While Terry joined the others in the pool, I subjected myself to a dreadful thing called musical chairs, another cruel game. There’s one chair short, and when the music stops you have to run for a seat. The life lessons never stop at a children’s party. The music blares. You never know when it’s going to stop. You’re on edge the whole game; the tension is unbearable. Everyone dances in a circle around the ring of chairs, but it’s no happy dance. Everyone has his eyes on the mother over by the radio, her hand poised on the volume control. Now and then a child wrongly anticipates her and dives for a chair. He’s shouted at. He jumps off the seat again. He’s a wreck. The music plays on. The children’s faces are contorted in terror. No one wants to be excluded. The mother taunts the children by pretending to reach for the volume. The children wish she were dead. The game is an analogy for life: there are not enough chairs or good times to go around, not enough food, not enough joy, nor beds nor jobs nor laughs nor friends nor smiles nor money nor clean air to breathe…and yet the music goes on.

I was one of the first to lose, and I was thinking how in life you should always carry your own chair with you so you don’t have to share dwindling common resources, when I heard a commotion by the swimming pool. I walked over. Terry’s arms were plunged deep into the water and two little hands were reaching up from the crystal depths trying to scratch his eyes out. The scene wasn’t open to interpretation: Terry was trying to drown someone.

The other children were now standing on the lawn, all fish out of water. A dismayed parent dived in, pulled Terry off the boy, and dragged both of them out of the pool, where the horrified mother of the half-drowned boy whacked Terry across the face. Later that afternoon, in a huddle of outraged parents, Terry, in his own defense, explained that he had seen his victim cheating.

“I was not!” he cried.

“I saw you! Your left eye was open!” Terry shouted.

“Even so, mate,” my father said, “it’s just a game.”

What my father didn’t know was that the phrase “just a game” was never to hold any meaning whatsoever for Terry Dean. To Terry, life was a game and games would always be life, and if I hadn’t figured that out, I wouldn’t have manipulated the information for my own sad revenge fantasy, which unexpectedly altered the course of my brother’s life.

This is one of those memories that I could go blind thinking about- when all the worst of my impulses fused together for one stunningly shameful moment. It was only a month later, when after years of home tutoring between sports practice, Terry finally started at school (an event I had been dreading, as I had been so successful in keeping my spectacular unpopularity a secret from my family). Dave and Bruno Browning, fraternal twins, had tied me to a thick branch of a tree behind the gym. They were not only the official school bullies, they were also thieves, wannabe criminals, and streetfighters, and I always thought they belonged in jail or in graves so shallow that when people walked over them they would actually be stepping on Dave’s and Bruno’s cold dead faces. As they finished their knots, I said, “How did you know this was my favorite tree? Oh my God, what a view! This is beautiful!” I continued my glib rant as they climbed down. “Honestly, fellas,” I shouted, “you don’t know what you’re missing!” I gave the thumbs-up sign to a small crowd gathered at the base of the trunk.

My frozen smile melted at the sight of Terry’s face in the mob, gazing up at me. Because he was an adored sporting hero, the crowd cleared a space to let him through. I fought back tears but kept up the act. “Hey, Terry, this is fantastic. Why don’t you come up and see me sometime?”

He climbed the tree, sat on the branch opposite me, and started untying the knots.

“What’s going on?”

“What do you mean?”

“Everyone hates you!”

“All right. I’m not popular. So what?”

“So why does everyone hate you?”

“They have to hate someone. Who else are they going to hate, if not me?”

We sat in that tree all afternoon, for five hours, during two of which I had acute vertigo. The bell rang every now and then, and we watched children move from one class to another, obedient yet casual, like soldiers in peacetime. We watched them all day, neither of us talking. In the silence all our differences suddenly seemed unimportant. Terry’s balancing on the branch beside me was an enormously significant gesture of solidarity. His presence said to me: You are alone but not utterly alone. We are brothers, and nothing can change that.

The sun moved across the sky. Wispy clouds were transported on fast winds. I looked at my classmates as through a double-glazed bulletproof window and thought: There is no more chance of communication between us than between an ant and a stone.

Even after three, when the school day ended, Terry and I stayed put, silently watching as a cricket game started up below us. Bruno and Dave and five or six other children were arranged in a semicircle, running and jumping and diving in the dirt as if there were nothing fragile about the human body. They let out roars, in crescendo, and occasionally the twins would look up at the tree and call out my name in a singsong voice. I winced at the thought of all the beatings I still had ahead of me, and tears came to my eyes. They were tears of fear. How could I get out of this situation? I watched those two bullies below and wished I had dangerous, mysterious powers that they could feel in their guts. I imagined them singing their taunts with mouthfuls of blood.

Suddenly I had the idea.

“They’re cheating,” I said to Terry.

“They are?”

“Yeah. I hate cheats, don’t you?”

Terry’s breathing became slow and irregular. It was a remarkable thing to witness; his face spluttered like hot grease in a pan.

It’s not melodramatic to say the entire fate of the Dean family was decided that afternoon in the tree. I’m not proud of myself for inciting my little brother to attack my attackers, and of course if I had had any way of knowing that by manipulating his fanatical reverence for sport, I was effectively ordering dozens of body bags direct from the manufacturers, I probably wouldn’t have done it.

I can’t tell you much about what happened next. But I can tell you that Terry climbed down, grabbed the cricket bat from an astonished Bruno, and slammed it into the side of his head. I can tell you that the fight had been going for only about fifteen seconds when Dave, the uglier of the nonidentical twins, pulled a butterfly knife and thrust it hard into Terry’s leg. I can tell you what the scream sounded like, because it was mine. Terry didn’t let out a sound. Even as blood pissed from the wound and I climbed down and ran into the mix and dragged him away, he was silent.

The next day, in hospital, an unsympathetic doctor casually told Terry that he’d never play football again.

“What about swimming?”

“Not likely.”

“Cricket?”

“Maybe.”

“Really?”

“I don’t know. Can you play cricket without running?”

“No.”

“Then no.”

I heard Terry swallow. We all heard it. It was pretty loud. A softness in his eight-year-old face became instantly hard. We witnessed the exact moment he was forcibly disengaged from his dreams. A moment later tears poured out of him and he made unpleasant guttural noises I’ve had the misfortune to hear once or twice since, inhuman noises that accompany the sudden arrival of despair.