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could, slipped him a few quid every time I saw him and I really didn’t mind because he’d had ya bad time of it. He wouldn’t let me do more than that though, and I reckoned he spent virtually every penny of it on booze and the horses he backed that won nowt for themselves, except a short trip to the glue factory.
    His crack-head neighbours left him alone because I made sure they knew whose brother he was but if I tried to do more, he just laughed and said, ‘you’re my younger brother, you’re not supposed to look after me. It’s s’posed to be the other way round!’
    I helped him in through the doorway and got him to lie down on the couch then I made more coffee but not before giving the two mugs on his draining board a proper wash. He was out of milk again, so I made the coffee black.
    ‘You should get yourself a bird,’ I told him, ‘you need a woman to clean up this shit tip. She can put some milk in the fridge while she’s at it.’
    He laughed again, ‘Nae bugger’d have us,’ and I’m afraid he had a point there, ‘I don’t have a fancy job working for Bobby Mahoney, yer knaa.’
    I brought the coffees into the tiny lounge and set them down on his rickety, little coffee table. He had an old TV in there with a battered PlayStation rigged up to it. He was always playing those war games where you have to shoot robots that look a bit like the Terminator, which I found strange, considering that the war he’d been in had clearly messed with his mind. Last time I was round, I gave him a few cartons of fags, some games for his play station and an iPod.
    ‘How are you getting on with that iPod?’ I asked him.
    ‘It’s great man,’ he told me, ‘thanks.’
    ‘So have you actually downloaded some tracks then?’
    ‘Downloaded?’ he asked me doubtfully. He clearly didn’t realise you had to do that.
    I laughed, ‘You’ve not taken it out of the box have you?’
    He looked hurt. ‘Aye, I have and like I said it looks great. I just haven’t had the chance to do the downloading thing yet. Jimmy will help us like. He knaas everything there is to knaa about computers.’
    ‘Jimmy? I’m sure he does. He probably has a Dragon 32.’ He didn’t have a clue what I meant and I knew he’d never get round to using that iPod.
    He didn’t have much of anything if the truth be told, except a couple of photos from his days in the Paras; one with him in uniform, with a blacked up face from the camouflage paint, holding an SLR, standing next to three other mates he had lost touch with over the years. He was smiling like he might have been fairly happy back then but I doubted it because I knew when it was taken, some years after he got the Campaign medal that he kept in his drawer. It was the South Atlantic medal and it proved my brother did a minimum of thirty days of continuous or accumulated service, between seven degrees and sixty degrees south latitude, between the 2 nd April and the 14 th June 1982. In other words he fought in the Falklands War. I refuse to call it the Falklands Conflict, people got killed, his friends got killed, so it was a war.
    I’d seen my brother’s medal many times, held it reverently in my hand when I was a tiny wee lad. Even today, I can still recall the chest-bursting pride I felt, knowing my brother was an elite member of the 2 nd battalion of The Parachute Regiment that took Goose Green. It was undoubtedly his finest hour. Trouble is, the rest of his life has been an absolutely unrelenting torrent of shit. He’s had every bit of trouble going; a shite marriage and a worse divorce, runins with the police, fights, drinking, drugs for a while but, thank Christ, we got him out of that world before it took a hold. When he left the Paras he worked a bit, casual stuff, labouring mostly but even that seemed to just tail away after a while. He went from being one of the most reliable men in the whole British army to a fellah you couldn’t trust to turn up at a building site two