Page 1 of Maybe
CHAPTER 1
ISAAC
"Ezra, play Wonderwall.”
“What, again? That ancient, cheesy thing?”
“Yeah. Haven’t you heard? Oasis is having a comeback. And you’re really good at it. It’s my favourite.”
“Maybe,” Ezra mumbled, or I think he said something like that. He spoke so quietly, I couldn’t catch it.
“Eh? What did you say?”
From behind the sweep of dark hair covering one eye, Ezra threw me a smile. The naughty one doing strange things deep in my belly. Staying there until long after my mum shooed him away, like a cuckoo in the nest.
“What did you say?” I repeated.
Not gifting me with an answer, he brushed his thumb down the guitar strings, sounding out the familiar chords. We were ten minutes from my bedtime, and I was supposed to practise my spellings. But who knew when he’d be allowed in here again?
“I said… maybe,” he sang in his clear, confident tenor, “you’re gonna be the one that saves me.”
A childish giggle escaped my lips. I groaned and shook my head. Every time, I fell for it.
Every time, I fell for him.
Professor Sir Henry Fitz-Henry KBE BM BCh FRCS (Eng) spent his life fixing other people’s failing hearts and then crowing from the rooftops about it. Thus preoccupied, he didn’t notice his own flabby left ventricle packing up until it was far too late to do anything about it. My mother, Lady Janice, had the bad luck of finding him. Half dressed and chin smeared in shaving foam, he was slumped on the bathroom floor, wedged awkwardly between the bidet and the side of the elegant copper roll top bath. He was already very dead, she reported afterwards—and quite defensively, seeing as she’d made no attempts at resuscitation.
Although before summoning an ambulance, she did wipe away the foam, cover him with a blanket and wiggle a fresh pair of socks onto his mottled feet. No one wanted the neighbours gawking, she explained, but maybe that was the shock talking. Fortunately for her, the pathologist conducting the post-mortem and the coroner agreed with her diagnosis.
“You don’t have to be here, Isaac,” reassured David Trethowan, my father’s solicitor, for at least the third time. I’d only met the guy five minutes earlier;avuncularwas the best descriptor for him. “As joint executors, only one of us needs to be present for the first will reading. I could easily summarise the gist of it for you in an email along with a duplicate copy.”
Yes, I was fully aware, but having moved heaven and earth to swap a day shift for a night—and what a fucking night—no way would I back out now, even though my warm bed called.
“I’m very happy to briefly go through the will with you now,” he added. “Then if your brother does decide to join us,go through it with him again separately. I’ve already told your mother I’ll relay everything to her and the twins this evening.”
I checked my watch; Ezra was only a few minutes late. David Trethowan wasn’t to know, but if I finally got to clap eyes on him, I was prepared to wait all day and all night. I’d quietly nod off in a cosy corner of this smart office.
Anticipation seesawed with the restlessness of anxiety. Would Ezra have changed? Would he be friendly? More importantly, would he enlighten me as to where the fuck he’d been? Ten years had passed since my eighteen-year-old brother had fallen off the face of the earth, ten years of wondering, imagining, speculating, fretting. Ten years of every single possible scenario jostling for space inside my head.
And ten years of saying nothing. Ten years of dutiful, well-behaved childhood. Of pretending no great empty cavity in our house or in my heart existed that someone used to occupy. Never daring to bring his absence up in conversation with my mother or my father. Never sticking up for him, never challenging them.
I tried to steel myself for disappointment. In all probability, he wouldn’t turn up, like he hadn’t appeared at the private family interment, even though, if Ezra read a newspaper or the news online, he’d have seen his father’s death widely reported. David, the solicitor, left urgent messages at two former actual addresses and via one old email address unearthed from our father’s eclectic filing system. One was for a pub in Mile End where Ezra had once held a bar job and the other turned out to be a hostel. The email was a Hotmail address; did they still even function?
I rubbed at my face, scratching itchy bristles from my overnight beard. Three relentless night shifts on the back of my father’s unexpected demise last month and I looked as shattered as I felt. Emotions I’d yet to find the time to unpick raged around my head, though a few highlights emerged: namely guiltat unmerited sympathy from a host of well-wishers, mixed with a vague, unpleasant relief.
I’d long passed the age when I believed either of my parents to be all-knowing, wise, and infallible beings. But, for better or worse, that self-centred dick had been my dad, and I wasn’t so callous. His sudden death would leave a scar. At four o’clock this morning, picking out glass shards, then tacking thirteen stitches into a drunk lad’s thigh, I’d been floored by a wave of unexpected, untrammelled grief. Not my finest needlepoint.
“You’re holding up very well.” David Trethowan was another person oblivious to the maelstrom shifting under my outer, weary surface. As his eyes flicked to the clock above the door, I nodded my acknowledgement, cringing with the weight of this stuffy lawyer’s misplaced compassion.
Surreptitiously, I sniffed my armpit. I should have made David reschedule for later in the morning so I could dash home first.
Somewhere below, a doorbell buzzed, and my heart nearly came to a crashing standstill in the manner of my father’s. Muted voices, one male, floated up towards us, followed by the tread of two sets of footsteps on the stairs. I leapt up from my chair, then, feeling like an idiot, plumped back down again, sending a harsh scrape across the wooden floor. David rose too, in a more relaxed manner, and stayed standing, smoothing down his blazer and stepping out from his desk. A sharp knock, and Margaret, David’s secretary, popped her head around.
“Mr Ezra Fitz-Henry for you, David.”
“Good, good, show him in.”
Nothing had changed.
