on Manx radio, “I love him like a brother!” And, once the laughter at his own joke had subsided, added, in all seriousness, “It was my brother, Michael, who was responsible for making me what I am today.”

Which was, at the then age of twenty-nine, a near-millionaire businessman with one fifth of the tear-off perforated plastic bag market in his pocket. “As it were,” he laughed to the mid-morning presenter, “I always was the kind of a man who had need of big pockets.”

The presenter pressed one corner of his mouth into a smile and cued up something by the Carpenters. Why was it always the biggest pillocks in the world who made the most money? And why did they always end up on his show?

“What I meant to say before,” Geoffrey said into the fuzzy end of the microphone, the last sighs of Karen Carpenter disappearing into the ether, “was that up until the day my brother was born, I thought the world owed me a living. I was an only child, idolized, waited on hand and foot. Suddenly-wham! — there’s this new model and I’m stuck on the back of the shelf, remaindered. Which was when, and I swear this, all of-what? — three and a bit years old, I realized if the world didn’t owe me a living, I was going to have to get up off my behind and make one for myself. And I’ll tell you,” winking at the man behind the console, who said the rest of it along with him, “I’ve never looked back since.”

And it was true.

Not even when he badly overextended his borrowing in ’87 and was obliged to call in a receiver. Before the ink was dry on that particular bankruptcy declaration, Geoffrey was registering another company under his wife’s name. Within a month, he had signed an exclusive contract to supply a northern supermarket company with plastic bags for its new range of serve-yourself fruit and veg. Geoffrey had grinned and bought a new Rover, sent his wife for a fortnight’s rest and restoration at Ragdale Hall and achieved similar effects for himself with a course of vitamin injections and a discreet Asian masseuse moonlighting from the Star Sun Lounge, Stockport.

For the next year he played one bank off against another, changed his accountant about as often as most men change their boxer shorts and faked a time and motion study at his main factory to persuade his largely immigrant work force to take a cut in pay. Back on top and in danger of becoming too conspicuously solvent, Geoffrey moved house and home some forty miles off the mainland to the Isle of Man. Here, from a six-bedroomed extravaganza on Bradda Head, he could enjoy fresh air, an uninterrupted view across the sea to Ireland and significantly lower tax levels. A private plane, shared with a select group of like-minded businessmen, meant that he could be back among the action inside the hour.

At forty, Geoffrey Morrison had a half-share in a couple of race horses, a steadily improving golf handicap, an open line of credit at a casino in Douglas and several photographs of himself shaking hands with the stars-Frankie Vaughan, Clinton Ford, Bernie Winters. He wore tailored suits, beneath which he flaunted brightly colored braces, wide silk ties and a relatively flat stomach. Half an hour in the pool three times a week, doing lengths, that and the exercise bike he rode while he was dictating memos.

When he arrived at his brother’s house, the morning after Michael had returned from the hospital, Geoffrey was wearing a light gray suit with a dark red stripe, midnight blue braces and a tie in which the predominant colors were yellow and orange. The milkman was still delivering further around the crescent and the lights of the hire car that had met Geoffrey at the airport were still shining. Even the media had yet to arrive.

“Lorraine, sweetheart! You poor darling, what a thing to have happened. It’s too much to hope there’s any news? And Michael. Where’s Michael? My God! What’ve you done to yourself? You’re limping.”

Oblivious to his brother’s embarrassment, Geoffrey took him in his arms and hugged him tightly; Lorraine, red-eyed, looking on.

“I don’t understand …” Michael began,

“Of course you don’t. How could you? A thing like this, your own child, how could you be expected to understand? How could anyone? Lorraine, sweetheart, you don’t mind me saying so, but you look awful.”

“That wasn’t what I meant,” Michael said. “I meant you. What are you doing here?”

Geoffrey’s eyes widened with surprise. “The fact neither of you thought to ring me, I can live with. Put it down to the surprise, shock. But that doesn’t mean I don’t care. I came as soon as I could.”

“Geoffrey, I’m sorry I didn’t call you,” Michael said. “I just didn’t think. I haven’t been able to think about anything. But, really, there’s nothing you can do.”

“Do? A time like this.” He caught hold of Lorraine’s hands and squeezed. “I knew I had to be with you, for now at least, express my sympathy, show how I felt. How we both feel, Claire and myself.”

Lorraine had seen Michael’s brother no more than twice before the wedding, four or five times after. For the wedding, Geoffrey had sent a small truckload of presents from Harrods, worn a white three-piece suit and had the time of his life splashing champagne into the guests’ glasses, dancing with anyone who was fool enough to let him, trying in vain to persuade Michael to join him on the small stage in “All I Have to Do is Dream,” the Morrison Brothers in close harmony, Geoffrey singing lead. “Come on, Michael. We used to sing this all the time at home, remember?” Michael swore to Lorraine later he didn’t recall singing it once.

They had made one visit over to the island, a week during most of which Geoffrey had been called back to one business meeting or another, leaving Lorraine and Michael in the company of Geoffrey’s wife, Claire, and the seals that splashed off the rocks into the coldness of the sea. Since Claire’s routine seemed to consist of rising in time for lunch and then immersing her nose in Home and Garden or the new Jilly Cooper, the seals proved rather the better company.

That aside, Geoffrey had descended on them occasionally; usually unannounced, staying long enough to drink a cup of tea, make a few phone calls and rebuke Michael for his lack of ambition.

“Lorraine,” Geoffrey was saying, “what’re the chances of you rustling us all up some breakfast? Times like this, we need to hit the carbohydrates as hard as we can.”

Touching a hand to Lorraine’s back, he shepherded them towards the kitchen. “And you,” he said, looking sideways at Michael, “what the hell have you managed to do to your leg?”