Aida Austin: “The one with the bird shit, Mr Company Director”

CORK AIRPORT, 3.20 pm, and I’m awaiting the arrival of my brother. Not the older one I stabbed in the arm with a sharpened pencil for stealing my pillow (don’t look at me like that) who didn’t deserve it. No, it’s my younger brother; the one who used his four sisters as psychological punch-bags, whom I called “fatso” — who deserved a sharpened pencil, but never got it because he was bigger than me.

Here I stand, waiting for him to emerge, with love in my heart and that weird laughter, ready to detonate like a bomb on a short fuse, in my lungs. For time has passed and we are, after all is said and done, siblings, with the same psychology text books locked up inside our heads, and the same blood running through our veins.

He appears, laughing as he walks towards me; a tanned, striding colossus hewn of solid muscle, to which his puppy fat turned at 17.