For Steven, on his birthday

Steven, right, with his brother and sisters in the early 1970s. This is probably while we were staying in Thurso when our dad was working at the nearby Dounreay nuclear plant. Picture improved by a kind soul on Twitter whose name I can't find.

I had a brother, once. His name was Steven and today he would have been 63 years old.

The second of my parents' four children and their first son, he loved music, comedy and football. Football never really stuck for me, but Steven definitely helped form my enduring love of the other two.

The Black Knight. The fact that he hasn't lost that little sword in over 50 years is some kind of miracle.

He was 6 years older than me, and we shared a room until my early teens. We got along pretty well, but he had a temper and I was a little brother, so there were occasional disagreements.

One thing we always agreed on, though, was that The Black Knight was the coolest of all our toy knights. I still have The Black Knight, rescued from a rusting tin in our parents' loft. He's on a shelf here in my office, right behind me, right now.

Steven had a happy time at primary school, with a couple of very close friends. But when he moved to high school, things changed. He fell behind, the close friends suddenly weren't so close any more, and the bullying began.

Steven wasn't quite like everyone else. He was prone to fixations (he'd be obsessed with snooker for a while, then athletics, then Elvis Presley, then something else) and found school work increasingly difficult.

Despite numerous interventions, the bullying increased and never stopped. The bullies passed it on to their friends and younger brothers. Steven was a target, every single day, but he never missed a day at school. Not one.

I can't remember when I first realised my brother wasn't like my friends' big brothers, but I do remember asking my parents about it. 'Learning difficulties' was all I was told. Things weren't so well understood back in the 1970s, and he would be well into his thirties before he was diagnosed, in the terminology of the time, with Asperger's Syndrome.

Steven aged about four. It's hard to look at this and think about some of what life was to bring for him.

He left school, went to work for our local council as a gardener and took to it well, earning good money and building a new circle of friends. But the bullying from school followed him into the real world: He'd been forever marked in our home town of Cumbernauld as 'the weird guy'.

In the mid-eighties, he met a girl. She was a pen-pal initially, but one day he announced he was going to live with her, in Burton-on-Trent. He quit his gardening job, packed up some things and was gone. The relationship lasted just a matter of weeks before my dad and I had to go and bring him back home again.

He never worked again after that. He did a few training courses and placements, but that was it as far as full-time work went. He stayed at home for the next decade or so, went through various assessments etc (including that Asperger's diagnosis) and followed his fixations.

Things became increasingly fraught. He wanted his own life, and felt he was being held back and mollycoddled by my parents. They, in turn, worried that he couldn't cope on his own. One day he announced that he'd got a council flat, and moved out to a place of his own not far away.

He lived there for a few years and did well on his own. He met a girl through one of his placements and began a long relationship, which involved late night bus trips from Glasgow, on which he was hassled by the younger brothers - or maybe even sons - of the original bullies.

Things got dangerous. He was almost attacked several times on these late-night buses, by scumbags who got themselves worked up enough to convince themselves they had a good reason to attack 'the weird guy'.

He made another move, this time out of Cumbernauld to a flat on the edges of Paisley. I went over there a few times - it was a nice little flat and he looked after it well. He had a couple of budgies, was still seeing his girlfriend and had made new friends over there.

In 2008, while I was in the US with my family, he died. It wasn't the bus driver's fault. Steven wasn't looking when he crossed the road. The rest of the family were with him in hospital when he passed away but, because I was travelling at the time, he'd been gone three days before I found out.

My dad and I cleared out Steven's flat shortly after I arrived home from the States. One thing I'll never forget is that the clothes Steven had put in his washing machine on the morning he'd died were still in the machine, still wet, waiting for him to come home. In another, kinder, universe, he'd have arrived home later that day, put his washing away and gone on with his life.

He had a tough life. He made some - many! - daft mistakes, and he was certainly no saint. But he was dealt a hand in life that would've buckled many a lesser person, and kept going. Now it's birthday and I'm older than he ever got to be, and that doesn't seem fair at all.

There will be people in Cumbernauld, adults now, who made his life a misery and who never even give it a second thought. They probably don't remember him, or what they did to him. They never took the time to know him, and they'll never know he was a dozen times the man any of them could ever hope to be. Happy birthday, Steven.

The Arria statue in Eastfield, Cumbernauld, created by artist Andy Scott.

If you’re ever travelling along the M80 through Cumbernauld, you might notice a statue, Arria, which overlooks the motorway and sits on the edge of the cemetery where Steven is buried. Maybe, as you pass, you’ll take a moment to think of him and people like him.

For Steven Alan Carnahan, 5/12/62 - 15/10/08.