This one time…

The family. We were a strange little band of characters trudging through life sharing diseases and toothpaste, coveting one another’s desserts, hiding shampoo, borrowing money, locking each other out of our rooms, inflicting pain and kissing to heal it in the same instant, loving, laughing, defending, and trying to figure out the common thread that bound us all together. – Erma Bombec

The forthcoming tale of reminiscence was sparked by a crayon. A red crayon. It is my middle brother’s (acronym: MB) favourite crayon. Why? You might ask. He said that it tasted the best. He also liked to chew on his toenails. But who am I to judge? I liked to eat the dog’s pellets and I thought they tasted good. We all have our idiosyncrasies. I love my brothers. I figured out just how much in the year 2000 when I moved out of home. I remember telling them that I was leaving and my little brother (acronym: LB) immediately whipped out a cigarette from his secret stash – the thatch roof in his loft room – and started smoking. If only the thatch was able reveal the interesting items that have been embedded in its many layers over the years – bombs, naked women, chicken legs, beer. Who knows? This time, I’ll do the ostrich thing and bury. So back to me leaving. I was horrified – being the oldest, being female and pretty much the matriarch of what I call the ‘siblinghood’ – that my little brother was smoking. But he didn’t care. The stress of me leaving provoked him to risk the lecture that I was to deliver about sending himself to an early grave, stinky breath and yellow teeth. It was at this point that I realised just how precious siblinghood is.

I was a biyatch of a sister growing up. Bossing and bullying were my specialties. I think (I hope) that I have become a better sister as I have grown older, and the fact that my bros are now both hulking pounds of lanky beefy muscle means that it takes a great deal more effort on my part to terrorise them. MB refers to me as his “little big sister”. I like that. They are my protectors. And vice versa. ‘We got each other’s backs’. We call ourselves The Tripod – like some mini Mafiosi organisation. Watch out, here comes The Tripod. People run in fear…as you can imagine. If one leg of the Tripod breaks, the other two can’t stand. Aren’t we sweet? Such a lovely metaphor. Okay, it’s pretty gay. Even gayer is the fact that we have a theme song, which is not so sweet – Korn’s All in the Family. It is an ode to our collective and individual tendency to embrace lunatic behaviour.

There is this thing about the number three which can result in some tenuous situations. Someone is always being left out or ganged up on. There is a lot to be said for the cliche “What doesn’t kill you makes you stronger”. I think that you can only hate somebody as much as you love them and based on this principle we certainly love one another a whole damn lot. There is this one story: Once upon a time a little boy was born. His mom brought him home from the hospital. Granny was hanging out at mom’s pad to help out. The little boy’s older sister was a little possessive. And as the story goes, the older sister tried to cut her granny with scissors when granny tried to touch the little boy. This incident set the tone for the rest of our lives as part of The Tripod. I have an innate need to protect my bros, and this instinctual and primal urge has often become a little psychotic. The impulse is easily identified by those who have siblings of their own but difficult to understand if one is not a member of a siblinghood. I have learned over the years that perhaps I am the one that the bros need protecting from at times. I have learned to back off, but beware one and all, Kratos still emerges on the occasion.

It is the job of siblings to torment one another. Violence is par for the course and age means nothing. When MB, at the age of 22, threatened to gut me like a fish, I laughed. Five minutes later he advised me to sleep with my eyes open because he was going to stab me with a screw driver, and then, from across the lounge, launched a screw driver at my face, I ran. I ran very fast. If LB hadn’t been around to protect me and shut me in my room, I wouldn’t be telling this tale. I took MB’s threat very seriously and I think I did sleep with my eyes open for a while whilst clutching my big pink fluffy elephant teddy. Threats like that are a little different coming from a 22 year old who is double your size, as opposed to a nine year old, who I could crush with my ass in one fell swoop. It reminded me of the time MB threw a stone at me and instead of taking my eye out or piercing my brain, as intended, it shattered the glass table sitting next to me. MB was always the crazier leg of the Tripod. He was the kind to jump out of his loft room window preceded by his blanket. When asked why he dropped the blanket, he said it was to break his fall. I have always admired him. It must be great to live in a world where a centimetre thick blanket can ‘break a fall’. I remember a day when I heard LB screaming from his room upstairs. It was a tortured scream of anguish and fear. When I asked him what had happened, he told me that he had broken MB’s CD player and was reacting in anticipation of what would be done to him. Potential decapitation is worthy of a few tormented bellows. Alcohol and testosterone are a dangerous mix. One day, the usual sibling competition between MB and LB reached its climax. The story goes like this: I was sleeping peacefully in my bed after a hectic night partying, and who staggers in at 6am but LB. He is bloodied up and all he can do is point to his hand and in some form of delirious speech say “He bit me”, over and over again he repeats, “He bit me”. I thought he had been mugged and gang raped. Not actually. He and MB had had a brawl on the side of the street on their way home. All I know is that fish-hooks, head-butting, pavement-slamming and pretty much every form of dirty violent trick imaginable, went down. I wish I had been there to see it. Later that morning MB strode in with a nose the size and colour of a pomegranate. And true to the nature of the male species, all is forgiven and forgotten in the blink of an eye.

I have always wondered if MB’s psychosis could be the result of a little game we used to play when we were younger called “blind man’s bluff”- although a slightly altered version of the original concept. It entailed blindfolding MB and leading him around the house…and into the occasional wall. Okay, not the occasional wall but pretty much every wall. Brain damage is a definite possibility – also reinforced by the fact that I was able to convince MB that the game would be fun, every single time. He has been known to flush his underpants down the toilet, drape them over the chandeliers in our house, and throw his clothes out of the car window. The dude is a regular Cro-Magnon – clothes just aren’t his thing. He is also known to be a little on the dramatic side. There was this one time that I kicked him in the shin because he was annoying me, and he crawled around the house wailing…for hours. I mean I didn’t kick him that hard. He was always running away or phoning child line. Running away usually entailed climbing a tree or hiding behind the electricity box up the road for a couple of hours. He also talks to himself and engages himself in the occasional debate or argument. I have always said that MB doesn’t need any friends because he is his own best bud.

I realised at a very young age that boys are very annoying. There was this day that MB infuriated me so much that I called him a bugger (I was seven). Bad move. My dad heard me and asked if I knew what a bugger was, I told him, “Yes. Someone who bugs me is a bugger”. To display such logic at such a young age is commendable. My dad told me that if I ever said that word again I would get a smack. It was around this age that MB caught me stealing liquorice from the kitchen the night before my birthday party. I cleverly, or so I thought, resorted to a little bribery – “Hey here’s some sweeties for you if you don’t tell on me”. The little Judas went straight to my Dad and gave him the liquorice. I got a smack.

LB is by no means exempt from the lunacy. He is fearless and downright mental. He is an accident looking for a place to happen. He has broken his arm and had a chunk of meat torn out of his hand by a spike on a gate, One day he fell off his bicycle and the dude behind him couldn’t stop in time, so he rode over LB’s head – I remember the tire marks across his cheek. He drove my dad’s car into a wall at quite a speed (note the euphemism), and he nearly killed his testicle in a motorbike accident. The adventurer in LB is tempered by his soft heart. LB had a hamster. One day he came down the stairs carrying the little guy in his hands. Half crying, he told me that his hamster’s eye had popped out. Me, suspicious by nature, thought he was conducting some kind of experiment, and thus demanded an explanation. LB had been playing with hammy, and hammy, being a squiggly hamster and all, had jumped off LB’s bed…the result: hammy’s eye hanging by a meaty string. LB was distraught.

Then there is Underberg. That is where the shit went down for The Tripod. I will set the scene for you: It’s our first trip. My mom, newly divorced, has just driven eight hours from JHB to Natal. We finally arrive at Underberg and it has been raining nonstop for the past week. The very long dirt road to my aunt’s house is slush. And it is very dark. As my mom negotiates the mud, that once was a road, veering this way and that, the three of us are panicking and wailing and crying and wining in fear of our imminent deaths as we anticipate the car sliding off the road and landing in the river below. We are hungry and tired and MB keeps telling all of us to keep quiet because we are giving him a headache. I am yelling at MB who can’t shut-up about his stupid head when I am hungry and facing a life and death situation. Headache? Food? Death? My priorities are well defined. Eventually my aunt, an experienced mud/slush-negotiator arrived to take over the driving duties, and my poor mother, close to tears, extricated herself from the car leaving the battle-axe to dish out the discipline. It was at Underberg that, one night, whilst sleeping in his tent, LB woke up screaming. He bravely limped up to my mom’s caravan whimpering in pain because he had apparently twisted his ankle after falling off his bed – which was a 2 centimetre thick mattress. It was at Underberg – that MB saw the phantom berries, which to this day he still believes to be real – that I drew a stick against the side of the bros tent and laughed hysterically when I heard their scared little voices tremor with fear because a snake was trying to get in – that I fell off the foofie slide into a bed of rocks and thorns spurring LB to make the fastest sprint of his life – that I made MB cry with fear when I told him a crocodile was chasing him in the river. It is these memories that form the foundation of my existence.

As we grew into our twenties and I moved out, I realised that it was fun to hang out with my bros. Skating, Partying and getting up to some shit. I think about watching the televised world cup rugby matches in 2007 with LB. We gyrated around the room at the hint of any excitement, and even when there was nothing to be excited about. I remember LB humping the floor in a state of manic hysteria when SA kicked some sweet English ass in the world cup final. It was a beautiful moment – the winning and the floor-humping. I think about going to Woodstock and trying to control MB, who was in the process of starting a box-up in the midst of an agitated crowd. I clutched MB’s shirt with a death-grip. He tried to escape but only managed to run on the spot, like some crazed cartoon character. I remember telling MB not to join the mosh as his shoulder would dislocate (an old rugby injury) and I didn’t want to leave Woodstock to take him to hospital after we had been there all day waiting to see Blindside. Did he listen? Nope. Then when his shoulder dislocates and I finish swearing at him he says “It’s okay, we don’t have to go”. The poor guy was prepared to stay at the event, with a dislocated shoulder and half dying from the pain, for me. Because I wanted to see the band. I would never have allowed him to do that and it was the one and only time he has managed to pop his shoulder back into place. MB has a generosity of spirit that transcends The Tripod.

Siblings are the people we practice on, the people who teach us about fairness and cooperation and kindness and caring – quite often the hard way. – Pamela Dugdale

I cannot fathom a life devoid of the sibling warfare over: who would sit in the front seat, who would go first at the dentist, who had the most food (everything must be of equal proportion in all circumstances), who stole money from the bank in Monopoly, whose turn it was to wash the dishes or feed the dog, who has the coolest friends. The list is literally endless. I have bossed them, bullied them, partied with them laughed with them and cried with them. I love them, and even better, I like them. I love them for the memories we have created, I treasure them for the individuals they are, I am proud of the men they have become, and I am honoured to be their sister.

To the outside world we all grow old. But not to brothers and sisters. We know each other as we always were. We know each other’s hearts. We share private family jokes. We remember family feuds and secrets, family griefs and joys. We live outside the touch of time. – Clara Ortega

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