Page 21 of Maybe
Half of me expected Ezra's absence—a single, lone molecule of me even hoped he would have moved on to a different busking spot, making things easier for both of us. Except that idea extinguished quicker than a candle in a hurricane when he lifted his head from his guitar to gaze across at me. Denying was pointless. He could be as brattish as he liked: I still felt things about him I really wasn’t supposed to feel.
He played ballads today. Beautifully, too, persevering in the face of indifference from the harried shoppers, the office workers, and the tourists, paying more attention to their phones and their bumper caffeine hits than the intense, ethereal manstrumming his songs and wrapping his fine-boned fingers around my heart.
I recognised one of the tunes, an old eighties hit about taking a fast car and escaping somewhere.Leave tonight or live and die this way. Ezra used to belt those lyrics out as if semaphoring a message to someone. Maybe he was, to himself.Learn to fly. Fly away.He played it over and over, perfecting the haunting melody, singing with as much passion as the artiste herself.
To my mind, anyhow. By the thousandth rendition, my father had been less than impressed, the ghosts of his twisted words fresh, even now.That bloody boy, Janice.Useless. He’ll never amount to anything.
By the time his set came to an end and my brother took the seat opposite, signalling for a beer, we were both on edge. Our last conversation had been laden with tension, Ezra jumping on my slightest misstep and me too full of what could have been—what should have been—to bite my tongue. Too blinkered to see Ezra for what he was: a young man playing brilliantly with the cards he’d been dealt. I’d been a pious git. Too judgemental, too stiff. Too angry as well, at him for disappearing, for having this child without telling me, for missing the first nine years of Jonty’s life.
So how did we navigate this shit? How did we pick up the pieces of a broken friendship, a fraternity, and string them back together? Because the man directly accountable for every charged silence and every cross word was six feet under. Always, always, it came back to him. But what would he have done? Welcomed Jonty with open arms? Played grandad? Taken the boy to the park? Unlikely, seeing as he never did that with any of us first time around. Was it too late to claw a family back?
To claw Ezra back?
The beer arrived, and Ezra gulped at it gratefully, stretching out his long pale throat.
“Hi,” I said. “That sounded great.”
“Thanks.” Ezra toyed with a beer mat. “No hot date this week?”
Gerald and hot didn’t belong in the same sentence. Though our last date had been curtailed, he continued texting me at all hours. He wanted to see a therapist, to help with his loneliness. He assumed I’d know a few, which said as much about me as it did him.
“Sadly not. Us sanctimonious, middle-class, imbecilic fucknuggets aren’t in high demand.”
The tiniest of smiles tugged at Ezra’s lips.
“I’m… I’m sorry,” I added. “I said some stupid things.”
Ezra took a further swig, and I looked away from his elegant throat before I blurted out another one. “It was uncalled for,” I tagged on instead. “I… I think… it was a shock. The last few months have been a shock, to be honest. But I want you to know that meeting Jonty was great.”
He accepted my apology with a wave of his hand, though none from him was forthcoming. Time ticked by, interrupted by a waiter with the payment machine.
“Are you seeing anyone?” I asked. I’d been itching to know.
“God, no.” He took a smaller sip of beer, wiping his mouth with the back of his hand. “I can’t be doing with that bollocks. Easy come, easy go is more my style; I’m one of those purple devil emojis in human form, that you fuck without consequence.”
I squirmed at his bluntness. And how his dangerous, dark eyes looked directly at me while he said it, as a challenge, like he could read my thoughts. “Don’t do yourself down like that,” I mumbled.
“Why not? It’s true.” He reached for a cigarette. “Call me cynical, but I’ve seen relationships. They’re not quite my cup of tea. Me and Jonty are hunky-dory just as we are.”
“Can I tell Ed and Saffron about him?”
He raised a shoulder in a half shrug. “Yeah, I guess. If you want. Will they be interested?”
“Of course,” I answered, with more conviction than I felt. They’d be a lot more interested if Jonty was a twenty-year-old juvenile frat boy. “I loved seeing him. I still can’t believe I didn’t know about him. Did… did Dad?” A horrid thought struck me. “Does my mum?”
His lips twitched properly, as if I’d asked something funny. Then he blew out a ribbon of smoke into the air above our heads. “Oh yes, he knew. And she does.”
“What? And no one told me? You’re joking.”
He smirked. “Why do you think I fucking walked out?”
“I don’t know. I’ve never known; they never told me. I always assumed you wanted to go to art college and Dad didn't approve. That was the usual row.”
You want an easy life, Ezra? Off you trot, then. I hear Tesco’s looking for shelf stackers.
He eyed me speculatively. “Jonty’s nearly ten. Surely it can’t be that hard to join the dots; I thought you were the clever one. When Carly got up the duff, I’d got a job at a pub, working in the kitchen and clearing glasses. We would have been able to cover the rent—I just needed him to loan me the deposit, which I was going to pay back.” He threw me a wry smile. “The cunt showed me the door.”
I’m gladyou’re a fucking heart surgeon. One day you might work out how to fucking implant one in yourself.
