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Authors: Jane Lovering

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BOOK: Reversing Over Liberace
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“You'll be prettier than me soon.”

“Shut
up
, Ash. Honestly, if you weren't my brother.”

“You'd be happy, I know.”

Ash and I get on a whole lot better when no one else is there. It's like we don't have to compete for attention anymore. We're the classic case of the observer changing the thing observed.

“Piss off and start the bike.” I checked my mobile to make sure Luke hadn't had a change of heart and decided to call me after all. But he hadn't, and so I mounted up behind Ash and wound my arms around his ribcage. So it wasn't quite how I'd envisaged spending Saturday night, but right now it beat the alternatives.

Chapter Six

It was a tiny, hidden valley in the depths of the moors. Great grey drifts of heather heaped themselves like breaking seas at the base of dry-stone walls. The walls combed up the sides of the valley, dividing it into small squares each of which held about half a dozen huddled sheep. “Come on.” Ash propped the bike up on its stand and began to lead the way down a tiny lane between two of the walls, carefully stepping over the scatterings of sheep dung.

“Where are we going?”

“You'll see.”

Down the trackway we filed, it being too narrow to walk side-by-side. I followed Ash gloomily, wondering exactly what I'd let myself in for. The whole place had an ominous air. Trees overhung the path, making it spookily dark although I couldn't imagine any ghost being desperate enough to hang around here. Except possibly the earthbound spirit of some recalcitrant farm animal.

“Ash?”

“Shh. Nearly there.”

“Oh. Wow.” The way suddenly widened, throwing up the view of a small whitewashed house perched on the bank of a stream which was tickling its unassuming way between the buttocks of the hills. Green meadows dotted with early white flowers surrounded the house and a goat was grazing, tied to an apple tree outside a shed.

“Who the hell are we visiting? Heidi?”

“Cute, isn't it? Come on.” Ash grabbed my hand and we ran down across the fields towards the dinky dwelling, me suppressing a desire to yodel. Around the back we raced, through a little cobbled yard, and on through a door standing open, into the house itself.

It was hideously dark in contrast to the daylight outside and I stopped dead. “It smells funny.”

“Yeah,” said a voice I didn't recognise. “What do you reckon?”

I sniffed. “Mushrooms?”

“Dry rot,” the voice said, glumly. “Or possibly wet rot. Some kind of fungal thing. Knowing my luck the place will probably turn out to have athlete's foot as well.”

“Willow. This is Cal.” Ash moved away so that a little more light filtered in through the doorway.

There was a note in his voice that I recognised. Pride and a touch of warning, plus a warmth that was usually lacking in my twin. Oh God, Ash was in love.

“Hi, Cal.” Outside, the sun suddenly broke through the clouds and bounced off the internal whitewash, revealing the owner of the glum voice in a halo of reflected light. I widened my eyes.

“Hello, Willow.”

Certainly a very definite step up from Ash's usual muscle-bound types, I thought. The initial impression was of eyes—huge, brown eyes in a pale face, unshaven and a bit hollowed around the cheeks. The second impression—as he moved forward to shake my hand was “phwoar”. He had the looks of a poet who's spent too long staring into the abyss; long dark hair and lines of stress around the mouth. Luckily, as ever when meeting my brother's boyfriends, I had no inclination to vomit on him. Dunno why, but something inside tells me that, however gorgeous, it's not for me and my stomach remains steady. “Nice place you've got here.”

“It could be. Would you like a tour?”

“Go ahead, show Will round. I'll make some tea, yeah?”

What, my ludicrously undomesticated brother making tea? “Boiling water. From a kettle,” I called, as Ash disappeared into the recesses of the dark.

“Ha. Bitch.”

Cal stood smiling curiously at me. “You're very pretty,” he said, disarmingly. “Ash didn't tell me.”

“Um, thank you,” I stammered. I actually felt a bit windswept from the journey over and kept catching sight of a wayward piece of hair sticking out at right angles above my left ear. “Have you known Ash long?”

“'Bout three years.” Cal moved forward towards a door which he threw open to reveal a large room, and I could see properly. See, for example, that he was using a stick. See also that he moved in a lurch as though one leg was longer than the other. I bit my lip.

“Living room. Dining room at the back. Over that side of the house is the kitchen and study, which is actually the old walk-in larder. Upstairs”—the stick gestured at the ceiling—“there's two bedrooms and a bathroom so disgusting I'd advise you to pee in the field. I haven't found out where it flushes to, but I bet
that's
not going to be good news.”

I half-smiled but was finding it hard to tell whether this man was joking or not. He had a straight face and delivered his words sharply, as though he wasn't used to talking to strangers.

“Um, Cal.”

“Willow.”

“Why am I here?”

“Ash wanted to bring you. He thought we should meet.” Cal shuffled himself around to face me. “And I'm glad we have.”

Okay, I had to get this question out of the way, whilst we were still relative strangers. It would be a lot more awkward if his relationship with Ash really took off and I was still skirting around the topic. “What's the matter with your leg?”

Cal tipped his head on one side. “War wound,” he said, deadpan. “Got shot up in '45, had to put the old crate down behind enemy lines. All very hush-hush, donchaknow.” Still no trace of humour, but a slight brittleness which told me this was his standard reply, a running gag to keep people from intruding. It made me wince on his behalf.

“You don't look old enough to have fought in the war,” I replied in kind. If he wanted his privacy, he had nothing to fear from me.

“Oil of Olay, m'dear. Fantastic stuff. I'm actually a hundred and three.” I couldn't help myself, and snorted back a laugh. Cal's face brightened. “That's better. You shouldn't take me seriously. And you're even prettier when you smile.”

Despite knowing he was Ash's, despite his clearly doing his best to keep me at arm's length as far as personal questions were concerned, and despite the fact that I'd only just met him, I blushed. As I was about to say something witty and snappy and devastating, Ash bounced back into the room with three mugs of something which looked almost like tea.

“Ash, you're going to make someone a wonderful wife.” Cal, still deadpan, took his mug. “Can you iron?”

Now it was Ash's turn to blush. I looked over my tea at the pair of them, Ash skinny in his leathers, hair ruthlessly spiked into a bleached Number 2, and Cal unkempt in a check shirt and jeans, tall, thin and dark, dark, dark. Talk about an odd couple.

“Look, I really should be getting back.” I swallowed my tea scalding.

“Are you still having trouble with your laptop?” Cal asked out of nowhere.

“What? Laptop? Oh, yeah, loose connection or something. Bloody stupid machines. Better off with a piece of paper and a slide rule.”

Cal looked at Ash. “Well, that's me Luddite-ed out of a job.”

“Cal's a computer consultant,” Ash explained, whilst I watched Cal being quietly amused. “That's why I told him about your laptop. Thought you might want him to take a look at it for you.”

“Oh. Sorry. About the slide-rule thing. Obviously. Couldn't, um, do spread sheets with a slide rule.”

“Only I could pick it up from you and drop it round to Cal's tomorrow.” Ash's voice had a pleading tone. Oh-ho, I thought, still at the looking-for-every-opportunity-to-drop-in stage, eh?

“No, it's too far to bike all the way over here again just for my laptop.”

“No, it's fine. Cal lives in York. Works from home.” Normally if I'd asked Ash for a favour such as, say, picking up my dry-cleaning you'd have thought I'd asked him to mud-wrestle Madonna, but now it seemed he couldn't do enough.

“I just inherited this place,” Cal said calmly, as though the intimated early-morning presence of a sex-crazed Ash was a well-known occupational hazard to computer consultants. Perhaps he was looking forward to it. “My great aunt died. Well, obviously. Inheriting from the living is something of an extreme sport, I should imagine. I used to spend summer holidays here and she knew I loved the place, so.” A little catch in his voice there. Again, that touch of vulnerability, quickly glossed over. I was beginning to see what Ash saw in Cal—apart from his total shaggability of course.

“My grandfather died, too,” I found myself saying. “He left me his nose.” And then I realised that this was the first time I'd actually said it aloud. “My grandfather died,” I said again. I hadn't even managed to say it to Luke. It was almost as though if I didn't say it, it hadn't happened.

Cal nodded. “Takes a while to get used to, doesn't it? Almost like they've been around so long, they can't just
stop
being. Maybe they have to, kind of, wear away in our heads.”

On the ride home, tucked down low to avoid the pull of the wind, I thought about this. Had Ganda left me his bodily remnant to ensure that he never “wore away in my head”? Or as a good-luck charm? He'd always sworn that, after the accident which had removed said nose, his luck had changed. Nothing that made his fortune, but enough to pay for materials, workspace, horrible baggy tartan trousers—all the sort of things that are necessary to mad inventors. All right, yes I had to admit it. Much as I had loved…
still loved
Ganda, much as I had enjoyed being his favoured grandchild and helping him with his creations, I had known all the time that he was completely barking. And look at his legacies. A ton of dusty books, a pile of mouldering rubber boots, half an acre of sandy soil and two spaniels?

Once home, I fetched the matchbox from the cupboard and pulled open the inner tray. There lay the nose in question, looking even more mummified than I remembered, round with a dividing crease like Tom Thumb's backside.

“Honestly, Ganda,” I said. “What were you
thinking
?” My grandfather had known he was dying, had a few weeks warning to get his affairs in order, so it hadn't been a mad whim. I closed the tray up. The nose was padded in place with a wad of paper so it barely moved. “Maybe I'm supposed to wish on it. Like a star.” I was speaking aloud, glad that there was no one to overhear. Wishing on a star is pathetic enough, wishing on your dead grandfather's nasal organ has to border on the pathological. “All right.” I shook the box again. “I wish…I wish…” A mistimed snatch of my fingers and the inner tray of the matchbox flew free, sailed across the kitchen and deposited Ganda's nose deftly into the plughole of the sink. It caught on the trap for a moment before my careful attempt to pry it free with my fingernails sent it plunging into the cabbage-scented depths of the U-bend.

As I sprawled under the sink attempting to unscrew the pipe, I found the paper wadding from the matchbox tray. It was thicker than the tissue paper I had thought stuffed the box, and its flight had caused it to spread half-open revealing the lettering which covered one side. I wiped my hands on my legs and ironed the paper down on the floor. The words I read sent me flying to the phone to call Katie, all thoughts of the renegade nose forgotten.

Chapter Seven

Sunday can best be described as a contained disaster. You know those days when, through nobody's fault, you are desperate to be somewhere else but are forced to go on with a kind of ritual? Katie said that summed up her wedding day to a T. I couldn't tell Luke or OC what I'd discovered hidden in the matchbox, not yet. Not until, well, not yet. In consequence I was a bit distracted. OC was cross with Paddy who hadn't yet returned home from his conference, which left poor Luke the only one of us fit to hold a civilised conversation. But, on the plus side, he really hit it off with my sister who, when she'd stopped clutching her bump and complaining that Paddy's absence was causing her Braxton-Hicks contractions, hissed to me over the sprouts, “Don't let this one get away, Wills.”

“What do you suggest, a high-pressure containment field?”

“You know what you're like with men. They're there one minute and gone the next.”

“I don't exactly release them into the wild.”

OC made a face and passed Luke the potatoes. “Will never has much luck with men,” she said.

“What
is
this? Just because Sophie and Iain aren't here, you feel that you have to go all parental on me? For God's sake, OC, next thing you're going to be showing him photos of me having my nappy changed.”

(Sophie and Iain are Mum and Dad. They brought us up to call them by their given names. Sickening, isn't it? I blame the parents.)

Under the table, Luke squeezed my knee. “Well, I'm not going anywhere.”

I had to dash into the garden room and be sick. I blamed it on the dogs.

And then it was Sunday night and I was on stage, wearing the band uniform black and white, belting out eighties' classics, feeling all warm and powerful with my boys behind me (best place for Jazz who, in defiance of the whole androgynous-Goth thing, was growing a goatee and therefore looked like a penguin with its dinner round its mouth) and Luke somewhere in the dark audience in front of me. I mean,
forget
releasing an album and have it enter straight at number one, this was what I was in music for.

We finished with “Do You Really Want To Hurt Me?” and exited to applause. Luke was waiting for me. “Will you be all right to get home?”

“Yes, in a bit. Got to give the lads a hand with the equipment first.”

BOOK: Reversing Over Liberace
8.39Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
ads

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