This book was a full-blown team effort from start to finish. First and foremost I’d like to thank Rosemary and her team at Square Peg for somehow chiselling my initial vomit-puddle of words into something approaching a printable work. It’s been a pleasure to work with people who care so much.
Next are the moral support people: people like Tom Williams, my colleagues and editors at the Guardian, and Robyn and Herbie. My god, especially those last two.
Then there are those who helped out with the meat of the book: most notably Mum, Dad and Emily. Craig and Mike, thanks for sending me all those photos of Pete. I’m sorry we couldn’t print any of the ones where you could see his testicles.
However, there are two people without whom this book wouldn’t even exist. The first is my agent Antony Topping, who throughout this process has been my biggest ally, cheerleader and bully, depending on what I needed to hear most at the time.
The second, and most important, is Pete. Good Lord, what a tremendous sport you are, Pete. I’m proud to be your big brother, and I have no doubt that you’re going to be a brilliant dad to little Tyson.
Stuart Heritage has written for the Guardian since 2009. His weekly column about his young son ‘Man With a Pram’ ran in the paper’s Family section from 2015 to 16. He founded a celebrity news site called Hecklerspray (Metro’s Best British Blog in 2007 and in the Observer Top 50 Most Powerful Blogs in the World in 2008) and has written for Vanity Fair, Elle, Cosmopolitan, Red, Marie Clare, NME, ShortList, Time Out and the Radio Times.
Growing up, Stuart Heritage was always the favourite son; perfect student, mummy’s pet and all round good guy. Quick-tempered, peevish and aggressively pig-headed, his younger brother Pete could never hope to live up to expectations.
But now, Stu has returned to his hometown after a decade away to discover that Pete has taken his place. Practical and resourceful where Stu is not, Pete has become a shoulder to lean on. He is now undoubtedly the better son. And all at once Pete and Stu have to re-evaluate their fraternal dynamic. It should be easy, but it isn’t. Because, well… Pete’s a dick.
DON’T BE A DICK, PETE is Stuart Heritage’s unconventional and laugh-out-loud biography of his brother. It is a hilarious examination of home and family; sons, fathers, fatherhood, sibling relationships and how hard it is to move on in a system that’s loaded with several decades of preconceived ideas about you.
Christmas 2014
‘I think our house is on fire.’
My dad, by nature, is not a telephone person. He’s a dad, after all. He knows the drill. If I call home and he answers, his first instinct is to hurl the phone across the room at the nearest bystander like it’s a pinless grenade, because rather that than we inadvertently find ourselves trapped in the hell that is a meaningful exchange.
So, if Dad ever calls me, I quite naturally assume that there’s an emergency. I grab my phone and instinctively scream ‘OH GOD IS MUM OK?’ into the receiver. Every single time. And every single time, Dad responds with:
1) An amused pause, and
2) A remedial-level IT query.
‘How do you embed YouTube videos into emails?’ he’ll ask. Or ‘How do you make things go bold?’ Or ‘My computer keeps making this “donk” noise …’
But I’m improving. This scenario has played out enough for me to know what to expect. My heart still races whenever he rings, but the historical likelihood is that he just wants to know which one the alt key is. So I pre-emptively tamp down my anxiety a little and, instead of answering with ‘OH SHIT WHAT’S HAPPENED?’ I’ve trained myself to force out a breezy ‘Hi, Dad!’ This is completely to my credit.
On Monday, my dad rang.
I’d been back in Ashford for three days. This in itself was an anomaly. People don’t go back to Ashford. It isn’t the done thing. People are born in Ashford, then leave Ashford as soon as they can, and never look back.
You’re supposed to outgrow your surroundings. You’re supposed to yearn for bigger and better things. That’s why people move to London. It’s the biggest and best thing around. It’s a 24/7 swirl of light and noise and colour and excitement.
It’s the place where, for centuries, people have met and shared ideas and helped to push humanity to the very limits of possibility. It’s a perfectly realised, self-assured global metropolis. If you ever spent your youth running away from anything, the only sensible place to end up is London.
The centre of government? London. The centre of industry? London. The centre of finance and art and culture and recreation and fun? London. The centre of the world? You’d better believe it.
I wanted to move to London for the same reasons as anyone else. I wanted to make my fortune. I wanted to be around people who were like me. People who couldn’t make it work in their scraggy little pockets of suburbia either. I moved to London because I wanted to reinvent myself. I moved to London because I wanted to breathe.
This was a mistake.
Jesus, though, London is the worst. To live in London is to begrudgingly make peace with its primary mode of transport; an expensive, sweat-drenched 150-year-old subterranean hell ride full of elbows and babies and backpacks, and thousands of people resigned to putting up with the sheer unrelenting misery of it all because it’s still preferable to getting a bus.
To live in London is to fling all the money you ever earn at a cackling slumlord who charges eye-watering sums for a yellowing mattress wedged into an airing cupboard in a derelict bushmeat abattoir located in an area of Zone 18 that’s colloquially come to be known as Stab Alley.
Worst of all, to live in London is to surround yourself with bellends. London is full – literally full – of giant thirty-something toddlers who boast about their own spurious accomplishments while ironically playing a vintage 1984 Professor Pac-Man arcade machine in the corner of a tatty upcycled pub that only sells a single small-batch IPA called BUKKAKE for £15 a bottle. They travelled there on a Swegway and they wear Pokémon backpacks and if you shouted the word ‘Josh’ at nobody in particular, the entire place would fall as still and silent as a Wild West saloon whenever a baddie walks in.
London isn’t really a home for these people. It’s a crèche. It’s a hypersleep chamber that allows them to eke out their insufferable responsibility-free student lifestyle for a good two decades longer than any normal person should, because the thought of standing up straight and looking the world in the eye like an adult fills them with abject terror. London isn’t a city any more. It’s a biodome full of bastards.
Of course, I didn’t actually tell anyone that I was sick of London. Because people who live in London don’t just live in London. They love London. They’re consumed by it. Institutionalised. It’s like their collective amygdala has become clogged up with soot and sweat and exhaust fumes and rat faeces and they’ve grown incapable of critical thought. Tell someone who lives in London that you hate London and they’ll look at you as though you’ve just shat vomit up Big Ben. Bitter experience has taught me that it’s better to keep this sort of thing to yourself.
But then I met someone different. Someone who was more than just an empty bag of borrowed affectations. I met Robyn. Here’s when I decided that we were going to get on:
One Tuesday night, we found ourselves in the middle of a three-hour queue for a pop-up hamburger restaurant located above a condemned pub in the arse-end of New Cross. There were dozens of people in this queue, each of them brimming with unbridled enthusiasm about the prospect of waiting for ever to be served a £20 hamburger in a room so suffocatingly packed that the most effective way to eat was to peck at it like a bird. Their excitement was palpable, even though the whole set-up felt like a relatively offensive cross between McDonald’s, Alton Towers and post-Soviet Russia.
After about an hour and a half of being stuck in this poxy queue, Robyn whispered to me that she was getting sick of London.
This was exactly what I’d been waiting to hear. Like hostages blinking against the light on their day of release, we both came to the same conclusion. We didn’t have to live here.
There are so many other places we could live, we said. Smaller cities. More polite cities. Towns where the air isn’t speckled with grot. Tiny Scandinavian fishing ports. Huts in the woods. There was a whole planet out there, and it was ours to discover.
It became incredibly important that I stuck with Robyn. So I did what anyone else would do in my situation: I asked her to marry me. Then, just to be on the safe side, I got her pregnant. And then we started looking for somewhere else to live.
‘What about the Outer Hebrides?’ I asked, remembering the holiday we’d taken a couple of years earlier. The Outer Hebrides are quiet and beautiful and utterly detached from the rest of the world. We could move there, among all that open space. What a perfect place to raise a child. But then I remembered that I still worked in London, and I still realistically needed to be able to get to the office in less than six hours. With a heavy heart, we looked elsewhere.
That’s OK, we thought. The English countryside is full of unspoilt little villages that we could be very happy in. All of them idyllic little chocolate boxes filled with ruddy-faced butchers and happy fishmongers and streets so safe that you could leave your front door wide open if you wanted to. But then I remembered that neither of us could drive, and we might as well have lived on Mars for how practical it’d be.
It’s still not the end of the world, we thought, refusing to give in. There must be somewhere. So we logged on to Zoopla and set a very specific set of criteria. We wanted a home in a town that was under an hour from the office, and not eye-wateringly expensive, that had room to accommodate our new family. One result popped up. I saw it, and my heart sank.
Fucking Ashford.
Ashford, where I was born. Ashford, that did its best to flatten out all my charming idiosyncrasies. That scoffed at my hifalutin career ambitions and pointed me towards the nearest paper factory. That kept me cooped up and caged in and trodden down in my youth.
Ashford is a crap town. It’s a vast, flat desert of estate agents and charity shops and Poundlands. It’s a plain, grey, pointless little mound of vanished industry and narrow horizons and squandered opportunity. Its insignia, genuinely, is a lion with a castle for an arse.
And this – this – was the only place I could ever be.
The penny dropped. Without realising it, I had left home, found a nice London girl, clubbed her over the head and dragged her back to my lair. And while Robyn was being polite about the place – ‘At least it isn’t Bracknell,’ she kept telling me in a voice pitched slightly too high to be sincere – I realised that I had no choice but to plant my tail between my legs, meekly acquiesce with fate and move there anyway.
Ashford isn’t great, but our set-up does have its upsides. My son was born in the same hospital as me, which made me happier than I ever imagined. And it’s been great for keeping my ego in check, too. In London, people sometimes stop me in the street to tell me that they enjoy my work. Here, though, they pretty much only stop me to tell me that they went to school with one of my cousins, and that my cousin owes them a fiver, and that I should get it back for them.
Most importantly, living here has given us an inbuilt support network. Raising a child is overwhelming and exhausting, so it’s useful to have your family nearby to help out. Plus – and this is something that had long been nagging away at me – I wanted to be able to get to my parents quickly in case anything ever happened to them.
That was unlikely. My parents were getting on a little, but they were sturdy old buggers. They were workhorses, raised to graft. They didn’t need me in the slightest but, by moving nearby, I could nevertheless assuage my anxiety that I’d be too far away to help if they ever did.
‘Hi, Dad!’ I breezed as I answered the phone.
‘I think our house is on fire.’
‘OH SHIT WHAT’S HAPPENED?’
He told me that someone had seen black smoke belching from my parents’ bedroom window. The news eventually got to the lady next door, who managed to track down my mum at work. Mum called Dad to tell him, but he was fixing a boiler in Islington and wouldn’t be able to get back for a few hours. So that’s why he called me, to see if I’d pop over and figure out what was going on.
Welcome home, Stu.
Dad’s tone was completely inscrutable. But then that’s my dad. Last week he sent me – with no explanation at all – a Facebook video of a dog licking the inside of a baby’s mouth. I don’t know why. I’ve parsed the video again and again for hidden meaning. Is it somehow a coded message about my parenting skills? There was just this video, as weird and enigmatic as a serial killer’s calling card. Maybe the dog represented the Middle East, and the baby the larger international community? I have no idea. If you have the slightest idea why a sixty-five-year-old man would send his thirty-five-year-old son a video of a dog licking the inside of a baby’s mouth, get in touch. It’s keeping me awake.
Before our conversation had even ended, I’d thrown on my shoes and started sprinting down the road towards my parents’ little suburban semi – the house they’d lived in for nearly forty years on the outskirts of town, the house where I was raised – scanning the horizon for plumes of smoke. This was exactly the scenario I’d feared. This was exactly why I’d moved back home. In the moment, despite all the panic, I was suddenly grateful that I’d made the decision to return to this miserable little nothing town.
I reached the house just as the fire engines were packing up. The blaze had been extinguished, but the front door had been kicked off its hinges. The carpets were drenched, the windows were tinted with a thick smear of soot and the suffocating stench of smoke had permeated the entire house. The power had been cut off. It was a mess. It didn’t look like our house any more.
I’d hoped that I’d be the first family member on the scene, so I could take stock and brace the others for what had happened. But Mum had beaten me home by a matter of minutes. She was standing in the middle of the living room, looking as small and frail as I’d ever seen her. A fireman in his thirties was doing his best to comfort her. By total coincidence, the fireman was also my cousin; my mum’s older brother’s youngest son.
I should probably point out here that this wasn’t such a coincidence. My family is unimaginably huge, with dozens of cousins and second cousins spiking off in every possible direction all over the place. It’s so huge, in fact, that one of my uncles claims to have once walked in on two of my cousins (who’d never met) having sex at a family wedding reception. Anyway, look, that isn’t the point. The point is that I was pleased my mum had been met by a friendly face.
The fire itself sounded pretty spectacular. A neighbour had charged into the blazing house once the fire brigade had smashed the door in, and a few moments later rushed back out cradling Mum’s two chihuahuas in her arms, to wild applause from a gaggle of rubbernecking locals.
The house was unrecognisable. The house that contained almost all my childhood memories had been ravaged. We were told that the fire had started in the bathroom, possibly thanks to a heated towel rail, and an open window had dragged the flames down a corridor and into my parents’ bedroom.
The flames had smashed windows and sprayed glass out across the garden. It had buckled doors. It reduced the bathtub to a molten puddle in the middle of the floor. The smoke had painted everything – walls, ceilings, furniture, mirrors – a thick tarry black. And yet, by some strange quirk of nature, the six-inch chocolate Santa that my mum had been keeping on the floor three feet from the path of the fire miraculously managed to remain completely intact.
Confronted with all this chaos, I wasn’t sure what to do, other than to awkwardly reassure Mum that it wasn’t her fault and try to pitch in with all the tangled logistics spread out before us. I just stood there, sad and scared and useless, but I figured that was OK, because it’s not like they give you a guidebook of appropriate reactions for when your childhood home burns down or anything.
And then my little brother Pete arrived.
Pete and Mum wrapped their arms around each other. It was an instinctive exchange of spontaneous affection and it bolstered Mum’s spirits no end. And, after seeing how effortlessly they were able to comfort one another in a moment of genuine crisis, I was struck by a powerful realisation:
Oh, I see, I thought. You’re huggers now. That’s how things work, is it?
I had not hugged Mum when I got there. Hugging seemed like a relatively low priority at the time, to be honest. I never even thought we were that much of a hugging family. Certainly we’d never hugged very often before. We hugged at my wedding, but only because everyone else was hugging and we all silently came to the conclusion that we’d look like a pack of brittle lunatics if we didn’t join in. And even then, when we did, it felt weird and alien.
I’m definitely not a hugger. The etiquette of a hug throws me every single time. The only coping mechanism I’ve found to get around a hug is to narrate it. If I can draw attention to how awkward I am at hugging, then it means I can drag my hug companion down with me. I don’t have to be the only one who feels stupid about it. If I can narrate my hugs, I make everyone else complicit in my awkward failure. ‘I THOUGHT THIS WAS GOING TO BE A HANDSHAKE,’ I scream at the hug initiator, or, ‘THIS IS ALL WELL AND GOOD BUT I SHOULD REALLY APOLOGISE FOR MY SWEATY BACK.’ It’s certainly a defence mechanism of some description, but it has to come from somewhere. My theory is that I got it from my family. And this is the real reason why I didn’t hug my mum that day. She had it bad enough as it was, without having to put up with her fat son bellowing ‘OOH HOO AREN’T YOU BONY?’ at her mid-embrace as well.
But now Mum and my little brother were hugging, as plain as day, and all because her house had been destroyed in a fireball. Neither of them was even shouting ‘HAHA WELL THIS IS AWKWARD’ at each other. Something was up, and it didn’t seem fair. A memo had clearly been circulated in my absence, telling everyone that it was OK to hug each other now. And I’d been kept out of the loop. I turn my back and move to the big city for five minutes, and my family all suddenly turn into a load of fucking huggers without telling me.
Hand on heart, this whole hugging thing was much more galling than the fire. How the hell did Pete know the right thing to do in the heat of the moment? I’m the favourite son, after all. That’s how this works. I was always the favourite son.
I was the one who did well at school. I was the one who went to university. I was the one who remembered birthdays and knew what people wanted for Christmas. I was polite. I was thoughtful. I was the one who volunteered at the local old people’s home and spent my afternoons gardening for blind pensioners. That’s prime favourite-son stuff. Jesus, it’s practically textbook.
But Pete? Pete was a nightmare. He screamed and swore when he didn’t get his way. He got into fights. He was an inveterate truant. He threw tantrums. He was riddled with scabs. I, meanwhile, was so clear-skinned and fresh-faced that I could have advertised anything from Milky Bars to an issue of the Hitler Youth’s in-house magazine. That’s what you want from a son, isn’t it? A well-behaved pin-up, not an inert scabby lump with a grudge against the world.
And yet, here was Pete handling the situation like a pro while I just twonkishly stood around next to them. That son of a bitch. I’d get him back for this. I’d get him back for this if it killed me.
Clearly, something had changed while I’d been away. All the things I’d done since I left home at nineteen – getting a degree, living abroad, starting a family – were supposed to cement my reputation as the reliable, successful one. I had thousands of Twitter followers, for God’s sake. I’d been on an array of Channel 5 talking-head clip shows. Didn’t that mean anything to my family, the recently homeless idiots?
I’m not saying that I expected the red-carpet treatment on my homecoming, but I wasn’t anticipating such a painful demotion. And, make no mistake, that’s exactly what this was. All that time I was away, Pete had insidiously decided to become the son to rely on. He was the one my parents could turn to when things took a dive. And, worst of all, he’d done this by becoming a hugger. Low blow, Pete.
As Mum – and, later, Dad – slowly began to go about the crushing job of packing up whatever clean clothes they could find in order to embark on a joyless three-month stint in a nearby Holiday Inn, things became clear in my mind. While I’d been away – even though I’d only been an hour and a half up a motorway – I’d lost my place within the family unit.
The bad news was that my parents no longer actually had a home. The worse news was that I’d been supplanted as the favourite son. And what really stung was that the kid who did it was a dick.
A week after the fire we discovered that a local newshound had somehow beaten everyone to the punch and taken a dramatic picture of smoke billowing from the top-floor windows of my parents’ house. Much to my mum’s annoyance, the photo made it onto page five of the Kentish Express. I tried to buy the photo from the paper, because I thought I could get it turned into a snazzy jigsaw puzzle and give it to her as a late Christmas present. It didn’t work out. Probably for the best.
I’ve always felt a little sorry for Pete. But let’s not go overboard. I’d feel sorry for anyone who had to follow in my footsteps.
I was a miracle baby. My parents got married in 1971. They met at a youth club a bus ride away from each of their villages as teenagers. Dad was twenty-one when they married, all his hair still intact. Mum was twenty, and so young-looking that for years after their wedding travelling salesmen would knock on the door and ask if her parents were in.
For seven and a half years, my parents struggled to conceive a child. They tried and they tried – visiting hospitals and speaking to doctors with an increasing sense of desperation – but every new hope led to a dead end. Nothing worked.
The years came and went, and eventually my parents resigned themselves and quietly decided to submit to the bittersweet agony of watching everyone else in their lives get pregnant and have babies around them. There was no other choice. Test-tube babies and IVF were still brand-new technologies. If you couldn’t have kids in the seventies, then you probably couldn’t have kids. So my parents consoled themselves the only way they knew how. They got a couple of cats.
But then, in the dying breaths of 1978, completely out of nowhere, Mum got pregnant. After years of heartbreak, it was finally happening. The thing they wanted more than anything was, at long last, going to be theirs. My parents started to plan like crazy. They picked names. They bought clothes. They thought about building an extension on the back of their little two-bed semi, all to give this unexpected bundle of joy a life that was better than their own.
He was born, this perfect little boy, and he was tiny. They called him Paul. My dad could cradle him in the smallest crook of his arm. Finally, they had what they’d wanted more than anything else in the world, and six weeks later it was taken from them.
My older brother Paul died of sudden infant death syndrome, or cot death. I can only imagine what this must have done to my parents, and how they found the strength to get through each new day afterwards. I overheard my mum talking about it to her friends once, and I remember snatches of the conversation. About how judged she felt by everyone. About how the local GP had visited, and told her in no uncertain terms that it was absolutely not her fault.
I didn’t give Paul an awful lot of thought growing up. When you’re a kid, you tend to accept whatever circumstance you’ve been handed. The trauma of my parents losing a baby – especially a baby who died before I was born – was just A Thing That Happened. I simply assumed that the scenario was universal. Everyone has a garish avocado-coloured toilet. Everyone has a front door that needs to be slammed shut in the summer because the latch sticks. And everyone’s got an older brother who died before you could meet him.
Now that I’ve become a father myself the whole thing just seems unimaginably horrific. If I’d been through anything that even remotely resembled what my parents went through, I’d have gone to bed and stayed in bed and just allowed myself to be liquefied by circumstance. Not my parents. They’re made from sturdier stuff than me. They might still only have been kids at the time, but that didn’t stop them. They got back on the horse and powered through.
In retrospect, you could argue that they were a little too eager to get back on the horse. Paul died in October 1979. I was born ten months later. Ten months, for God’s sake. I mean, sure, it’s a cruel and callous thing to judge the actions of grieving parents. But at the same time, Jesus, Dad, keep it in your pants.
This is how I came to be. Born to two parents who’d spent a decade trying to have children, and who’d suffered one of the greatest losses imaginable in the process. I was everything they’d ever wanted. See? Miracle baby.
From my behaviour around my own son in the first few months of his life – watching his chest rise and fall at night to make sure he was still breathing properly, fretting over every last pimple and rash – I can only guess at how over-cautiously my parents must have treated me as a newborn. After all, if you’re given a second chance at something, you’ll do everything in your power to keep it from slipping through your fingers again.
But you can’t remain on full alert your whole life. Standards slip. You come to learn that, rather than being delicate porcelain flowers that perpetually need to be wrapped in cotton wool, babies are actually amazingly robust.
For Robyn and me, this slacking of parental standards came pretty fast because we’re both quite lazy. But for my parents, it came with the arrival of Pete. Because when you have a Pete in your life, that’s where all your energy goes.
Peter Heritage was born in October 1983, twelve days after the first ever branch of Hooters opened in Florida. Squatter and less blond than his miraculous older brother, Pete didn’t fit so easily into the world. He didn’t fit anywhere. In fact, he almost crippled my poor mum.
Pete weighed in at eight pounds and thirteen ounces at birth, close to twice what I weighed. That’s four kilogrammes. That’s the weight of an adult cat. It’s a figure my mum still quietly repeats to herself sometimes, as if she’s trying to convince herself that she actually managed to push this ferociously gigantic clump of boy out of her body. These roles would continue through childhood. I – six weeks early and so small she barely even felt me coming out – would cause her no trouble at all. Pete, meanwhile, will for ever be the boy who destroyed her life from the vagina up.
Family stories about Pete’s early days make him sound like a monster, albeit one of those sad monsters who inspire pity while they’re screaming into the night and setting fire to orphanages. Pete cried constantly. His whole body was covered in eczema for most of his infancy. As a result, barely any photos exist of him as a baby. In those that do he’s angry and blotchy. Many of them are out of focus, like he’s trying to swipe the camera out of the photographer’s hand. He’s still got a chip on his shoulder about this lack of presentable baby photographs. It’s a chip he’ll sometimes use as a weapon.
Pete didn’t crawl until he was eighteen months old. His first steps came several months later. He never exhibited any interest in speaking, choosing instead to communicate in tortured screams. My mum claimed his slow progress was a sign of laziness. I’m not so sure. My son was on his feet and propelling himself around at ten months and, as nice as it is to be able to boast about this relatively early crossed milestone, there’s still a part of me that would immediately trade the whole thing for an extra eight months of rest. I daydream about rest. If we’d had a Pete, I would have had eight extra months of not babyproofing everything. Eight extra months of not having to navigate a complex series of stairgates whenever I wanted to enter a different room. Eight extra months of being able to keep cups of hot tea on side tables without worrying that they’ll be yanked to the floor, scalding everyone in sight. However, I suspect that Pete wasn’t really a late developer. I suspect that he was simply picking his moment to pounce.
Because, when Pete did finally choose to start propelling himself around, he found himself with almost two years’ worth of extra energy stored up inside him, and I’m convinced this is what has powered him through the rest of his life. The moment Pete’s motor skills kicked in, there was no stopping him. Keeping him under control was like trying to use chopsticks to fill a hot-water bottle with a swarm of flies. Pete was a force of nature. He was wayward and erratic. He was, basically, a gigantic pain in the arse. I mean this literally.
One of my first memories of Pete is the phase he went through as a toddler when he ran around pinching women on the bum. Where this creepy behavioural tic came from is anyone’s guess – perhaps his one true formative experience was a Sunday-afternoon television broadcast of a Carry On film – but for a good few months Pete was relentless. He’d run up behind a woman (and it was almost always a woman, rather than a girl his own age), clamp his stubby little fingers down on her arse, then run away screaming with laughter. It was as if, instead of a regular kid, my parents had given birth to the lead character in a Shane Richie West End musical about the legend of Spring-Heeled Jack. I vividly remember the time when Pete – on the cricket pitch that our garden backed on to, in front of my parents and a couple of my cousins – screamed in out of nowhere and pinched my Auntie Helen’s bum. Nobody really knew what the correct response to that was supposed to be, because children aren’t really supposed to aggressively molest their own relatives. Still, you live and learn.
Had Pete grown up in South Korea, this would have been perfectly normal behaviour. In my twenties I spent a couple of years teaching English to Korean toddlers in Seoul, where I was exposed to an abomination called the ‘dong-chim’. Roughly translating to ‘shit finger’, a dong-chim is performed by clasping your hands together, extending your two index fingers like a double-barrelled pistol, taking aim and charging at full pelt towards someone’s arsehole. And I mean their arsehole. The aim of a dong-chim is to slam your fingers right into someone’s winking bullseye, because that’s the bit that hurts the most.
I must have been unwittingly dong-chimmed dozens of times over the course of my career. And these kids, believe me, are like little fucking radars. They know exactly where to aim, and they home in on it like bloody falcons. And it really does hurt. It hurts so much that one afternoon I went home and googled ‘dong-chim anal prolapse’ because I was scared that one of the kids – specifically the beefy one with the sloping forehead who seemed genetically doomed to a life of criminal muscle – would somehow dong-chim me so hard that my intestines would piñata out of my bumhole like a drop-down Millionth Customer banner in a 1970s supermarket.
If Pete had been raised in this environment, he wouldn’t have been seen as a ridiculous sexual deviant in the making. No, he’d have been crowned as the all-time Harry Potter Quidditch champion of non-consensual anal fingering.
But really, it was the eczema that defined Pete’s early years. He’d cry because it itched, so he’d scratch it, but that would only make it more livid, so he’d cry even more. My parents tried everything. They put him in mittens to keep him from scratching, but he tore them off. They slathered him in lotions and creams and ointments, but he rubbed them off. They even tried cranial osteopathy, Mum dragging the pair of us on an hour-long bus trip to Tenterden once a week to pay a man she couldn’t really afford to try and help ease the pain my brother was in.
Then they tried altering his diet. For a huge chunk of his childhood, the food that Pete was allowed to eat was incredibly restricted. Almost entirely consisting of items bought at Holland & Barrett, it was a nightmare of miserable, taste-free, fun-free health food for him. Milk was out, unless it was a special occasion, in which case he was allowed a thimbleful of thin, watery, see-through skimmed muck.
Meanwhile, I, the miracle child, I could eat whatever the hell I wanted. This was masked from Pete, of course, in an absurd cloak-and-dagger ritual that involved me pretending that I was eating a small bowl of dry Rice Krispies when actually I was chowing down on a small mountain of chocolate buttons like a goddamn champ. And, clearly, Pete could tell that he was missing out on something. He wasn’t an idiot. He had the mental capacity to understand that he was being treated like a second-class citizen. It’s just a shame that he didn’t have the mental capacity to tell that it was all for his own good.
This made Pete resentful of anyone who got to eat normal food, setting one of his key character traits in place: wild indignation whenever anyone else had something he didn’t.
All he ever wanted was for everyone to have exactly the same amount of stuff, right down to the number of chips they were served for tea. Not that this extended both ways, of course. If anyone ever gave him anything, that meant that it was his, and there was no way on earth that he was going to share it. It also meant that, since he had something and you didn’t, this was indisputable proof that he was better than you. But, if he caught anyone with more than him, he’d throw himself to the ground and thrash around like a beached shark, all in the spirit of fairness.
Here’s an example. Once a year, in our sole overtly religious act as a family, my mum would gather the pair of us up and take us to the church a couple of streets away.
Along we trooped every Christmas Eve to the Christingle service, where we’d gently cup a candle-studded, ribbon-wrapped orange in our hands and, in the crisp chill of the draughty church, sing carols and hear stories of suffering and kindness from within the local community. But then one year the vicar told a story about a boy called Peter who had a lot of toys, and Pete threw a tantrum because he thought the story was about him, which meant that we’d all somehow been keeping this enormous stockpile of toys away from him, and in a wanton act of retaliation he tore open his sacred orange and ate it in front of everyone. That was the Heritage family’s last Christingle service.
The most nefarious instance of Pete’s fury happened at my infants school. It was so subtle that I didn’t even realise it had happened for years.
I was in my first or second year, which meant that Pete must have been about two. Walking from our main assembly hall one day, a teacher – not even my teacher, a new woman I didn’t recognise – slapped her hand down on my shoulder and pulled me to one side. I’d seen this happen a few times before, and it was usually down to a minor breach of uniform standards: a pupil’s shoelaces were undone, or they weren’t wearing their tie.
But the teacher didn’t look angry. If anything, she actually looked a little concerned.
‘Stuart,’ she whispered, softly enough so that only I could hear, ‘is everything OK at home?’
‘Yes,’ I replied shyly.
‘Are you sure?’ she asked, a little more urgently. ‘It’s OK to say if it isn’t. Nobody can hurt you here.’
This stopped me in my tracks. Nobody can hurt me? What on earth was this woman bibbling on about?
‘Stuart, listen. I want you to tell me what happened to your face.’
In that moment, I understood the cause of her concern. My entire face was covered in a grid system of tiny scratches so completely comprehensive that I couldn’t have possibly inflicted them on myself. Imagine applying a moisturising facemask out of tinned pilchards, going to a cattery, finding the biggest, meanest, most socially maladjusted beast there and calling it an arsehole. My face looked like the aftermath of that. In retrospect, the teacher was probably well within her professional care of duty to worry about me.
‘Oh, this?’ I replied with an obliviousness that I’m now aware comes off like genuine stupidity. ‘That’s just my little brother. Sometimes he scratches my face. That’s just what toddlers do.’
Then I wandered off and instantly forgot that this temporary disruption to my school day had ever even taken place. This moment remained an unexamined memory until one day, maybe fifteen years after it happened, when it suddenly struck me:
Hang on a minute. They thought I was being abused.
My teachers must have all got together and discussed the state of my face. Worse, they must have all come to the same conclusion. Stuart’s parents were beating him up. Oh, sure, they look nice enough at the school gates, but who knows what really goes on behind closed doors? Actually, now they came to think of it, of course Stuart’s being abused. Look at the size of his dad’s eyebrows. They’re Bond-villain eyebrows. If Stuart’s dad isn’t beating him up, then he’s almost definitely developing a satellite capable of controlling the global nuclear stockpile. I mean, look at him, with his big bushy eyebrows.
They must have decided to play it cool. They weren’t going to get the authorities involved just yet, and they certainly weren’t going to make any calls home, but they were going to test the waters by asking me what all the scratches were about. Maybe they thought I’d collapse, crying into their arms, revealing between frantic gulps of air that my mum jabbed me in the face with red-hot knitting needles every night before bed because I didn’t wash the dishes properly.
Instead, I’d just told them that my baby brother was a bit of a twat.
This realisation – that Pete had spent his early years clawing at my face so violently that my school almost called social services – was huge. Potentially, it’s second only to the realisation (which we really don’t need to go into) that hit me five years after my grandmother’s death while I was lying on a sunlounger on holiday: that this wonderful woman with the kindest heart imaginable had given her poodle an unutterably offensive name. I think she named him after the dog from The Dam Busters, and she just really liked The Dam Busters. Anyway, look, we don’t need to get into that.
This was Pete all over. He’d noticed – possibly wrongly – that I was getting preferential treatment, and he’d chosen to enact a violent knee-jerk revenge on me. The kid thought the whole world was out to get him the whole time, and he could only succeed by clawing and scraping until all his enemies had been vanquished. He was a Shakespearian tragedy wrapped in scabs, a barely contained ball of spite.
This is not how it was supposed to go. Admittedly, as someone raised as the elder child, with zero experience of having an older brother myself, I might not be the best person to make this statement. But, still, it needs to be said: being a younger sibling looks like a piece of cake.
I was the one getting slammed in the face by life over and over again, because I was the one who had to go through everything first. I was the first to go to nursery school, to primary school, to secondary school, to college. I had to fumble through each new institution blind, figuring out the rules on the fly.
And I had to forge my own tastes in a vacuum, discovering my own music and films. This is why the first cassette I ever bought was a Curiosity Killed the Cat compilation. If I’d had an older brother, he’d have slapped it out of my hands in the record shop and gently eased me towards The Fall. That’s what big brothers are for.
I was the first to go off-piste with an independently chosen haircut, for crying out loud. Pete could simply look and learn as I struggled with the desperate limitations of being born with my mum’s fine hair and my dad’s slightly conical skull. I didn’t have the luxury of sitting back and watching. If I’d had an older brother to observe, I wouldn’t have tried to grow my hair out, only for it to curl up at the ends so violently that I spent three years of my life walking around like a giant letter W. I’d just have shaved it off, like he did.
I had to do all this stuff first. I was the one shoulder-barging all these doors open. All Pete needed to do for a quiet life was ball himself up, roll into my slipstream and enjoy the ride.
That’s it. That’s all he had to do. And, to this day, I’m staggered that he didn’t. I hacked out the path for him, setting the best examples I possibly could by charming my elders and working hard and winning good grades, only for him to lumber in a few years later and dynamite my beautiful trail to smithereens.
Take primary school. A few weeks after my academic journey began, I was introduced to the peculiar tradition of the Harvest Festival. In most schools, these things operated as a jumped-up food bank, with pupils bringing in cans of soup and packets of rice that the school would later hand over to charity.
Not at Willesborough County Primary Infants School, though. Not at my weird little out-of-the-way parochial English countryside school, with its mandatory weekly country-dancing lessons and its maypole and its menacing oak tree logo and its whole general Wicker Man vibe that couldn’t have been any more pronounced if we’d been taught PE by a naked Swedish woman with deer antlers stuck to the side of her head.
No, at Willesborough County Primary Infants School, the Harvest Festival included something called the Harvest Festival Parade. This mainly involved getting all the kids together and making them walk around the school three times, presumably in the hope that the almighty god Woden would grant us a bountiful crop of tinned peas and Cup-a-Soups. And, just to make this meaningless gesture even more needlessly ceremonial, the students first had to pick a King and Queen of the Harvest.