Page 22 of Maybe
I stared at my brother, letting his words sink in. Something painful twisted inside me. How could an unborn child’s own grandfather be so heartless?
“Why didn’t you come back and tell me? Shown me that you were okay?”
Ezra plucked a corner from the beermat. “I wasn’t okay. Far from it. I was eighteen, homeless, and about to become a father. I couldn’t stay at Carly’s, seeing as her dad and me didn’t see eye to eye—for obvious reasons—and Sir Henry Fitz-Henry decided he’d had enough of the awkward foundling messing up his perfect little family. To be fair, I’d had enough of him.”
“So where did you go?”
He gestured with his arm all around us. “Everywhere. A mate’s sofa, a night shelter, the pavement outside Hamleys on Oxford Street. You know, the usual.”
“Oh, God.”
My face must have shown everything. All hospital emergency departments received their fair share of homeless people. Most were merely on a hunt for somewhere warm and safe for a few hours. Depending on how busy we were, they’d get both, and a cup of sugary tea. My own brother had been one of them, and I hadn’t known. The idea made me sick.
“You think living rough was bad?” Ezra grimaced. “At least on the street I could see trouble coming. It used to blindside me at home.”
I rested my head on my arms for a moment, briefly shutting my eyes. To our left, two girls slated their boyfriends. Behind, a party of Australian backpackers argued over the cheapest route to Camden market. And in front of me Ezra sipped his cool beer, casually filling me in on how he’d survived the last few years. My own warped version of the past imploded. “So why are you telling me this now?”
He shrugged. “You deserve to know. He was your hero, wasn’t he?”
Myhero?After that horrific argument, my hero vanished, taking a chunk of my soul with him.“I deserve to know what? That being out on the streets was better than our home? That’s… Christ, Ez. Really?”
“Compared to living under his tyranny?” A raw note crept into his voice. “Yeah, I’d say so.”
My stomach clenched. I could scarcely believe I was asking the next question. “Did… did he hurt you? You know, physically?”
“Nah, not really. I used to bait Janice into giving me the odd slap; they never bothered me. But I’d rather have taken on a whole coach load of pissed Chelsea supporters than one of his tongue lashings.”
“You’re okay now, though. Aren’t you?” Even to my ears, I sounded desperate. “Apart from, you know, generally being a dick and not phoning or texting after showing me I had a bloody nephew and calling me names?”
He laughed at that, thank God. I wasn’t up for any more shocking revelations.
“Yeah, me and the kid get by.” He studied me with a lopsided smile. “Better than you, I reckon, from the look of you.”
I’d nodded off at midnight with the anatomy of the brachial plexus, my evening’s revision, scattered across the bed. It had jerked me awake at four a.m. Realising no more sleep was forthcoming, as dawn made its bleary way over the horizon, I hauled out of bed and got back to it.
“I’m all right. Busy week. I don’t always sleep that well after coming off nightshifts and switching on to days. An early night, and I’ll be right as rain by tomorrow.”
“I see.” He toyed with his bottle for a few moments before spearing me with those wicked eyes. “Come out with that bullshit a lot, do you?”
“It’s not bullshit. Ask any shift worker.”
“I don’t care about other shift workers.”
I didn’t expect sympathy from Ezra, neither did I deserve it. One of us enjoyed a safe, secure home, the other hadn’t, and yet here he was, thriving. Whereas most days I was secondsfrom drowning. I didn’t want to talk about me, about exams I’d probably fail, for a career I felt pressurised to pursue, in a hospital I’d grown to despise. Working for a system that had already broken my kind, decent friend, Luke, and left me and Alaric hanging on by our fingertips.
“Tell me about Jonty,” I said with a bright smile. I had plenty of colleagues with young kids; I’d learned how to steer a conversation away from myself. “He looked full of beans. What sort of things does he like? And are you teaching him the guitar?”
Was Ezra fooled? I doubted it. But at the sound of his boy’s name, his eyes lit up. For the next fifteen minutes, until he had to start his next set and I had to go back to revision, we talked Jonty and guitars.
CHAPTER 9
ISAAC
It didn’t take many nightshifts listening to patient stories in ED to fully comprehend that the world was bleaker and uglier than you ever dreamed. Some of those nights passed in a blur: a chaotic jumble of belly aches, X-ray reviews, prioritising the sickest patients, inserting catheters, breaking bad news. Lancing whitlows. A miasma of injuries, illnesses, and life-changing dramas, catastrophic for the patients and their loved ones, routine for you. Wiped from your memory before you’d even alighted from the Tube and collapsed into bed. Sleep followed fast and dreamless after those nights, despite the chink of sunlight between the bedroom curtains and the low-pitched whine of next door’s vacuum cleaner.
And then there were the other nights, the ones plunging you into a sickening, unfathomable hellscape. A sadder, harsher land you wished you’d never visited. A land which had you questioning the validity of being alive; the absurdity of human existence, the futility, the utter meaninglessness of it all. The randomness too. It could be a Tuesday, could be a Thursday, could happen all over again tomorrow—who knew?
All I knew was Alaric and I volunteered for an extra ED shift because they were short staffed and we were a soft touch. And some sicknesses, some quirks of fate, had no respect for age and no morals. Simply an instinctual urge to drive a soul to death.
