Loving Amélie Read Free Page B

instilled in Peter that he was to be his little brother’s
protector, and Peter took on this mantle without hesitation or complaint;
although with this rank came the expectation that little Christopher would pay
him back with unquestioning tolerance of his higher power:
    “Why don’t I ever get to be Batman?” the younger
Skinner had frequently wailed to their mother.
    This was particularly plangent
as the Batman costume was, in fact, Chris’s; and it didn’t even fit his lanky
brother very well. Batman would never wear football socks to cover his bare
calves.
    “Oh, just be Robin for today,”
Jean would coo, for the “quiet” life she so coveted.
      (Robin didn’t have a costume: it was usually whatever Chris
was wearing).
    Linda had hung a photograph of
the brothers, taken when they were ten and eight respectively, in the corridor
that led to the kitchen in Skinner’s. They were standing shoulder to shoulder in matching
school jumpers: Peter sporting a savagely short fringe and a brazen smile of
haphazard teeth; Chris patently blushing despite it being in black and white,
with an untidy head and firmly closed mouth. It was a smile of sorts: Chris had
not wanted the gaps in his teeth recorded for posterity, and ended up,
ironically, looking like he had a mouthful of marbles instead.
    They were the only two children
that came along for Roy and Jean; and were raised in a modest terraced house
with such a small back garden that the boys spent most of their outdoor lives
at the local park, where they could cycle their bikes through a tubular subway
that smelled of urine to a concrete-based world of opportunity and excitement.
The grassy parts were good for football, if there were enough spare items for
goalposts, or for skidding around on their bikes. Occasionally a park warden
would pitch up and tell them and the other children that cycling on the grass
was forbidden, as it “churned it up”. Peter and Chris would look at the warden
with contrite expressions on their faces until he had gone, when Peter would
say: “Sod off, it’s not a bowling green!” and Chris would giggle and stick up
two fingers after him.
    Then they would return to
whatever grass-based activity took their fancy. The downside of this was, of
course, that it was a minefield of dog turds that could never be completely
avoided; and it was always a weary cycle home when one or other of them had
poo-smeared trousers to present to their mum for washing, plus an ear-bashing.
    Peter was by far the more
athletic brother: he didn’t have his sibling’s troublesome lungs and could run
and climb and shout all day with enviable ease. Chris’s early pièce de
resistance , however, was the ability to draw a crowd by promising that he
could do a three hundred and sixty degree turn on the swing: clinging to the
chains for dear life and swooping so high that he looked like he might actually
achieve the impossible, and twirl right over the top bar and return back down
to his standing, swinging state. Occasionally, if there was a significant
audience – preferably including one or two girls – he would finish
by leaping off the swing and landing with a showy flourish of his arms. Having
witnessed this act with hidden terror at how much the frame of the swing was
lifting off the ground, Peter would then whoop his congratulations, and make
sure everyone knew that it was his little brother they were watching. On one occasion, he had even
tried to charge some onlookers for the spectacle – shaking an empty Marvel tin at
them – and collected several two pence pieces and a girl’s hairclip.
    At school, Peter was finishing
one year pretty much as Chris was starting it. Given he had sat through his
older brother’s endless teatime accounts of life at the court of Henry the
Eighth, or his loud attempts to make sense of the hieroglyphical world of
algebra, Chris should have been better prepared for what was to come. He might
have turned his thoughts from his