The Only Brother (7 page)

And as for the Hayden Smiths of the world who wanted to get a rise out of me, or the people just trying to cause trouble? Well, you’ll always run into those people, and you can either flip out over it or do your best to not let it bother you. Chances are you won’t be around those people for the rest of your life. For one thing, once school wraps up, Hayden’s going to be a
distant memory. I mean, there will always be people like him, but there are far more people like Trevor and Emma and Sara in the world. If I come across a Hayden, I’ll just cross the street.

And people kept handing me beers. I was pretty good about holding my drink and I kept an eye on what I drank, but it’s one of the downsides of just fitting, I discovered, that people keep handing you drinks. I took my time with them, and ate stuff to slow down the alcohol, but I could feel the buzz running through me. I avoided the urge to drunk-text Sara, even though I wanted her to know I was having a good time; she could call and I’d tell her all about it during the week.

‘You!’ Trevor grabbed me and pulled me away from his boss, who was looking to make a new logo for the auto shop and picking my brains.

‘What?’ I slurred, as Trevor pushed me up the stairs.

‘Got a surprise for you, like,’ Trevor laughed.

‘I’m not big on surprises,’ I said.

‘You’ll like this one,’ Trevor assured me. ‘I arranged it special. Consider it me making up for the bruise.’

We kept on going upstairs, to the top floor that Trevor had blocked off with a few chairs. He’d scrawled a note – OFF LIMITS OR I’LL STOMP YOU – it said, and taped it to a chair. We stopped at his dad’s bedroom, where Trevor had put my laptop so it wouldn’t get smashed by accident.

‘Gotta make sure we’re still good on beer,’ Trevor said. He turned the knob of the door and shoved me inside.

Trevor’s dad’s room was a shrine to Newcastle, from autographed pictures going back to the seventies, to a piece of St James’ Park in a shadow box. Caroline stood in front of the glass box, staring at it curiously.

‘Some guys are more serious about football than others,’ I mumbled.

Caroline jumped, not having realised I was there. I tried not to laugh, but she giggled first.

‘I got a call from Trevor out of the blue today,’ she said. ‘I don’t know how he got my number. Told me to show up without “that yob Hayden and his fools” because you wanted to talk to me.’

I’m going to kill Trevor, I thought. Or thank him. I don’t know which yet.

‘He got it off my phone today, I guess.’

‘You still have my number on your phone, Andrew?’

‘Yeah.’ I tried not to make eye contact. ‘Just never took it off.’

‘Oh, OK,’ Caroline said, her voice dropping.

Think quick…

‘And I thought I might, you know, want to call you again. Maybe see how you were doing.’

‘I’m good. Just another year of school and then uni.’

‘Yeah. The A Levels and then figuring out where to go…’

And then it was quiet. She didn’t say anything, I didn’t say anything. And in the back of my mind, Trevor and Sara were both screaming at me to do
something
.

‘We should have kept on seeing each other,’ I said. She nodded in agreement, even before I’d finished talking.

‘Why didn’t we?’ she said.

I thought about this for a moment. We had been so worried about what other people thought, and I had been going nuts dealing with my family, and I was just an idiot, and…

‘I don’t know,’ I said. ‘Don’t care though. It’s the past.’

‘Yeah,’ she said, smiling. ‘You still… I mean, you want to go out? I mean, sometime?’

‘Yeah.’

She sat on the bed. So did I. We talked. Beer was really getting to me, but I remember some of the stuff that happened – the good, and the bad. Mostly, it was just getting to know each other, talking and seeing that we had stuff in common, like art and music. She was with Hayden’s crowd because everyone was nice to her, but it bothered her that they weren’t nice to me. Hayden also fancied her, even though he had a girlfriend, and that was causing all sorts of problems. I told her I didn’t give a damn what Hayden thought any more. And she was a great kisser, just like I remembered.

That was the good.

The bad was Hayden finding out about the party and finding out that I was upstairs.
The bad was also Hayden finding the two of us wearing just enough clothing to spare the modesty of one person.

Like I said, I don’t remember much. I woke up the next morning next to Caroline. She assured me it hadn’t been anything other than us in the same bed sleeping. I was glad about that, because I wasn’t in a rush, and neither was she. My head hurt like hell, so the next hour was Caroline rubbing my temples and talking with me about lots of different things. We wandered downstairs to find most of the house trashed beyond recognition. This was a sign of a good party at Trevor’s, for whom success was based on how many people were passed out, and how many days it took him to clean up. At least Trevor had the sense to drag most of the drunks unable to get home into the house from the yard, neatly lining them up in the bar room downstairs.

‘So yeah, like, Hayden heard about the party,’ Trevor said between forkfuls of eggs, ‘and someone must have told him they saw you here, heading upstairs.’ He nodded at
Caroline. ‘He brought a few of his mates with him, and he didn’t take it well finding you two in bed together. When I got upstairs, he had already got some good shots in on you.’

That explained why my stomach hurt so much. I looked under my shirt, seeing the ugly purple bruise along my ribs. Caroline gasped while Trevor shrugged it off.

‘But you got the better of him, Andrew.’

‘I did?’

‘Yeah,’ Trevor laughed. ‘Boot right in the marbles…’

Trevor then mimed the fight, including the part where I punted Hayden down the stairs while I was yelling ‘I don’t give a damn what you think!’ over and over again. I kept my head low, trying not to be too embarrassed when Trevor described how I vomited all over Hayden just as he tried to hit me with a lamp. Caroline smiled, remembering it and everything else all too well.

‘Anyway,’ Trevor continued after a last boot into the imaginary Hayden on the floor, ‘my cousins’ friends and a few others took him out back and, like, worked him over after they ripped his pants off. Then we handed him back to his mates, like, and said if they called the cops we’d set their cars on fire. Don’t think he’s going to live down two rugby girls taking the piss out of him.’

Trevor paused for a moment. ‘You two look really cute together.’

I laughed, even through the pain of my ribs and the hangover. Caroline smiled and took hold of my hand under the table. I could get used to this. Especially the ‘hey, I’m dating someone’ part. I can, of course, do without the ‘oh God, my ribs are on fire’ part…

Trevor loaded us up with food and juice, which I for one really needed. I still had to talk to my parents later. It wasn’t going to be easy, and the yelling that would probably happen wasn’t going to be good for my head.

But at least the olds were going to listen this time. Wish they’d listened sooner. But that was in the past. They
were
going to listen to me this time.

I wasn’t sure how this is going to turn out or what I want to write here. No one else gets to read it, not even Sara, so I can say whatever I want. Learned a lot in the past few days, or maybe I just realised stuff I learned months or years ago. Not going to try to be too deep here, but maybe I’ll look back at it years from now and it will seem deep for a sixteen year old.

The party was great, even with the surprises. I’m not one for surprises, or ambushes or anything like that, but Trevor outdid himself.
Caroline and I talked about lots of things, and I’m remembering the bits and pieces about pounding Hayden now that I’m sober. I’m remembering kissing Caroline and a lot more, and I’m remembering just lying in bed with her and talking. I don’t know if we’re ‘dating’ yet, but we’re going to talk some more tomorrow and see what’s what.

I showered at Trevor’s and got cleaned up. When I could pass for sober, he dropped me off about two streets from my house and wished me luck. Then, the walk to my door, about 11 am.

Dad hugged me when I came in, but then he pulled away when he remembered I didn’t like people touching me. I said it was OK and dropped my bag in the living room. He asked me about the bruise on my head. I just told him it was a fight between mates, nothing special. Mum came in and hugged me. I did everything I could not to yell from the pain in my ribs.

We talked. It was a lot of talking – at least from me. Mostly it was me telling them to let me say
what I needed to say. Dad kept on wanting to interrupt, but I told him he just had to listen. I know William didn’t like me, based on what he said and did. I didn’t hate him, but I didn’t really love
him
either. I knew he’d got a suck deal from life, and he took lots of it out on me. I knew that he needed a lot more attention and stuff than I did, needed a lot more help. And I knew that they understood him a lot better than they understood me. I’d had to come second.

But it still didn’t mean that I didn’t want stuff, or attention, or love. Just because I was able to do stuff on my own didn’t mean I didn’t want them to pay attention to what I did. And part of that was down to me too, I know. I just didn’t click with them. I’m not the sort of person to say that I care about people, and I think that makes me seem cold; I make sure the rubbish bins are out and I clean up after myself. I’d left everyone alone when William got sick and had his operations. And I shouldn’t have done that. I should have spoken up more, should have pushed more, because that would have been better for everyone. I shouldn’t have let William take stuff out on me, I should have
been louder and angrier and I should have stood up for myself.

I could have handled things better too, I know that. And I made sure that Dad and Mum knew that. But I wanted them to know that I am still here, and that for all their talk about ‘pitching in’ and ‘helping out’, they sometimes forget that. I need to know they want me here. It took a while, but I got all this across to them.

This is when Dad started crying. He was angry and red, and his hands shook. Mum wanted to get up and leave, but I told her we needed to do this now or it wasn’t ever going to get resolved. I said it again, because they needed to hear it: William never really showed me that he cared, despite what they said or thought. William was angry with me for some reason, but I couldn’t help being me, just like he couldn’t help being him.

I just wanted to hear that I was doing the right things – someone telling me, ‘hey, you aren’t screwing up’. Sometimes they’d done that, but I’d had nowhere near the kind of support from them that William had. Just because William
had had a tougher mountain to climb didn’t mean that I had had an easy walk of it.

So I just put it all out there and said we should see about all of us finding someone to talk to about this. We could go to support groups for parents who had lost kids, we could talk with friends. We could even just talk about it together from time to time. I’d buried stuff for too long, they’d kept on trying to keep everything and everyone together on the surface, without seeing what it was that was actually pulling us apart…

It kind of dropped off from there and these are just the headlines – the whole conversation went on a bit. But I think that some of it got through. We got an Indian takeaway that night, and we actually sat at a table and ate together. Mum talked about some property deals, Dad talked about projects at work. They asked me how work was for me, and if I had painted anything recently. We didn’t talk about William.

We talked about us.

GraphicAndrew:
*wave*

HaveYouSeenMyPants:
Hey love

HaveYouSeenMyPants:
How was the party?

GraphicAndrew:
It was good…

HaveYouSeenMyPants:
*plays porno music*

HaveYouSeenMyPants:
hehehehe

GraphicAndrew:
stop that. :P

HaveYouSeenMyPants:
well, I figured you would have hooked up with Emma at least…

GraphicAndrew:
nononono…

HaveYouSeenMyPants:
:(

GraphicAndrew:
Caroline was there

HaveYouSeenMyPants:
you mean the blonde girl? The posh one?

GraphicAndrew:
yeah

HaveYouSeenMyPants:
*turns up porno music*

HaveYouSeenMyPants:
;)

GraphicAndrew:
No no no…

GraphicAndrew:
sort of…

HaveYouSeenMyPants:
oooooooo…

HaveYouSeenMyPants:
do tell…

GraphicAndrew:
we were in bed. Talking mostly. Some other stuff

HaveYouSeenMyPants:
did you get pictures?

GraphicAndrew:
no. :P

HaveYouSeenMyPants:
damn :)

GraphicAndrew:
it’s a good start

HaveYouSeenMyPants:
so you gonna see her again?

GraphicAndrew:
yeah. Gonna see what happens with us. At least give it a shot

HaveYouSeenMyPants:
hey, isn’t she one of Hayden’s friends?

GraphicAndrew:
was, I think. I think I convinced her not to care after I beat Hayden up at Trevor’s party

HaveYouSeenMyPants:
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

GraphicAndrew:
don’t remember much, I was drunk. Trevor said I pounded Hayden and threw him down some stairs

HaveYouSeenMyPants:
rock!

GraphicAndrew:
gonna email you something, just read it and delete it, OK?

HaveYouSeenMyPants:
OK

GraphicAndrew:
sent

HaveYouSeenMyPants:
*waits*

HaveYouSeenMyPants:
got it, gimme a sec

HaveYouSeenMyPants:
OMG *hugs*

GraphicAndrew:
I do the right thing?

HaveYouSeenMyPants:
I think you did

GraphicAndrew:
I’m surprised I didn’t get thrown out of the house

HaveYouSeenMyPants:
I don’t think they want to lose another son

GraphicAndrew:
I don’t think they want to lose me. Not just ‘another son’. They actually talked to me about what I was doing. May seem a bit late, but the past is, well… past. Time to be part of the family

HaveYouSeenMyPants:
yeah

HaveYouSeenMyPants:
I love you, you know that?

GraphicAndrew:
yep. Never doubted it

GraphicAndrew:
love you too

GraphicAndrew:
I’m gonna go and get some sleep. Last night and today were rough

HaveYouSeenMyPants:
*hops into bed with you*

GraphicAndrew:
hehehehe

HaveYouSeenMyPants:
sleep well, dear

A few weeks before the start of term, I got a call from a number I didn’t recognise. Turned out it was Buzz.

‘Namaste, Andrew,’ he said.

‘Hey Buzz,’ I said. ‘I’m not home right now, but if you lost my parents’ number I can give it …’

‘Actually, I needed to talk to you.’ He cut me off as politely as possible.

‘Oh, OK,’ I said. ‘What’s up?’

‘I’m going to be visiting in a few weeks, wrapping up the estate account, reading the will, things like that. It’s something we should have done earlier, but with everything being so stressful for your parents, I didn’t think it was a good idea to rush right into it. I need to meet with you beforehand, though.’

‘OK…’ Now I was wondering what was going on.

‘It’s nothing bad,’ Buzz assured me. ‘Just want to see how you are doing.’

‘I’m better. Working through stuff with the family. It’s not easy, you know?’

‘Yeah,’ he said, his New Jersey accent loud and clear. ‘I know. I know I miss William. I know your parents do.’

‘Yeah,’ I agreed.

‘I know you had problems with him, Andrew. And he had problems with you.’

I paused.

‘It’s OK, Andrew. I know you guys didn’t click. Sometimes that happens. But we’ll talk about this more when I see you, OK? I’m going to call your parents and give them my flight info. Do me a favour?’

‘Um, yeah?’

‘Don’t tell your parents about me wanting to meet with you ahead of time, OK?’

‘Sure.’

Buzz hung up, leaving me with a head full of questions. From what I know, Buzz is not much for secrets. They stay in touch, him, Dad and Mum, and for him to hide something from them it has to be something serious. I thought about calling him again to see if he’d just tell me, but thought better of it.

Instead I headed over to Caroline’s to meet her parents. She’d warned them about the make-up and pushed that I was a working artist, so figured that I should go over well. Next week is her meeting my parents. I don’t have to explain anything to my parents, they are just glad that I’m bringing someone home.

It was not turning out to be a bad life, all in all.