That was the bit of the story Ned kept insisting he repeat to people. To Annie. To Nikki. To every member of Home staff they’d bumped into all morning, in fact.
‘Only Adam,’ Ned kept saying, struggling almost to get the words out, he was wheezing so hard with laughter, jabbing with a finger in Adam’s direction. ‘Only my brother would actually pick up a shitty brick.’
And of course they had all laughed along, Annie, Nikki, their waiter at breakfast, even if there wasn’t actually a joke there, the way there would have been had he picked up a literal hot potato or the wrong end of an actual stick, even if half the staff Ned insisted he repeat the story to had never actually spoken to Adam before.
It was all part of the pattern, of course, a pattern that had gradually established itself over time.
And he deserved it, a little ribbing. Sometimes he had drunk too much at dinner, or lunch, been hungover in a morning meeting, said something stupid, done something stupid, nodded off. The thing with Ned was he never let you forget it. Never let you forget it, and never let anyone else forget it either. You were expected to simply sit there, nod, smile, take it. And somehow, somewhere along the line, without really noticing, he had gone from being a person to being a running joke. Somewhere along the line he had got so used to being shouted at and blamed for everything, called names, told he was useless, had got so used to just sitting there while other people were informed of his uselessness, that he barely noticed it, most of the time.
And then occasionally, the way some comment landed, the mood he was in that day, he really did mind. And minding about that comment meant he suddenly also minded about all the other comments, over the years, all at once. Or it could be days later, or even weeks later, and suddenly he would remember some snide remark, and he would suddenly be able to hear his breath whistling in his flared nostrils, suddenly feel himself gripped with real anger.
And the point Laura would always remind him of, when he had one of those moments, when he started brooding and frowning and snapping at her, was that he did not have to put up with it. He did not have to confront Ned, he did not need to lose his temper or start a fight. All Adam needed to do was calmly tell Ned what he had decided, and make it clear this was serious.
‘I know it’s scary,’ Laura had texted him that morning. ‘But I trust you and I know you can do it.’
He hadn’t texted back. There was no point, not until he’d done what he’d promised. He knew Laura. They had been married a long time. She’d made herself absolutely clear on the phone the day before. She loved him. She would always love him. She believed in him. But what she was not able to do was to stick around and watch him destroy himself, to stay in this marriage and watch him making himself so unhappy. Just like the clients she coached, she said, once he had taken the decision to make a change, she could help him. Every inch of the way, she would be there to help him. But Adam had to take this first step alone.
It was scary. All his life, everywhere he went, he had always been Ned Groom’s little brother. At school, where the first question every teacher asked him, year after year, the first time they took the register, was whether he was any relation. As a teenager, when he started noticing the way people’s manner immediately shifted once they knew who he was – or rather whose little brother he was. It was hard to convey, to someone who had not been there, to Laura, just how big a deal Ned had been, even while they were growing up. His brother had always been magnetic, one of those people everyone seemed to know, everyone wanted to know. Not just at school. Every party Adam went to, someone would recognize his brother in him. Get on a bus and the driver would give him some message to pass on to Ned. The guy in the corner shop would ask how his brother was doing. Wherever he went, whoever he spoke to, Ned seemed to find a way of connecting with people, remembering something about them, leaving an impression.
Adam had probably been about twelve when someone had first asked him if it was weird for him, all that.
His answer had been: ‘I dunno really.’
It was not just that his life would have been different, if he had not been Ned’s brother. He would have been different. Ever since he was a child, it had partly been Ned’s eyes and ears he had been looking at and listening to the world with. Ned didn’t like the taste of carrots? Adam wasn’t going to eat them either. Ned hated swimming? For years, Adam had refused to learn too. He had absolutely idolized Ned, as a teenager. He could still recall how it used to thrill him when someone commented on how much he looked like his brother – more of a compliment then than it would be now. When Ned had gone off to study law at university, Adam had literally moved into his bedroom, started wearing his clothes. With music, books, even people, Ned’s taste was his touchstone, Ned’s imagined opinion the one he found himself triangulating his own against. Perhaps that was one of the reasons he had proved so consistently useful to his big brother, that ability to anticipate what Ned would think about something, what was going to excite or annoy him, how he was likely to react.