When his brother died at the age of nine, Richard Beard blocked out all memories of him. Nearly 40 years on, he goes in search of him

For most of my life, and I’m 50 now, one piece of information about my brother had blocked all others. “Dead” became the barrier; a restraining wall.

Nicky’s deadness became his defining characteristic, although he must have had others: he was nine when he drowned. I was 11, his closest brother by age, but to contain the grief I had dismissed his character as provisional. He was a child. Now he was dead. Nothing more to see here.

In death, Nicky thinned and faded. He became timid, vulnerable, too weak to keep his hold on life. Death kept his mouth shut, a meek and unassuming boy barely worthy of notice. As a family, we didn’t talk about him, and waited for silence and time to wear him away.

It was another death that brought him back. When my dad died, suddenly I had access to three metal filing cabinets in the alcove in the corner of his study (previously hidden behind a roll-down screen, also locked).

My first instinct, or hope, was that unfamiliar keys would open up a hidden inner life. I’d search through my dad’s files and find a secret shrine to Nicky, evidence of emotional yearning concealed for decades among the correspondence and credit card statements. No such tortured soul emerged. What I did find, in the bottom drawer of the furthermost cabinet, was a green plastic bag.

Nicky’s documentary relics, such as they were, comprised a bundle of school reports and a vinyl-covered ring-binder of commiseration letters. There was also a certified copy of an entry of death, signed by the Cornwall registrar. I put the death certificate aside, to glean what I could from the paperwork left behind.

At first, the letters of condolence weren’t much help. The boy they described felt as unlikely as my dead, passive version of nine-year-old Nicky. The letters reached for the other extreme, summoning a super-powered small boy with “special gifts … so earnest and enquiring”. Nicky was “a bright, handsome boy with a lovely sense of humour”. Apparently, “everything Nicky did he did well, be it sport, work, his music, or just kindness and good manners”.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Richard, far right, and his brother Nicky, far left, with their father and two other brothers.

Right. I understood the urge to offer solace, but didn’t see how exaggeration was supposed to help. I wanted the truth, but here I had a compassionate reluctance to speak ill of the dead. Remembering Nicky imprecisely seemed as pointless as not remembering him at all. However generous.

“Nicky was, to me, the perfect schoolboy.”

Maybe he was and maybe he wasn’t, but, slowly, picking through the bones of praise, a surprising emotion began to make itself felt: resentment. I resented my dead little brother, but not because he was “bright”, “talented”, “extremely kind” and “a great conversationalist” (a nine-year-old boy!). Not even because he was dead. I realised, or remembered, that on the far side of the wall we had been rivals. And not in a good way.

The forgotten truth struck me like a revelation. I turned to the school reports, greedy for word of Nicholas Beard, and initially his teachers seemed to confirm what I had read in the letters of sympathy. In 1974, Nicholas was “a promising pupil” who developed into a “delightful and able boy”. By 1977, he “continues to do well, and his future looks bright”, at which point I was relieved to see a pattern of doubt creep in. Aged eight and a bit, my brother was “a little overconfident”, though he did have his reasons. By 1978, the year of his death, he was first in every subject except maths (in which he came fourth). First in French, history, geography, scripture, all first. First in English, and that’s my subject, where “he is never satisfied unless he is top!” No wonder he had a “somewhat arrogant manner”.

He was “a natural cricketer, above average”. I’d blocked that out. My little bro Nicholas had been a brainbox with a talent for sport. Anyone who had shared his formative years, as I did, could on reflection have remembered that this was so, only I’d never taken the time to reflect. Nicky was “active and well coordinated, and always gives 100% effort”.

Though he was a terrible loser, was Nicholas. There was also that. His school reports vouch for his “competitive spirit”: “he must learn to curb his temper when things do not go his way”, and “he must learn to accept defeat more graciously when he meets it”. I’ll say. It’s only a game, Nicky.

Stubborn little bastard, yes, I remember that now. “He holds his own and does well to compete with others who are often physically much larger than he is.” Like an older brother, for example. Wiry, indefatigable, he just kept coming. Had enough yet? He’d never had enough. And Christ, the tears and tantrums when the natural order prevailed and the older, bigger boy came out on top. Cricket, football, Subbuteo, Othello, the last black cherry Ski yoghurt in the fridge: there can be only one top dog.

I was after him now, and I too could put in 100% effort. I went searching for more evidence, for random photos in forgotten corners of attics. Whenever I found him, my first reaction was often condescension. Nicky was marooned in the 70s. He wore brown sandals and a nylon petrol-blue polo neck. His clothes were a special disaster at family occasions, including a red and blue striped waistcoat, or a red-checked shirt with a plain blue tie. I had the same outfit, but I grew out of it.

Gradually, I gathered a Nicky photograph collection. All his life was here: he crawled, sat, splashed in the bath, toddled about with a cushion on his head. His tricycle, his seventh birthday, Stonehenge, the paddling pool out the back on a summer’s day, full snorkel diving in 10 inches of plastic Barrier Reef. He just was. He lived.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Nicky playing cricket.

I’d succeeded in wiping out all memory of Nicky as a unique living being. The scorched earth of English repression had reduced his brief life to its final act: his death. Nothing else of him had been allowed to survive.

So concentrate. Here he was, playing cricket in the garden, posing the follow-through of an on-drive, the hardest shot in the book, his eyes tracking the ball to an imaginary boundary. I could recover all of him, even a picture of his dreams.

One particular photograph activated a memory. Four brothers on holiday, wearing anoraks, arranged for the camera on a disused metal railway bridge. Somewhere in Wales, at a guess. Nicky is pretending to unfasten a rivet on a girder, as if he’s hard at work. Everyone is looking at the camera except him and me, because Nicky is attending to his rivet and I’m looking at Nicky, slyly, face to the camera but eyes sliding meanly to the right. I want to hide my spiteful sideways glance at whatever it is he’s doing, but the photo doesn’t lie.

I hated Nicky’s pretending. We were a family group posing for a photograph and anyone who saw it later should know, actually, that my younger brother was not a qualified engineer.

My nasty look, and the ill will behind it, wasn’t an isolated incident. In another photo, Nicky was “running” out of the sea, but I could see for a fact he wasn’t. He was standing still, only pretending to run. He was “mending” his upturned bicycle, only he didn’t know the first thing about bike mechanics. He was eight. What he was actually doing was drawing attention to himself, making sure he was the one in the photo. I resented his showing off, his attention-seeking, and I was hyper-alert to his ploys because I liked to use them too.

My wall of death had offered a less complicated anguish than this fact of competition with a threatening and capable rival, who was also my younger brother. Hamming it up in the photos, Nicky had been looking ahead, imagining the print in a frame on a prominent mantelpiece. He was making calculations about the future, to further his interests. He was self-aware and had a mind of his own.

The horror. He had become fully conscious, only two years younger than me and already a powerful character.

Back then, I hadn’t wanted him to catch me up. I preferred him as a little boy who belonged with other little boys, whereas I fancied myself almost one of the big boys. His growing up endangered my status. Bluntly, at that stage in our lives, we didn’t like each other, and then he died. Not long before, I’d punched him in the face, and I remember the feel of his nose-bone against my knuckles. I remember disputed sandwiches and broken Lego and world war three. He just kept coming. Fuck off, Nicky, I miss you more than I ever said.

For too many years, I’d preferred to stop at his death and look no further, because death made a simpler memory than family. In the end, albeit nearly four decades later, the denial finally lost its grip. Nicky’s forcefully lived life, however brief, refused to stay repressed. He gave 100% and was never satisfied. Everybody said so, and a boy like that was always going to make it back. He took his time, and death delayed him, but eventually he caught me up.

• The Day That Went Missing by Richard Beard, about the death of his brother, is published by Harvill Secker, £14.99. To order a copy for £11.24, go to bookshop.theguardian.com or call on 0330 333 6846. Free UK p&p on orders of more than £10, online only. Phone orders min p&p of £1.99.