ANTHONY: OUR KID, MY DISSERTATION AND MY FINAL YEAR AT BIRKBECK
People come and go.

That's just how it works.

Family's not like that.

Nobody stood beside me the way my younger brother Anthony did — through every daft scheme, every glorious cock-up, every phone call at three in the morning that started with, "You'll never guess."

Our kid.

My only brother.

Then December came, and cancer took him.

But Anthony's story doesn't start in a hospital.

It starts long before that.

And if I'm going to write ten thousand words about him for my dissertation, that's where I need to begin.

THE RAIN IN HAVANA
The rain battered the corrugated roof of the Rafael Trejo gym in Havana.

Not falling.

Hammering.

A proper tropical downpour, beating the tin like it owed the sky money.

Water found every gap and turned the air thick and wet as a sauna.

I stood against the ring apron, soaked through, clothes stuck to my skin, phone held up anyway, filming my sixteen-year-old boy.

He moved across the damp canvas while the rain came down above him, took a shot and stepped back into the pocket.

I stood in the puddles, watching my son get harder.

Then my phone rang.

Anthony.

Our kid, calling from Dubai.

I stopped filming, wiped a wet thumb across the screen and pressed the phone to my ear, one hand cupped against the noise of the rain and the thud of wet leather.

"Still alive then?" he said.

That was how he always started.

But this time something was off in his voice.

Nervous.

No jokes in it.

"Listen, Tom. Remember that thing I said was probably nowt? Just a bit of bother?"

He tried to laugh.

It didn't land.

"Turns out the bastards were just waiting for me to forget about it. Insurers. Pulled the plug. Can't cover it myself. Not even close."

A pause.

The line crackled.

"So I'm fucked," he said.

"Properly fucked.

"Coming home."

I opened my mouth to ask something, anything, but he cut me off.

"Don't. You're with the boy. Halfway round the world doing the thing you've been on about for months."

He pulled himself together.

Put the act back on.

"Finish it. I'll see you when you're back."

The line went dead.

I lowered the phone, the screen smeared with rain and sweat, and turned back to the canvas.

My son kept moving under that roof, throwing combinations, not a clue in the world what had just happened three feet away from him.

I watched him slip a jab and felt it land somewhere else entirely.

My brother was flying home to face something he couldn't talk his way round.

I put the phone in my wet pocket and walked to the ropes.

My boy came through them, chest heaving, buzzing off surviving a Cuban sparring session.

I handed him a towel.

Smiled.

Patted his shoulder.

"Brilliant."

My head was somewhere over the Atlantic.

BACK TO WARRINGTON
We were staying deep in Old Havana.

Marcus, who ran the Cuban Boxing Academy back in London, had let us use his flat for the two weeks. A real base, none of the tourist gloss.

Neither of us spoke a word of Spanish, so every day meant holding a phone out and trusting Google Translate to get us bottled water or point us in the right direction.

Then there was Lauda.

Next door.

Sixty-odd.

Hands swollen from a lifetime of scrubbing floors and a laugh that set mine off too.

She took the two of us in without asking why.

The first morning she turned up with two cups of coffee. When I tried to pay her, she waved the money away like I'd insulted her.

She fed us.

Rice that stuck to the plate the way it should.

Black beans watched over like a cornerman between rounds.

She told us which peso pizza would leave us fine and which alley to skip after dark.

Her kitchen became somewhere we belonged.

Twice a day we walked the half hour from Marcus's flat to the gym, dodging stray dogs, breathing in diesel from cars older than me, the sun hammering down on brick that had been crumbling since before either of us was born.

My boy walked beside me, wraps and boots stuffed into the bag on his shoulder, buzzing with nerves.

But after that call, every step carried something extra.

My head kept going back to Anthony.

Eventually I left the Havana heat behind and got the train up from London, watching the city thin out into the grey I grew up under.

Anthony had gone straight back to Warrington.

Back to where we started.

I walked onto the hospital ward and the clinical air scrubbed the Caribbean right out of me.

No canvas.

No leather.

No rain.

Just the smell of floor cleaner and the low hum of machines.

Anthony sat there carrying the worst news going.

Oesophageal cancer.

It had already got into his lymph nodes.

The doctors laid it out flat.

Three months if he did nothing.

Maybe eighteen with palliative chemotherapy.

They used that word — palliative — and took the last bit of hope out of the room with it.

This wasn't about beating it.

It was about buying a few more months, knowing that's all you were buying.

They gave him somewhere between three and nine.

Anthony took that like a target, not a sentence.

He made it to eight.

Eight months.

I won't let those eight months become the whole story.

That would let the illness have the last word.

And Anthony never let anyone else hold the pen.

"I DON'T WANT TO DIE"
On the ward he kept the jokes going.

Still the funny one.

Still the bloke who could walk into a room and change what it felt like.

But the second we stepped outside for a vape, the automatic doors sliding shut behind us and cutting off the hum of the ward, the act dropped.

We stood there in the cold Warrington air, smoke going up between us.

He looked at me with nothing left to hide behind.

"I don't want to die, Tommy."

Something in my throat went.

The way he said it.

Flat.

Certain.

No performance.

I grabbed for anything that might help.

"We're all going to die," I said.

Which sounds fucking mad written down.

But it was the only thing I had.

A rough way of saying, you're not doing this on your own.

You don't know the right words in a moment like that.

You just stand in the cold and give what you've got.

Even when it's nowhere near enough.

FOUR HUNDRED AND FIFTY MILES
The months after that turned into a mess of motorways and phone calls.

I stayed in London, head down in university books, trying to hang on to my Creative Writing degree.

My boy was in Portsmouth.

Anthony was flat on a bed in Warrington.

Three places.

Three lives.

One thing dragging all of us in the same direction.

I didn't have a car, so getting up north was never as simple as turning a key.

I blagged lifts off whoever I could.

I'd get myself down to Fareham first and stand on the kerb waiting for my niece or my sister's fella to pull up.

Then it was the motorway.

Four hundred and fifty miles there and back.

Tarmac.

Tyre noise.

The red taillights of the M6 pulling us north.

We drank coffee to stay awake and talked about nothing much, dancing round the one thing waiting for us at the end of the road.

I only got up there four times in those last months.

Every time I walked in, Anthony was still Anthony.

Eighteen years in Dubai's heat, and now he was lying under the grey rain of the North West.

But the house was never empty.

His five kids kept the place going.

Friends flew in from all over.

The house was full of voices, the odd argument, laughter and, underneath it all, the clock always running.

We were opposites, him and me.

He was the one who made the room laugh.

I was the quiet one.

Kept my mouth shut unless I'd had a drink.

Even with everything hanging over him, he kept the energy up.

I'd sit there telling him to take it a day at a time, worry written all over my face.

He'd shake his head.

"No more doom and gloom, Tommy."

That was him.

He didn't want pity.

He wanted to still be living.

BROTHERS
It wasn't all jokes, though.

The cancer made sure of that.

Ten rounds of chemo knocked him properly sideways.

When the pain hit, his patience went with it.

We had a couple of rows down the phone.

I'd say the wrong thing.

He'd hang up.

I'd sit in London staring at the screen, thinking, here we go again.

But he never let it sit.

The next day the phone would ring.

"Sorry."

That was it.

Done.

Back to normal.

That's brothers for you.

You can wind each other up one day and be laughing the next.

No ceremony needed.

Anthony was funny, stubborn, opinionated and sometimes a proper pain in the arse.

He was also generous, loyal and fiercely protective of his family.

He had his good days and his bad ones.

His good decisions and his spectacularly fucking stupid ones.

That's the bloke I knew.

Not some saint created by grief.

A real bloke.

THE DEAL WITH THE UNIVERSE
On one visit he told me straight.

He reckoned he had another four or five years left in him.

He'd struck his own deal with the universe.

I sat next to him and agreed with every word.

You don't take hope away from a man who's fighting for his life.

He knew what was coming, mind.

He tried to sort the practical end of it early.

He started paying his own funeral off monthly.

It made me squirm, sitting there talking coffins and cars while he was still breathing next to me.

So I stepped back from it.

Our sister took that one on.

THE LAST WEEKEND
The only time I didn't blag a lift was the last weekend.

The weekend he died.

That time I got the train.

The rail network fell apart on the Saturday.

Six hours stuck in delayed carriages, watching the country crawl past, no idea the clock had already run out.

The doctors had told him on the Friday there was nothing left to try.

Anthony kept that to himself.

He just told me to come.

Never said why.

I walked onto the ward and it was packed.

The whole family was there.

He was in agony, so the nurses had him full of morphine, floating somewhere just above the bed.

But he was still Anthony.

Still cracking jokes.

He looked at me, heavy-eyed, and told me he'd had a good life.

Said he was ready to see Mum, Dad and our little sister.

I stood there listening and didn't understand yet that the fight was already over.

The next day they moved him to the hospice.

That's when the jokes stopped.

The morphine had all of him now.

I sat with my sister.

Anthony didn't say another word.

He just lay there breathing.

His chest going up and down.

Slow.

Heavy.

For hours.

That night I went back to his flat and slept in his empty space.

His clothes.

His things.

His whole life sitting around me in the dark.

Knowing our kid wasn't walking back through that door hit different to anything before it.

Morning came.

We stood around the hospice bed.

Me.

My sister.

My niece Donnah.

We held his hands.

The radio played quietly in the background, ordinary as anything, while the world ended in that room.

My sister stroked his head and leaned in close, crying, her voice steady even with the tears in it.

She told him to go towards the light.

He never said another word.

Just breathed.

Then he didn't.

Ten o'clock in the morning.

3rd December 2025.

My brother died.

THE SEND-OFF
Grief doesn't stop the bills coming.

It's a bastard like that.

The funeral still had to be sorted.

Ten grand.

Because the cancer got him before he hit twelve months on his payment plan, the policy went void.

They wouldn't pay a penny.

So we got the grief and the bill straight after it.

Friends and family dug into their own pockets from all over to cover it.

Christmas came round.

A university assignment sat waiting.

Everything kept moving whether I wanted it to or not.

I went back down to London and waited for the burial date.

Weeks dragged by.

My head was split between the degree, the holidays and the fact my brother was still waiting to go in the ground.

Then his daughter Sarah rang.

30th December.

Right at the death of the year.

I went back up the M6 one more time.

We buried him in the cold.

I walked into the church and there were three hundred people packed into the pews.

They came from everywhere.

Standing shoulder to shoulder.

That said more about the man than anything I could write.

His five kids stood at the front and carried the day for him.

After the church we went to the Irish Club, the same doors we'd been walking through since we were kids.

We come from a big family, roots going back to Castleblayney in Monaghan on Mum's side.

That night the room filled with Irish and Scottish relatives from all corners.

There was a DJ.

A karaoke machine.

The drinks going round.

My sister Lynn and I got up and had a go on the mic, even though I can't hold a tune to save my life.

It was brilliant and terrible at the same time.

Which felt about right.

Then the night wound down.

The DJ put on one last track.

Chris, Sarah's fella, picked Anthony's photograph up off the memorial table and held it above his head in the middle of the dance floor.

The girls in the family circled around him and danced.

I stood by the bar and watched.

A tear went down my face before I even knew it was coming.

The noise of the club fell away.

Everything in my head went quiet.

Looking at Anthony's face above the crowd, surrounded by the women who loved him, it landed on me, plain and simple.

I would never see him again.

I held onto the bar.

Six months of holding it together finally caught up with me all at once.

FINDING THE REASON
New Year's Eve, I sat on my own in Portsmouth while the rest of the country counted down.

A few days later I was back in London with my head in bits, staring down a university assignment due the day after our kid's birthday.

I didn't know if I could finish it.

Didn't know if I wanted to.

I'd nearly binned the degree once already.

Now I couldn't see the point of it.

I'd sit with a book and try to read the same line over and over.

Nothing went in.

My head was somewhere else entirely.

And then something shifted.

The harder I tried to force somebody else's words into my head, the louder my own got.

Anthony.

His life.

His voice.

His humour.

His mistakes.

His family.

Dubai.

Warrington.

Everything that was him before cancer tried to shrink him down to eight months in a bed.

That's when I started looking at the degree differently.

Maybe I didn't need to put Anthony to one side to get through it.

Maybe I needed to put him in it.

MY FINAL YEAR AT BIRKBECK
So now I'm going into my final year at Birkbeck.

And I want my dissertation to be about Anthony.

Not about cancer.

Not a medical write-up.

Not another account of those last eight months.

I want to get at the man behind them.

The life before it.

The character.

The family.

The stories.

The good calls and the shocking ones.

The jokes that shouldn't have worked but did anyway.

The things that wound him up.

The people who knew him.

And the people who knew a completely different bloke to the one I did.

Because that's where it gets interesting.

I've got my version of Anthony.

His kids have theirs.

His mates have theirs.

My sisters have theirs.

People he worked with in Dubai will know things about him I've never heard.

Someone might tell me something that makes me laugh.

Something that catches me off guard.

Something that doesn't match the brother I thought I knew.

That's exactly what I want to go looking for.

How do you write about a real person when nobody owns the whole truth of them?

What gets left out?

What gets stretched?

What changes the longer a story is told?

How much of someone's character survives in the people they've left behind?

And what happens when you try to get all of that down on paper?

I don't know yet if Birkbeck will let me run with it.

I don't know where the line sits between my own life and academic work.

I don't know what shape the dissertation will eventually take.

But for the first time in months, I know what I want to find out.

I've spent years turning my own mess into pages, trying to make sense of the people and places that made me who I am.

Now I've got a reason to turn that same eye on somebody I've known my whole life.

My brother.

That makes it personal.

It also means I can't cut corners with the truth.

I'll go and ask around.

I'll listen.

I'll talk to people who knew him in places I never saw him in.

I'll accept my version isn't the only one going.

And I won't turn him into a saint just because he's not here to argue with me about it.

Anthony wasn't a saint.

He was a bloke.

Funny.

Stubborn.

Opinionated.

Hard to deal with sometimes.

Generous.

A proper handful.

He got things right.

He got things badly wrong.

He wound people up.

He made people laugh.

He loved his kids.

He loved his family.

He worked eighteen years in Dubai.

He came home.

He fought the cancer.

And he lived a hell of a lot more life than those last eight months would have you believe.

That's what I want on the page.

Not the patient.

Not the diagnosis.

Not the bloke lying under a hospital blanket waiting for it to end.

Anthony.

Our kid.

THE NEXT CHAPTER
So back to Birkbeck I go.

Final year.

One last push.

And hopefully a dissertation that lets me do something I've never tried before.

Take a life I thought I already knew and look at it from every angle.

Not to change what happened.

Not to make it neater.

Not to turn Anthony into something he wasn't.

Just to understand the man underneath it all.

Anthony was my younger brother.

Our kid.

My only brother.

And now I've got the job of telling the story I never thought I'd have to write.

Maybe that's where the next chapter starts.

Miss you, our kid.