The Minimum Version of Ourselves

The other day my mum sent me an old photograph of the three of us together — me, her and my little brother — on my grandad’s boat.

I must have been about thirteen, and my brother was probably three. I was in the river swimming while he stood there wearing one of those little life jackets that made children look like they were being prepared for an emergency evacuation. Mum had one arm clamped around him because he was the youngest, the favourite and, as far as she was concerned, one unexpected gust of wind away from being swept out to sea.

It was pissing down outside and Mum was bored, which apparently meant it was time to climb into the loft and emotionally ambush everyone with thirty-year-old photographs.

They kept arriving throughout the day. Pictures of me, my brother, my two sisters, Mum and Dad. Christmases, holidays, birthdays, gardens, terrible clothes and some absolutely criminal haircuts.

The strange thing was that in nearly every picture we looked genuinely happy.

Not Instagram happy either. We didn’t have the technology to pretend our lives were amazing back then. Nobody had taken forty-seven photographs, applied a filter and selected the one where everybody looked least dysfunctional.

We just looked happy.

And looking through them reminded me that there had been a long period of our lives when we were all incredibly close.

My brother was born when I was ten and immediately became a protected species. I wouldn’t let the wind blow on him.

I was ridiculously protective of him as a kid, although he never really needed it. He was a clever little shite, went off to university and eventually moved to Hong Kong, where he married into what I can only describe as Crazy Rich Asians rich.

He’s still a scally underneath it all.

He just speaks a little posher now.

Then there are my two sisters, who I’ve affectionately referred to at various stages of my life as nobheads.

My younger sister and I weren’t actually that close when we were kids. In fact, one of my favourite childhood activities involved nothing more sophisticated than walking past her on the stairs.

For reasons I still don’t completely understand, my physical presence on that staircase used to absolutely infuriate her.

I’d walk past and hear:

“I FUCKING HATE YOU.”

So naturally, being the mature and compassionate older brother I was, if I saw her walking downstairs I would suddenly remember something incredibly important that I needed from upstairs.

Back up I’d go.

Past her again.

Absolute meltdown.

There were no winners in our childhood home. Only survivors.

She also had a bizarre obsession with toilet roll.

She used to hide it under her bed.

I have absolutely no idea what economic collapse she was preparing for, but clearly she knew something the rest of us didn’t because this occasionally meant there was no toilet roll in the actual toilet.

More than once I walked into the bathroom and found ripped-up pieces of newspaper sitting on top of the cistern because my dad had clearly assessed the situation and decided whatever was available would have to do.

Thinking about it, I don’t actually remember us having a toilet seat for any significant length of time either.

Dad somehow kept breaking them by charging into the bathroom.

I have never properly understood the mechanics of this and, at this stage of my life, I’m happy to leave some family mysteries unsolved.

By the time we were in our twenties, though, my younger sister and I had become close.

She would come to mine for what she called a “feast”, which basically meant I would buy an unreasonable amount of food and we’d sit there eating until she had reached her daily limit of human interaction.

She has never been massively fond of people.

There would normally come a point when she gave her husband a look which translated roughly as:

I’ve had enough humans now.

And that was it.

Gone.

The best example was when she travelled up from London specifically to visit me, arrived at my house, stayed for about fifteen minutes, decided she’d completed the necessary amount of socialising and left.

A four-hour journey for fifteen minutes of Andrew.

Looking back, fifteen minutes might actually have been generous.

When she was single, she stayed at mine once and arrived carrying a suitcase. Most people open a suitcase and take out the things they need.

She tipped the entire fucking thing upside down onto the floor.

For the rest of the evening, whenever she needed something, she simply rummaged through the pile until she found it.

At Christmas one year she was skint and turned up carrying a bag full of whatever cheap shit she’d managed to afford.

Rather than deciding beforehand who the presents were actually for, she seemed to allocate them live.

She would reach into the bag, pull something out, look around the room and decide there and then who was getting it.

“This is yours.”

There was no sentimentality.

Christmas had become a game show.

Then there was Secret Santa.

My dad’s stupid idea.

My sister wanted a guitar.

I happened to have an old one lying around that I must have picked up somewhere. It had horrible plastic strings, looked like it had survived several wars and, for reasons I can no longer remember, had a washing peg clipped onto the fretboard.

So naturally I wrapped it beautifully.

Christmas morning came and she opened it.

Her face dropped.

I managed to keep the joke going for about an hour before eventually going out to the car and bringing in the actual present, which was a genuinely lovely guitar.

She was delighted.

She played it once, discovered guitar was quite difficult and never played it again.

She had also been supposed to buy my brother an iPod that Christmas and hadn’t bothered.

Tight arse.

Remember iPods?

At the time they seemed like the greatest technological achievement in human history. Now I’d be devastated if somebody took Spotify off my phone for twenty minutes.

My older sister is different again.

She is clever, but she’s also properly street smart. She has always been able to work things out, make things happen and throw herself completely into whatever mad idea has taken hold of her.

She is probably the sibling most similar to me in that respect.

There is always another idea, another plan, another thing that might finally make us rich beyond our wildest dreams.

The fact that none of these ideas have yet resulted in either of us owning a Caribbean island has done absolutely nothing to reduce our confidence in the next one.

She has always thrown herself into life.

At one point this included acquiring two horses despite living in a three-bedroom house.

The horses weren’t actually in the house, obviously.

Although knowing our family, I wouldn’t completely rule it out.

We could also be absolutely terrible to one another in the way only brothers and sisters can.

At one family party, all the chairs had somehow ended up turned away from the table. My sister went to sit down and, at precisely the right moment, I kicked the chair away.

She completely disappeared.

Her head hit the table on the way down and for a second there was just an empty space where my sister had previously been.

Then she emerged from underneath the table absolutely fucking furious.

Any sensible brother would have recognised that the joke had run its course.

I waited until she went to sit down again.

And kicked the chair away for a second time.

Looking back, there are moments from childhood where I genuinely wonder how I survived long enough to become an adult.

Years later I used to love going round to her house on a Sunday.

There would be a roast, Dad would have his guitar out, people would be taking the piss out of each other and my sister would almost certainly be pissed as a fart by about two in the afternoon.

At some point she would start singing The Cranberries.

Usually Zombie.

Not quietly either.

There was no tentative little singalong in our family. If Zombie had started, Dolores O’Riordan had effectively been replaced for the afternoon.

My sister also installed an absolutely enormous swimming pool in a relatively small back garden.

Getting from the back door to the seating area became something resembling an event from Gladiators. You had to turn sideways, squeeze around things and occasionally consider whether it might actually be easier to climb over the pool.

And I loved those Sundays.

I loved the stupidity of them. The noise. The arguments that disappeared as quickly as they started. Dad sitting in the garden playing guitar while my sister murdered Zombie at two o’clock in the afternoon.

There would be kids everywhere, too much food, too much drink and two fucking horses looking over the fence.

At the time, I never thought of any of it as something that could disappear.

Why would you?

Families are just there.

You assume there will always be another Sunday, another Christmas, another barbecue, another stupid argument and another ridiculous story.

Until there isn’t.

My dad died five years ago.

And somewhere around that point, everything changed.

Not immediately. There wasn’t one dramatic moment where the Murphy family exploded and everybody marched off in different directions.

Nobody held a meeting and agreed that from this point onwards we were all going to become dysfunctional.

We just started drifting.

And I definitely changed.

I’m not saying I’ve spent five years permanently grieving. I haven’t. Life carried on. I worked, laughed, travelled, coached football, became obsessed with various ideas, wrote things, drew things and lived my life.

For a while I also developed a considerably fatter face, although thankfully that particular stage appears to have passed.

On the outside, I probably still looked mostly like me.

Inside, though, something shifted.

I became quieter and more selective. More defensive. My world got smaller and then smaller again until eventually my circle became so exclusive that I’m not entirely convinced even I’m allowed into it some days.

Around the same time, my older sister and I stopped speaking.

Five years.

When you tell people you haven’t spoken to your sister for five years, I think they naturally assume there must have been one enormous event.

There wasn’t.

Not really.

We were both in a bad place. We both knew exactly which buttons to press and, because we are brother and sister, neither of us had much interest in being the person who backed down.

So we pressed every fucking button available to us.

Repeatedly.

Every attempted peace treaty somehow became another episode in the world’s lowest-budget soap opera.

My favourite was after my nan’s funeral when she created a family WhatsApp group called:

LAST CHANCE SALOON.

A tremendous foundation for reconciliation.

Nothing says healthy family communication quite like putting everyone into a digital Wild West showdown.

I lasted approximately twenty minutes.

I called my sister a nobhead.

She felt triggered, dramatically left the group and I returned to my traditional position of being banned from family WhatsApp chats.

For years I could tell those stories and laugh because, objectively, they are funny.

But underneath all the comedy was something none of us were handling particularly well.

We had lost our dad.

And I think all of us lost something slightly different with him.

Recently that same sister said something to my mum about me that genuinely stopped me.

She acknowledged that when I was struggling, the family had probably moved away from me when perhaps what I actually needed was for them to move closer.

When Mum told me, I didn’t hear it as an apology and I don’t think that was what it was intended to be.

It just made me think.

Because I remember how lonely that period felt.

I remember feeling as though everybody had disappeared at exactly the point I needed people around me.

But five years gives you enough distance to see something else as well.

I made myself incredibly difficult to get close to.

I was angry and stubborn. If I believed I was right about something, good fucking luck moving me.

There were times I shut people out and then felt hurt that nobody came in. There were times I interpreted things through whatever I was feeling rather than what was actually being said.

And there were definitely times when I knew exactly what I was doing.

My sister absolutely hates being called a nobhead.

Not mildly dislikes it.

Hates it.

So there were occasions during an argument when I didn’t call her a nobhead because it was an accurate clinical assessment of the situation.

I called her a nobhead because I knew exactly what would happen next.

That isn’t misunderstanding.

That’s warfare.

Mum regularly asks me whether I reflect on my part in everything.

Yes, Mum.

Constantly.

Like some sort of foul-mouthed Buddhist monk.

I know when I’ve been a prick, and sometimes I even know I’m being a prick while I’m doing it.

Sometimes it’s because I’m hurt. Sometimes because I feel threatened. Sometimes because I think I’m defending myself and sometimes, on reflection, I was probably just being a prick.

That doesn’t mean nobody else ever got things wrong.

Of course they did.

It doesn’t mean some things didn’t hurt or that I’ve suddenly decided every version of events except mine was right.

They weren’t.

But I’m no longer particularly interested in producing a family balance sheet showing who was responsible for which percentage of the past five years.

You can spend the rest of your life doing that and still end up exactly where you started.

Families don’t work like court cases.

There isn’t always a verdict.

Sometimes there are just four or five people carrying completely different versions of the same years.

Everyone remembers what was said to them, the birthday somebody forgot, the phone call that never came or the argument that crossed a line.

Everyone remembers where they were standing when things went wrong.

Nobody is quite as good at remembering what the room looked like from the other side.

And when we are hurt, frightened, lonely or grieving, we rarely behave like the best version of ourselves.

Quite often we become the minimum version.

We become smaller, harder and more suspicious. We withdraw before anyone gets the opportunity to reject us and convince ourselves that not needing anybody is strength.

Sometimes it is.

Sometimes it is just loneliness with better branding.

I think that is what I have been trying to understand through a lot of the writing I’ve done over the past couple of years.

Loneliness is a horrible thing.

Not because being alone is necessarily bad. I actually like my own company. I have deliberately made my circle smaller and some of that has been one of the healthiest things I’ve ever done.

But prolonged loneliness changes the way you see people.

It can make you incredibly protective of your peace, until eventually you’re protecting it from everyone.

And perhaps the cruelest part is that when somebody is struggling, the version of them everyone else experiences can be the least likeable one.

They can become angrier, quieter, more defensive and harder to reach, which from everyone else’s side can be completely understandable.

The problem is that sometimes that is the exact moment they need somebody to move closer.

That’s the bit I couldn’t see clearly while I was living through it.

Maybe people should have come looking for me.

Maybe I shouldn’t have made myself so fucking difficult to find.

Both things can be true.

And maybe that is one of the more uncomfortable parts of getting older.

You begin to realise that taking responsibility for your own behaviour doesn’t require pretending nobody else ever hurt you.

Those aren’t opposing ideas.

I can acknowledge that there were periods when I felt incredibly alone without turning myself into the victim of the story.

I can also admit I was hurt without rewriting myself as some perfectly reasonable man wandering around bewildered while everybody else inexplicably behaved like lunatics.

I was there.

I contributed.

Sometimes considerably.

That’s what those photographs from my mum’s loft made me think about.

Not that everything was perfect back then.

It wasn’t.

We were probably arguing five minutes after half the photographs were taken.

But there was a version of us who were completely woven into each other’s lives.

My little brother standing there in his life jacket while my mum held onto him like the Atlantic Ocean was about to claim him.

My younger sister screaming that she fucking hated me because I’d walked past her on the stairs again, while presumably sitting on enough hidden toilet roll to survive a national emergency.

The same sister years later travelling four hours for fifteen minutes of social interaction and tipping an entire suitcase onto my floor.

My older sister disappearing underneath a table because I’d kicked her chair away, getting back up ready to murder me and somehow falling for exactly the same thing thirty seconds later.

Two horses.

A swimming pool that occupied most of a garden.

Sunday roasts.

Dad on the guitar.

My sister pissed as a fart by two in the afternoon singing Zombie as though The Cranberries had specifically asked her to take over lead vocals.

My dad blagging his way backstage at an Olly Murs concert with his granddaughters and emerging with photographs like he’d personally arranged the tour.

And Mum somewhere in the middle of all of it.

A free spirit with Fleetwood Mac playing somewhere in the background, fiercely protective of her cubs and never really needing much from life other than knowing they were okay.

Then there was me.

Thirteen years old, swimming alongside my grandad’s boat without the slightest idea that one day I would look at that photograph and see far more than a kid in a river.

I used the word drifted when I first started trying to write this.

I think that’s what happened.

Nobody necessarily decided to leave anybody behind.

Life happened.

People moved away, got married and had children. Priorities changed. Values changed. Dad died and grief landed differently on all of us.

People said things they probably shouldn’t have said.

Old resentments got fed.

Pride turned up.

And everybody drifted a little further from the shore.

The problem with drifting is that it doesn’t feel particularly dramatic while it’s happening.

It can be one Sunday you don’t go round, then another. A message you don’t send. A Christmas that feels easier to avoid. An argument nobody quite repairs.

A year passes.

Then another.

You build a new life around the absence until eventually the absence itself becomes normal.

Then five years have gone.

Your mum climbs into the loft because it’s raining, finds an old photograph and sends it to your phone.

And suddenly you’re looking at a family you completely recognise and a life that feels almost impossible to imagine living again.

I don’t know what happens next.

I think that’s important.

I don’t want to wrap this up with some inspirational bollocks about forgiveness or tell everyone who reads this to immediately phone their estranged brother or sister.

Jesus Christ, don’t do that purely on my recommendation.

You might end up in Last Chance Saloon II before bedtime.

Some relationships shouldn’t return to what they were.

Some can’t.

Some probably need boundaries.

Some might eventually find their way back in a completely different form.

I haven’t worked any of that out.

What I have realised is that we spend an extraordinary amount of our lives treating people and moments as though they are permanent.

We assume there will always be another Sunday lunch, another Christmas, another guitar in the garden, another stupid argument and another chance to say the thing we should have said differently.

Sometimes there is.

Sometimes there isn’t.

And occasionally somebody sends you an old photograph and you realise you didn’t even notice when a whole chapter of your life ended.

I don’t think growing older means trying to become the person you used to be.

I don’t want to be thirteen again.

I definitely don’t want the hair. I like being a silver fox.

But maybe there is value in looking back occasionally and recognising the parts of ourselves that were worth keeping.

The willingness to turn up. The stupidity. The laughter. The ability to have an argument and still eat Sunday dinner together.

The assumption that people belonged in your life rather than having to constantly prove they deserved a place in it.

And perhaps it is worth noticing when hurt, grief, pride or loneliness have slowly reduced us into the minimum version of ourselves.

I’ve been that version.

I suspect most of us have at some point.

I just don’t particularly want to live there anymore.