Page 19 of Maybe
When had my sweet Isaac become such a prig? “Carly wasn’t some poor girl. She hadn’t been then, and she isn’t now. She’d known what she was about. I did the right thing by her at thetime, and I still do.” My voice rose so sharply Jonty peeked over. I gave him a wave.
“All right, all right,” said Isaac, “Calm down. I wasn’t judging.”
“You sounded judgy. What’s it like up there on the moral high ground? A bit chilly? A bit lonely?”
Casting his gaze over at Jonty, Isaac hitched his coat closer around his body. “Listen, Ezra. If you brought me here to rail at me, then I’ll say my goodbyes now.”
Arsehole. Even as I thought it, a pang tugged at my chest. Him and Jonty hadn’t even been properly introduced. But he was nevertheless an arsehole. “Good idea, why don’t you?” I said, as if I didn’t care. “And feel free to take your sanctimonious, middle-class, imbecilic fucknugget attitude with you.”
CHAPTER 7
EZRA
“Who was that man, Daddy?”
An excellent, insightful question, and one I hoped he’d forgotten to ask. Since Isaac stormed off, Jonty and I had discussed the colour of the paint on an estate agent’s front door (an interesting greeny-blue), why frogspawn wasn’t toad spawn (clumpy not stringy), why the stickers on apples should be edible (Jonty ate them anyhow), and the relative merits of Faizan’s mum's lamb samosas compared to her vegetable bhajis.
I hesitated to describe Isaac as an uncle, even though the idea warmed me. A few ‘uncles’ had traipsed through Carly's house until she settled with Dave, her current bloke. Given that my own early childhood had been built on a house of cards, I went with the truth.
“He’s my brother,” I said, as we turned the corner into our street.
Now none of his friends lurked, Jonty held my hand. “Is he a nice brother? Did he used to play football with you?” Disappointingly for Jonty, Carly’s child with Dave was of thefemale variety and far more interested in trampolining than football.
“I’m afraid we didn’t play much football, no,” I replied. “He’s a few years younger than me. Sometimes we practised guitar together, though.”
Play Wonderwall, Ezra. Show me that last chord again. Look! I’ve learned the first three.
I squeezed Jonty’s hand, and he squeezed back. “But he is quite a nice brother, when he’s not saying stupid things. I’m going to see him more. Did you take your blue puffer at lunch time?”
“Yes. And the brown one.”
“Good boy. Do you want the blue one again now before we climb the stairs? The lift’s packed up again.”
“No, I’m fine.”
He was not fine. Our flat was on the fourth floor of an old six-storey block and blanketed in illegal tinderbox cladding that the council had promised to replace years ago. Not too many flights of stairs, but he still wheezed like an accordion by the time we reached the halfway mark, not helped by him insisting on reciting his lines for his upcoming school play.
Wordlessly, I handed him a blue inhaler. At home, we did it properly, using the spacer like the nurse had shown us. “You okay?” I fiddled with the key longer than necessary so he could get his breath back.
“Yeah.” He coughed a couple of times. “Can we have pizza for tea?”
Jonty had yet to meet a problem pizza couldn’t fix. “On Friday,” I promised. “Shepherd’s pie tonight.”
Whenever I knuckled down and had an honest conversation with Carly about boundaries, she rolled her eyes at me, thenturned her attention back to whatever she was doing. On this occasion, it was putting the finishing touches to a shepherd’s pie in my tiny kitchen. With her felt-tipped pens spread across the breakfast bar, Freya, Jonty’s younger half-sister, was covering a sheet of paper in gold and silver stars.
“You’ve been avoiding me.” Carly dolloped mashed potato on to a layer of meat, then made tramlines in it with a fork. “And Jonty says you’ve been acting weird.”
“Thanks, buddy.”
My son threw me an angelic smile, his arms already squeezed around his mum’s rapidly expanding, seventh-months-pregnant waist. “I just met Daddy’s brother. He came with Daddy to the swings.”
“That’s nice, sweetheart.” Over the top of his head, Carly gave me a shrewd onceover. “Why don’t you go and change out of your uniform before Freya gets glitter all over it?” She used her no-messing voice. “Were you given any homework?”
“Just my reading. And practising my lines.”
“Dinner won’t be ready for another forty minutes. Take Freya with you—she’s got spellings to write out.”
No subtlety, my Carly. While the kids skipped off, I emptied out Jonty’s lunchbox.
