My younger brother’s death was unreal – it felt like I was being scammed

It was there every time I looked at the calendar or opened the laptop. “Events in May”. Days lengthening into Spring, getting longer and warmer, and then the diary entry “Roger’s funeral”. A fact, a date. My younger brother is dead.

Once, having panicked myself awake at three in the morning, I thought maybe his death was some sort of scam, like those emails from a mate who really wants you to click a link but is also emailing from Kazakhstan. Or those mysterious texts from “Bank Security”. Or the chummy robocall -“Hey! You all right?” The neurotic mind will find any shortcut to denial, any thought in a storm. But he was gone.

Once I’d accepted it was real, it was wrong. The chronology was broken. I’m the eldest of three. I die first – that’s basic, that’s obvious. Now Rog, four years younger than me, had queue-jumped into first place. It’s ballsed up, mate. All jumbled and jangled.

The nearer the funeral, the more I dreaded it. I’d be fine for a while, then sideswiped into tears by the stupidest memory of him, the way everyone is when this happens.

Teenage him, a massive Marvin Gaye fan, in a woollen jumble-sale hat on which he’d crocheted “MARVIN”. It was somehow, improbably, the coolest hat in the entire world of young adult fashion.

Middle-aged him in Turkey, topless, surveying the scene, smoking a cigar like he’d just formed a new government.

The three of us – me, Roger and Paul, the youngest brother – and our stupid weekend on a canal boat, before his health took a tumble. Rog was the best at steering, three-point turning it nice and easy, like a heavy, drifting old saloon car. We moored miles from anywhere on the Saturday night, played the music of our 20th-century youth, and sang along. Motown. Disco. Marvin. Boozy nonsense for a couple of days, pootling around, talking bollocks, eating rubbish, having a laugh. Now it’s a priceless memory, like him.

I went into the funeral with a heart like a cannonball. And despite a brilliant, funny eulogy from his youngest son, it was a weepy old farewell. Bye, Rog.

And then it happened. That thing that happens after funerals, turning the day from tragic to joyous. The wake was held in a pub, and suddenly the place was a whirl of cousins, family friends and in-laws. Nattering indoors – “Oh, you’re looking well!” – smoking outside, kids charging around, everyone swapping stories about Rog and raising their glasses. “Hey, how you doing?”, “How’s it going?”, “How’s the family?” and “What are you drinking?”

Back in Essex, it took 30 seconds for my voice to shed its middle-class overlay and to sound more the way it did in the 1960s. Essex filth – you forget that here everyone swears, like a f*** of a lot. It felt like coming home, even though I haven’t lived there for more than half a century.

And the laughter, my god. After weeks of waiting for the inevitable, now he was free of it all. And we could be glad to have been summoned, assembled. I’m so grateful I got a chance not long before he went to say goodbye to him in the hospital: “love you.”

There was something else, too. We think of funerals as an ending, but they’re the start of a new thing. Life going on with the memory of someone, bookended now by dates, birth and death. But going on nevertheless with them, somehow.

People said it was like he was looking down, rolling his eyes at the fuss, but he must have known we’d all be here. In death, his gift was to bring the scattered family from Edinburgh to Newhaven together, to the Essex town where he lived and died. Incredibly, his last address was about 300 yards from his first, the little place where we all grew up. Paul and I both got out of Wickford in our teens. Rog stayed and made a life here.

His values were old-school. Family first. Work to live, not the other way round. Got money, spend it. Got a credit card, max it. That terrifies me, still. But Roger had a fearless approach to life, braver than most of us. Always living in the moment. Thinking about the future only in terms of the next holiday. Cheers to that.

By the end, the wake was roaring with laughter, everyone hugging, “love you!”.

Later, at the worst Toby Carvery in England, the evening continued. A life-affirming Arc of Rog. He would have bloody loved it.

And at the magnetic centre of it all – his steady, anchored life with his missus, Sue. Both were born in the town and grew up there. Found each other and married there. Raised a family there, stayed there to the end.

We’ve dedicated a bench to him, with a line from one of Marvin’s songs: ROGER JAMES MARTIN (1957-2026). Wickford born and bred. He loved his family, holidays, a glass of red and Marvin Gaye. “I just looked around and he was gone.”

This week I have been…

Watching… Friday nights we have a houseful, with ages ranging from 14 to 79. We’ve all loved Taskmaster for years, and I’m totally invested this season as my mate Armando (Iannucci, who created The Thick of It and Veep) is on it. We’re also addicted to The Pitt, and we fill in the wait for new episodes with a rewatch of ER, like we’re trapped in some time-shifting Noah Wyle cult.

We’ve just subscribed to MUBI, so my wife and I can watch worthy, subtitled films; I usually nod off 20 minutes from the end of all of them. Almost anything from the BBC4 archives is worth a spin. Yeah, maybe we did watch it in 1979, but that’s a long time ago and our memory’s not what it was.

Reading… I love the London Review of Books, but it’s always a struggle to keep up. I have the latest issue in the kitchen, the one before that in the bathroom and the one before that in the bedroom. One day I’ll be up to date.

I’m also reading a lot of very dull “Luxembourg during WW2” stuff for something I’m writing – really bloody looking forward to VE Day.

I loved Everything Will Swallow You by Tom Cox. Just started Saraswati, the debut novel by Gurnaik Johal (there was a good review in the LRB). I really liked Flesh by David Szalay, then went back to read his Booker-nominated All That Man Is and found it a bit boring and predictable.

Listening… The older I get, the more I like working to ambient and electronic music. Apart from Loula Yorke, contemporary acts all seem to have long, cantilevered names like Field Lines Cartographer or Warrington-Runcorn New Town Development Plan.

They’re all excellent, but my favourite album at the moment is Norther, by a Liverpool outfit with easily the stupidest name of all: Ex-Easter Island Head. They use, among other things, guitars as tuned percussion instruments. The noise is thrilling. And the mood can swing, violently.

My favourite track is Golden Bridges, which starts off sounding like Christmas morning and then falls away into some terrifying horror soundtrack.