Larvatus Prodeo

His face is twisted, red and purple blotches smear across his straining cheeks, spit hangs from his grimacing mouth. He is hammering his own fists into his chest, with a rib-breaking bang bang bang and all the while he is making a horrible, repetitive “nah nah nah” grunting sound.

The teenage girls dart away from him in a flurry of blue school skirts, with sniggering laughs, one runs up to flick his baseball cap and just misses his flailing fist. There’s a rubbish bin and he suddenly lunges for it and throws it at one of the girls, it smashes beside her and pie wrappers and coke cans fly off in every direction. The girls start screaming and there’s a teacher there and I am too, I run to my brother and grab his hands even though he’s so big and I try to stop his fists from bruising his chest again.

The teacher takes him to the office and he’s too distraught to speak clearly for a while, he evades their eyes and his agitation grows as they try to find out what happened. It was one of the younger girls, they like to tease him, he’s a lumbering boy and they run up and try to knock his cap off his head.

Every day, every recess, he likes to take empty coke bottles and pretend to play the drums on a bench and these girls, these little bitches, they try to take his cap or his wallet and sometimes they’re nice, they pretend they like him and then they steal his packet of chips. He puts up with it for a while and then he snaps, once a week, every second day, every lunchtime. He’s thirteen years old.

He is three years younger than me and I resent him, like I resent the end of the school holidays, like I resent my glasses and tests and other people, but I will protect him as much as I can. It’s not much. I can’t do much. I feel the stares of the boys as I walk back to my lunch and know they think it’s somehow stupid to get involved. That we’re both freaks, the retarded boy and his chubby, sullen sister. I sit down and return to my sandwich. My friends pretend nothing has happened. Nothing will happen again every week or so until I leave high school.

He is four or five years old and he loves his Winnie the Pooh video and watches it every day. One day we are playing in the yard. It has been raining. I go back inside and when I come out he’s taken off his clothes and has wandered down the driveway. Mum comes out as I call her and we hurry up the driveway as he lies down in the big mud puddle and rolls around.

He smiles his beautiful smile up at us, his icy blonde hair plastered down with mud. “I wanted to be a little black rain cloud,” he says, and we remember his Winnie the Pooh video, where the bear does the same thing to try and steal honey. For a moment he seems like a normal boy.

He was the most gorgeous child, with his see-through skin and his brilliant blue eyes. It was when he was about two that my parents began to suspect that something was different, when words didn’t come and toilet training was impossible. It took several years for a diagnosis, and by then I’d grown to hate him, this changeling in our family. He used to shit himself regularly and I called him the “pooey monster” and would run away from him. As we grew older he found my sneezes (common with hayfever) so painful that he’d start banging himself in the ears if I sneezed. He would take off his clothes at the worst possible moments. He was embarrassing and humiliating and I hated him. But I loved him too, though it’s harder to remember that, and I got into a fight with a girl at school once who teased him. I used to dream that I would wake up and he would be normal.

Now he is 23 and we are working in my parent’s shop and I am teasing him about his girlfriend. She is 40 and lives in Mildura. I say, “You need a girlfriend your own age.” He says, with a small little dip of his head, his eyes sliding away and his skin flushing just a little, “but none of the girls like me”. He knows he is different.

He works in my parents’ shop all day. I have come home for four weeks so my parents and other brother can go on holidays. He didn’t want to go because they’re going to Vietnam and Cambodia and he doesn’t think he’ll like the food. He like chips and pies and McDonalds, so my parents ask me to stay with him, run their business, while I’m between writing jobs.

He works as hard as anyone I’ve ever met, harder than I do, but no-one except Mum and Dad will give him a job. So, they mortgaged their house, they put their lives on hold, and they bought a business which they now work in every day of the week.

My mother told me the other day how she worries about what will happen when they grow tired of the never-ending work. “I’m weary,” she said. “I need a rest. But what will your brother do if we sell the shop?” It’s a good question, and one echoed by my own questions: What will we do when my parents aren’t around?

My brother was diagnosed with Autism as a small child, but in recent years it seems his diagnosis is probably closer to Asperger’s Syndrome, as he is extremely high functioning in many ways. He doesn’t require 24-hour supervision. He works and he interacts with others on a very mature level, his aggression issues have settled down, the taunting of girls no longer bothers him.

He couldn’t get work in our small town until my parents bought the business they now run. He is their main employee and works from 7am to 7pm every weekday, and spends his money on CDs and baseball caps and trips with the local sheltered workshop group. If my parents weren’t around he’d be living on the disability pension.

My brother works hard, but he couldn’t get work elsewhere because people don’t like to be confronted by the unnatural, the not normal, the way he doesn’t like to meet their eyes and how he gets stuck on certain topics and sometimes he forgets to brush his teeth. But he’s not so strange. He’s a big boy and he loves to eat, he hates to shave and his favourite t-shirts have sports logos on them. He loves Metallica and Eminem and playing his Xbox. He gives me a big hug every time I come home and tells me how much he misses me.

If something happens to my parents, I am his legal guardian. I’ve been so since I was 21. I will do my best to look after him, and I see his worth as a human being again and again. But I know it will be hard, and I hope it won’t happen for many years, not just because I love my family and don’t want anything to happen to them, but also because I’m afraid of the responsibility.

I tell this story because it is people like my brother who fall between the cracks of economic rhetoric and political chatter. There are hundreds of thousands of such stories, such lives. Sometimes, yes, there are people who take advantage of the system. But many, many times, there is genuine need, only in our world, there isn’t much room for people like my brother. We’re all told to be productive and buy houses and do these things to be good citizens. We are a good society, a productive society, we pat ourselves on the back for our hard work, we deserve it.

I don’t think this success measures what sort of people we really are. I think the true evaluation of our worth is how we treat the poor, the dispossessed, the disabled. Yes, personal responsibility is important, but so is the way we treat those who cannot take that responsibility, through no fault of their own. My brother didn’t ask to be born disabled, yet he is, and he is as much a part of our society, contributing as much as a wealthy stockbroker or a politician.

My brother doesn’t deserve our pity. What he and the thousands of others like him do deserve is our support.