My bro's keeper? Up to a point

Today I've been thinking about my siblings - as archaic-sounding a word as I'll use all week. I have two brothers and a sister, and while we can only choose our friends, not our family, I have no good reason to disown any of them, even though I have next to no contact with them either.

One brother is a rather odd little fellow who has lived in London for two decades but hardly ever ventures out of his townhouse other than to go to work. Though he married once, it was simply to help out a Serbian acquaintance seeking UK residency, and while she and her actual partner were very friendly towards him at the time, they drifted away after getting what they wanted (and completing the divorce) and have not been in touch with him for years.

As far as I know, he has never had a real intimate, adult relationship and now, at 50, and being as socially active as the broccoli in my newly built garden box, it is difficult to see this monk-like lifestyle changing now. My mother recently confessed that she suspected a certain clergyman had interfered with him before he'd reached puberty, but she never told anyone at the time as it seemed so outlandish and she felt she would not be taken seriously.

Whatever; the first part of our Sunday routine of church (Presbyterian) and then dinner at Gran's ended abruptly one day, and as far as I'm aware no explanation was ever sought or offered. There were some things you just didn't discuss.

My other brother rode with a hard-drinking, hard-brawling, southern biker gang, and God only knows what that meant or involved. Fortunately, it was before the gangs really entered the hardcore drug scene. No doubt there was plenty of dope and acid to spark up the copious amount of booze that was consumed every weekend, but at least his involvement pre-dated the meth and P days.

Though Easy Rider might have glamourised bikies in my idealistic youth as free-wheeling, rule-hating, wind-in-the-hair, modern day warriors, the ones I've known have been more thug than heroic. Their denims and leathers were so encrusted with sweat and urine they would probably stop a bullet.

Local legend had it that one of the gang's hangers-on's special party tricks was to defecate on a newspaper and eat up the lot.

We've never talked about what initiation tests were expected of my bro' to join the Angels, or what he faced in order to extricate himself. I understand his exit terms included handing over his 650 Triumph Bonnie ... surely a small price to pay.

My sister left school at 15 but then redeemed herself by earning a good science degree, much of it through correspondence, and scoring a good-earner as an industrial chemist. She packed that in after a while - couldn't deal with the internal politics - and ended up on the maintenance and clean-up team.

She's more of a Kiwi bloke than I am (her man has been increasingly incapacitated with MS), farms a lifestyle block in her spare time and has all the carpentry, drainlaying, concreting and butchery skills of your average backblocks farmer.

What's my point? Two words: Clayton Weatherston. The four of us - brothers, sister and me - are as unique as we are also unexceptional - as are the vast majority of us. But I find myself wondering how it would be to be the sibling of an evil, repugnant, remorseless nut-job.

How would I cope if my younger brother had scoffed some tainted acid one night, flipped his switch and shot up the town with his sawn-off shotgun? (He did in fact have one, which the cops confiscated after catching him blasting at seagulls one evening, on an otherwise isolated beach). Or if the other brother, so mild and harmless in appearance, was actually a brutally ruthless paedophile-killer, preying on urchins on the streets of London?

Though almost everyone in New Zealand would have united in empathy with the family of Sophie Elliott, appalled by the horror she, and those who loved her, suffered at the hands of her demented (if not legally so) killer, I also found myself wondering about the Weatherston clan.

Father Roger dropped some hints, telling the court he "never thought for one minute" that his son could ever be capable of what he had done. "As a father, I know he is a very truthful person and I still believe this. I hope that Clayton will find it within himself to publicly show remorse.

"We will always love and support our son but of course our thoughts are also with the Elliotts for the terrible loss of someone so special to them."

He could do or say nothing more revealing, I suppose. But is there a point where it becomes appropriate or permissible to disown family members who commit some unimaginably awful crime?

We probably don't suspect even half of what our own friends, workmates, partners or family are up to or capable of ... and maybe that's just as well.

If your brother happened to be Weatherston, Graeme Burton, George Baker or any other of the dangerous, twisted killers that brutalise our sensibilities by their despicable acts - how would you rationalise the role you had played in their lives, and how would their outrages impact on you as news of them unfolded?

Would you look back to the time you ignored their pleas for help, pushed them out of the treehouse or wrongly let them carry the can for breaking that precious blue mountain pottery duck, and wonder if you'd helped set in motion a chain of events that ended in catastrophe?

Is blood always thicker than water? And, why do four offspring of the same gene pool and environment wind up being so different? Is it simply because parents tend to learn as they go along and make fewer mistakes with second and subsequent children? That family dynamics change as they grow, putting pressures on the various and increasingly complicated relationships within?

Or is it simply that we're all just different, and respond to different stimuli - nature and nurture, interfering clergy, inappropriate peers - in our own way?

If I were Weatherston's brother, I would view his crime as unforgivable and leave him to star in his own twisted little world. He crossed the line all on his own, and should face the consequences alone, too.

- © Fairfax NZ News