My only sibling is seven years older than me. That means he has forever been seven years ahead of me in life, sitting somewhere between a willing co-conspirator and knowledgable surrogate parent – protective but fun, and always aware of the secrets of existence I am yet to discover. It was his aside that spoiled the secret identity of Santa Claus; he who laughingly revealed the mechanics of sex; he who gave me my first sip of beer. Yet, when he found out I was sneaking cigarettes from my dad’s stale dinner party supply, he chastised me before either of my parents could, and when my mum was diagnosed with cancer and I was just 15, he was already a 22-year-old medical student, able to speak in a doctor’s shorthand and advocate for her care while my father and I floundered.
Ever since my mum died in 2013, family photos have been a source of bittersweet pain. In the pictures where she is present, I’m reminded of her wide smile, appetite for fun and her loving presence. In the images without her, all I see is her absence – the mum-shaped silhouette where she should be, either because she was outside the frame or because she was no longer alive.
There are some family photos, though, that escape that binary. One that sits on my desk and that I look at almost every day is of me and my brother, probably aged six and 13. We are perched on the lurid bedspread of my grandparents’ spare room in Hounslow, smiling from either side of a bootleg calendar image of supermodel Cindy Crawford. It’s as 90s and absurd as it sounds – I have no recollection of the calendar or why we had a picture taken with it and it doesn’t particularly look like I knew what was going on then either. But sense-making isn’t the point of the photo.
Instead, the joy of the picture is in its snapshot of our goofy sibling bond. I’m sure my brother was in on some pre-pubescent secret as to the special status of the calendar, but, like so many younger siblings, I just seem happy to be included. The picture serves as a reminder of the world we would go on to create for ourselves – the hours spent passing each other the video game controller, watching late-night TV or cruising in my brother’s Fiat while blasting UK garage tunes. It’s not sad that my mum wasn’t present at any of those moments or in this picture, since this was a space for just us. And now that she is no longer here, it’s a reminder that we still have each other.
