Underground by Andrew McGahan Page A

avoiding chores around the house, or cheating off my homework. But if the law-breaking was public and dangerous, then he wasn’t interested. It was a matter of risk assessment, of investment versus return, of calculating the odds. In every other way he would grab whatever he could, legal or not—as long as he was certain of not getting caught. The other kids were completely baffled by him, but they caught on, eventually, to that stubbornness in him, and eventually gave way before it. He was never as popular as I was, but he was tolerated and respected in a grudging kind of way. A super-cautious little prick, everyone agreed, but certainly clever.
    Me, I changed my mind about everything twenty times a day. And while I’d charge off on any caper that was going, well, as soon as it went wrong I’d hightail it out of there just as fast. And I had no problem whatever in backing down if the other kid was bigger and meaner than me, or worse, if it was the school principal. I’d throw in fulsome apologies too, as lengthy and inventive as they were insincere. Christ, it was only for a laugh, so what did it matter?
    You can tell which one of us was destined to be PM, can’t you?
    Our education was private. We weren’t at the best schools in town, but they were far from the worst. Church of England—sport, God, buggery and the Queen. Well, okay, no buggery, not in my case at least, and nor, as far as I know, in Bernard’s. To be fair, not so much of God or the Queen either. And whileneither of us were geniuses, we got by all right, academically. Me, I think, on native intelligence, breezing along without really trying, and Bernard more by rote learning and by an innate grasp of how to work the system. He was one of those kids who always pinned the teachers down on exactly what part of a lesson would be in exams and what wouldn’t. One of those kids who always had a good excuse as to why he should get an extra two days to finish an essay. One of those kids who always demanded his test papers be reassessed, and who would fight over every half mark. A ready-made lawyer, one teacher called him. An annoying little twerp, said another, while wearily changing a C into a B minus.
    No, by the time we were teenagers, I really didn’t like my brother very much.
    And we were going our separate ways already. I’d discovered girls, for instance. Not to mention all sorts of useful, entertaining things to do with erections. The underside of my mattress became the repository for a growing collection of racy paperback novels and stolen issues of the quaint, softly pornographic magazines of the day. Thankfully, Bernard and I had our own bedrooms by this stage, so what sort of stash he had I don’t know. Perhaps he didn’t have one at all because there was nothing under his mattress. On the other hand, he would never have hidden it somewhere so obvious. Indeed, as I’ve already mentioned, he did that kind of thing in the garden shed.
    Real girls, meantime, while not actually taboo, were still dangerous and foreign things to boys from an all-male private school. The other lads and I hung out at milk bars and cinemas and studied them like novice game hunters amidst a pack of lions. It was a time of heavy-breathing trysts behind cricket sheds and the sheer trouser-straining ecstasy of touching female lips, arms, legs and (oh my God!) breasts. I was no Lothario, but I had my share. Bernard, however, took no part. He never lingered on his way home from school, he never snuck out atnight, he never, as far as I saw, even spoke to a girl who wasn’t either a relation or a family friend.
    Shit, now that I think of it, his wife is the daughter of a friend of our mother’s! They were set up, Bernard and Claire, by their respective maters, when they were both in their early thirties and apparently heading for eternal spinsterhood.
    I was already over my first divorce by then.
    Anyway, I don’t think it was that the young Bernard didn’t like girls.