The Bro

Darren is two years younger than me, but a few inches taller. Whereas I have taken after our father, and our younger sister our mother, Darren, I felt, got a bit of each of them.

Currently, our communication is sporadic. I'd get an SMS message or a phone call from time to time and would return the communiques using the same medium. It's not as if we don't talk, we generally just run out of things to talk about pretty quickly. At the moment he's living in Tamworth, married (to a teacher), with two lovely boys, Connor (in the red jumpsuit) and Blake. I try to get up at Xmas time to see them all, but I am loathe to stay away from my flat for too long a period. That, and I'm not a good traveller, never have been. It's a Catch 22, I do like to get away every now and again, but just don't like the journey.

I have envied him. Whereas I have been a more studious, scholarly type, Darren was a natural sportsman. He had potential, playing in some junior representative rugby union teams and later local club rugby league. But he never seriously pursued it, even though mum had hoped that her boy would make the grade and play for a Sydney team, preferably Parramatta. He also played soccer, cricket and basketball, and was good at all of them.

I don't know what happened to him when he was growing up, whether it was a result of peer pressure or just teenage rebellion (which seemed to have missed me altogether), but he went off the rails. The rebellion continued into his early twenties, with drugs, by then, playing a big part of his life and it would often drive mum to tears. She feared an early morning raid by the police and had once told myself and my younger sister that by the time he was forty, he'd be in a mental institution. Little did she know it at the time, her prophecy would turn out to be quite accurate.

But, despite his faults, he's my brother, and I still love him. He's the only brother I'll ever have. He obviously respected me enough to ask me to be his best man at his wedding in 2000, which, I have to say, was one of the greatest moments of my life. This picture was taken around Xmas 2002, at my father's place in Bathurst. My brother has a lot less hair now.