#i just realised... but his character in abbott.. meh

[charmac]

Glenn Howerton and Josh Segarra together...

[harrison-abbott]

Stickers

Harrison Abbott

My big brother Freddy was jealous of my football sticker collection. So he stole my collection one time, just to annoy me. I had put all of the stickers into a textbook, and had bought them up over months and months and I nearly had all of the stickers in there. Freddy stole it.

So I went and told mother about it. I did ask Freddy to give it back but he wouldn’t. And he was a yard bigger than me … and if I went into his room I knew he would smack me around so I couldn’t do anything aside from ask mother to help me out.

And then she went and beat him about it. Because that how she disciplined us, when she was half tanked up on wine.

It worked, temporarily, because I got my soccer stickers back.

I looked over at Freddy later that night. He had a puffy face from where mother had whacked him. There was a menace in the way he looked at me with those deep brown eyes which also had a nothingness within the pupils that frightened me.

Next day I had to go to school.

When I got back home, my sticker collection had gone. “FREDDY!” I yelled. I went down the corridor and banged on his door. “Freddy – did you take my book again?” He wouldn’t answer. I knew he was in there because I could see that his light was on under the slit of the door. And then the door opened in my face. He smelled of cigarettes and another smell I didn’t recognise. And he looked down at me smugly, disinterested.

“What do you want?”

“You know what I want. My sticker book. Where is it?”

“It’s out in the garden.”

I asked him what he meant but all he said was to go out into the garden to go and see. So I left the house and went into the back garden. At the far end of the garden we had this patch next to the flowerbeds where we lit bonfires when it was a festive season or when people were visiting. I could smell smoke … Lost smoke, old smoke. I got nearer to the bonfire place and realised what Freddy had done.

There was my football sticker book. It was all charred. He’d burnt it and left it there. I opened up the pages to see if some of the stickers were still salvageable. No. Nothing there. No colour anymore. Some of the stickers still had outlines of the faces but the colours had all turned to grey. It was quite difficult to believe. And, incredulously, I turned and looked up at Freddy’s bedroom window.

He was standing right there in the window. Grinning at me. I could see his full set of teeth from thirty yards away.

That wasn’t even the worst thing that Freddy did to me.

This story ranks quite low on the list of things he did to me in boyhood. And he didn’t really change that much when I was an adolescent. Even after he moved away and then would come back for Christmas or when he boomeranged home, he was still that needless bully character. What made it all the more baffling was that I was nine years younger than him. And he felt the need to do all of that.

He destroyed my book of soccer stickers that I had spent a year and a half collecting, because he wanted them himself.

When he was at university and he would come home now and then he would steal my money, because he was short for cash, and he knew I couldn’t grab it back off of him.

Or if he would see a bar of chocolate he would just lift it and eat it, even though he knew it was mine.

There are so many examples with Freddy.

But, meh, hey ho: he’s the one that never changed. And it’s not the same with me.