Page 6 of Maybe
“Poor kid.”
“He’s not a kid anymore. He’s twenty-nine.”
“Had he changed much?”
“Personality-wise, I have no idea; he didn’t hang around long enough for me to find out. Physically, he’s still in his Goth-lite era. You know, tall and lanky, undernourished? A bit scruffy, with a long overcoat and eyeliner? And moody. He’s always had that dark academia, dramatic vibe going.”
“Not that you’ve been, like, dwelling on him much.” Alaric threw me an amused glance at the same moment his pager bleeped. “Are you sure you’re not lamenting a lost boyfriend? He sounds hot.”
I passed him the phone. “Hi,” he said into the receiver. “You paged the incontinence hotline? Please hold on a little longer.”
I sniggered as Alaric made faces at whoever on the other end was trying to refer him a patient. “You’re phoning to putthe patient on my radar?” Tucking the phone under his chin, he made a wanking gesture with one hand whilst jotting the referral down with his other. “Do I look like air traffic control?”
Picking up my empty bowl, I carried it over to the kitchen area, adding it to the festering pile already stacked up in the sink.
Alaric wound up his call. “Better return to the coalface,” he declared. “A fourteen-year-old with a torsion might be coming in later if the GP can coax him to show someone his sore bollock.” He shoved his fags into the back pocket of his scrubs. “Are you on tomorrow night?”
“Yep.”
“Me too.” He grinned through his tiredness. “See you then.”
“Yep. No worries.”
I said ‘no worries’ a hell of a lot for someone who was a pile of worries in stale surgical scrubs.
What with revising for my surgical exams and sixty hours a week at the hospital, I had as much shit on my agenda as a six-year-old avoiding bedtime. But if I couldn’t get it off my chest with Saffy and Ed, the only other folks alive, except for Ezra, who knew the real Henry Fitz-Henry, then chances of concentrating on work or exams were precisely zero.
“Excluded from the will?What the blessed fuck?”Saffy had done all the talking so far. Ed was listening in.
I adored my younger twin siblings—Ezra’s half siblings. Everything they said, everything they did, possessed a carefreeness, stemming from knowing someone else had their back. Whatever shit had been going down at home—Ez, my dad, my mum—they somehow always floated above it.
Joined not only at the hip, but the shoulder, knee, and brain cells too, Edward and Saffron were in the States, studying atStanford. Neither of them wanted to go into medicine. Politics for Edward and journalism for Saffron. Living their best lives, the lucky sods. Dad having already earmarked me as his heir apparent, when they’d presented him with their futures, haphazardly mapped out on the back of a cigarette packet, he hadn’t given a fuck. When they’d gone a step further and plumped for expensive courses on the other side of the world, he’d saidfine, just send me the cheque.
Whereas I’d never had any doubt as to my career path. And as for Ezra… fuck. Despite his passion for music, his brilliant drawings, and his floaty shirts and cool friends, he never stood a chance of funding for art college.Study a proper subject, Ezra. The arts are for thickies and weirdos; I’m not wasting my money on that rubbish.
“Good luck with that,” was Ed's first comment after I suggested appealing to our mother’s better nature regarding Ezra’s portion of the inheritance. “You’ll have to find it first. I might have been young when he left, but making her life difficult was Ezra’s daily workout.”
“And how,” I agreed.
Some people used silence to express their pain. They suffered quietly, they brooded, they internalised. Like their bodies were hollow shells gradually filling with bitterness layered onto loss layered onto sorrow. Not our Ezra—not back then, anyhow. He’d been an obnoxious, hurt, teenage boy, his grief at his mother’s death anchored in anger and strengthened by rage, desperate to hang it on something tangible, orsomeonetangible. With his father frequently absent, my mother became the focus. Sure, she might have bagged herself a rich husband, a fancy house, and three kids, but bloody hell, did Ezra make her pay handsomely for them.
“Do you remember that time he graffitied his bedroom walls?” Saffy chuckled. “What was it he wrote? Dad had beennagging him about all the crap he hadn’t done, like tidying his room and bringing the dirty mugs down.”
Christ, I’d forgotten the graffiti saga. Ezra had been grounded for the first week of the school holidays.
To-do listhe’d sprayed in matte black comic sans. The short message covered the entirety of one wall.1. Learn to fly. 2. Fly away.
As if that wasn’t a big clue as to what the future held.
“Even after four coats of magnolia, you could still see the outline of that eagle. He was a bloody good artist, wasn’t he?”
“Yeah,” I agreed. “He was.”
“What on earth made you try to cover for him, with that bullshit story about a burglar climbing in?”
All the times he covered for me.
“We let him down,” I said. “Or rather, I let him down. You were just kids.”
