The Other Son (22 page)

“Totally the last,” Bruno says. “Not one leek remains.”

“They don’t look good,” Matt says, pulling a face.

“They don’t,” Bruno agrees. “It’s snow damage. But they’ll taste fine in the soup. You’ll see.”

As Bruno, behind him, prepares the soup, Matt sits and stares at the flames behind the stove window. He lets his mind drift and physically jumps when, ten minutes later, Bruno places one hand on his shoulder.

“You OK, hon?” Bruno asks.

Matt looks up at him and smiles. “I think so,” he says. “I was just thinking about that boy.”

“The kid in the store?” Bruno says.

“Yes.”

On their way into Aix they had stopped in a small supermarket to buy cans of Coke. At the checkout, in front of them, a drama had been unfolding.

A father, his young boy by his side, had been trying to buy two plastic bottles of cheapest cooking wine. He had looked (and smelt) like a fully-fledged alcoholic.

The cashier, a young, pretty girl in her twenties, was refusing to let the man leave the shop with the wine. His Visa card, it appeared, had been refused.

But as Bruno and Matt reached the checkout, the father had started to rant, and then to shout, and then, finally, to bang his fist against the counter. And his child, a beautiful brown-eyed boy of six or seven, began to plead, his voice quivering, for him to stop. “S’il te plaît, Papa,” he kept saying, pulling at his father’s sleeve. “S’il te plaît, on y va !”

“That kid was scared,” Bruno says.

“He thought he was going to hit her,” Matt says. “That’s why. It was heartbreaking.”

“I wondered about that. I wondered if he might hit her. Or the boy.”

“He needed his booze,” Matt says. “That’s all.”

“Huh. Still not sure that buying it for him was the right answer though,” Bruno says.

Matt nods. “I know. But I needed it to stop. It was unbearable.”

“You were shaking.”

Matt nods again. “He reminded me of Dad,” he says. “That’s why.”

“Really?”

“Yep. He used to get out of hand like that. I hated it.”

“Out of hand?”

“Yes,” Matt says. “Nothing
that
bad. But it was hard, as a kid, to see your father out of control. And you saw how grateful that boy was when I made it all stop, right?”

“Yes,” Bruno says. “He had tears in his eyes.”

“Isn’t that what your graceful thing’s all about?” Matt asks. “Isn’t it about making some six-year-old’s nightmare stop?”

“Maybe,” Bruno says. “But it only stopped till he went home and drank those two bottles.”

“And once he had drunk them, he fell asleep,” Matt says. “We bought that kid four hours of peace. Maybe five. That’s less than one euro an hour.”

“If you say so,” Bruno says.

“I do say so,” Matt tells him, earnestly.

As Bruno returns to the kitchen area and begins, noisily, to liquidise the soup, Matt remembers pleading with Ken, he remembers tugging at Ken’s sleeve in exactly the same way.

He had been seven or eight at the time, and Ken too, had been drunk. Tim had, it seemed, broken something. Matt struggles to remember what it was but the memory escapes him. It could have been something important, something expensive like a clock or a vase, or it might have been just a cheap mug from Woolworth’s. That was the thing about Ken’s moods – they were utterly unpredictable.

Anyway, Ken had been drunk and furious about whatever it was, furious enough to meet Matt from school, furious enough to demand, “Who broke it?” and to shake Matt’s arm so hard he feared he would rip it from him. “Tell me, you little sod. Who broke it?” he had shouted.

But Matt hadn’t known, that was the thing. He was like Dustin Hoffman in
Marathon Man
being asked, “Is it safe?” And like Dustin, though he didn’t know, he had eventually caved in and replied, “Yes, it was Tim.” After all, that was probably true. And so they had waited for Tim at the school gates.

Matt had tugged at Ken’s sleeve. “Let’s go home, Dad,” he pleaded.

“Shut it!” Ken had replied.

So they had continued to wait, Ken’s foot tapping angrily, the sole of his shiny shoes sounding hollow against the playground and Matt constantly scanning the horizon, praying that Tim would for once be held in detention, or that he would see them and run away until Ken had calmed down or at least sobered up. But there he was, as bright as a button, walking towards them, wondering what was wrong, wondering why the welcoming committee had turned out to greet him.

Ken had slapped Tim’s face so hard that he had crashed into the railings and cut his ear. It had bled profusely. But also like Dustin, Tim had no idea who had broken the bowl either. Yes, Matt remembers now: it had been a wide, low-edged fruit-bowl and Ken had stuck it back together. They had continued to use it for years, lest anyone dare try to forget.

Once Tim had been reduced to a snotty, snivelling mess, grovelling on the floor, Ken had hit Matt hard across the back of the head too. “Just in case,” he had said. “Because it must have been one of you little bastards.”

Back at the house, while the boys hid in their rooms, Ken had laid into Alice. Matt, his heart racing, had hidden under the covers and put his fingers in his ears until it was all over.

The next morning, Alice, with a hefty bruise on her arm and a strange matted patch of hair at the back of her head, had told them, in apparent amusement, that “silly Ken” had broken the “stupid bowl” himself. And Matt had vowed, for the first time of many, to kill him. It was the only way, he had decided, to liberate them all from his tyranny.

“So if your father gets crazy,” Bruno asks unexpectedly, “Don’t you worry about your Mom?”

Matt clears his throat. Has Bruno somehow been listening to his thoughts? “Not really,” he replies. “She knows pretty much how to deal with him by now.”

“She does?”

Matt shrugs. “If she doesn’t then she’s had long enough to leave him. It’s just not something I can help her with. She knows the score. That’s their deal. It’s like some kind of S&M thing almost. If she didn’t like it, she’d leave. You have to step away from other people’s craziness at some point. I learnt that in therapy. You have to stop owning it on their behalf. Even when they’re your parents.”

“That sounds... I don’t know...” Bruno says.

“Harsh? Uncaring?”

“Maybe.”

“It’s like that AA thing. You know, help me to accept the things that can’t be changed or whatever.”

“But she’s still your mom.”

“And like I said, he’s still my dad.”

“OK... But do you miss them?”

Matt laughs. “Define ‘miss’,” he says.

Bruno, leaning on the counter behind him, frowns.

“There’s kind of a hole where they’re not,” Matt explains, with a sigh. “If that makes any sense.”

“Not much.”

“There’s an absence, OK? But it’s an absence of something very complicated. So it’s an absence of love and fear and hatred and... I don’t know... exhaustion, maybe?”

Bruno nods. “And Tim?”

“You’d have to ask him.”

“No, I mean, do you miss your brother?”

“Of course I miss him. But you know, we’re so different. We–”

“How so?”

“Oh, Tim’s very into his stuff. His CDs and his–”

“But you like music too.”

Matt rolls his eyes. Bruno is always trying to find empathy, even where there isn’t any. It’s sweet, but it’s tiring sometimes too. “Sure. I like music. And Tim likes CDs. He likes hi-fi. He likes
things.
We didn’t see that much of each other even when we lived in the same town. But sure, I miss him. And I’m kind of hyper aware that the boys are growing up and I’m not around.”

“How old are they again?” Bruno asks, giving the soup a final stir and then joining Matt on the sofa.

“Seven and eight, maybe. No, seven and nine, I think.”

Bruno is staring at Matt strangely.

“What?” Matt asks.

“I don’t know,” Bruno says. “I mean, suppose your folks died tomorrow...”

“They’re not
that
old.”

“No, sure. But if they did. How would you feel? Wouldn’t you have any regrets?”

“Obviously! I’d be sad not to have seen Mum. But I’ll see her. I’ll go back soon and see everyone.”

“And your pa?”

“Ah,”
Matt says.

“Ah?”

“Perhaps I’d be sad too. But not really for him. For a version of him that never existed, maybe. For the relationship we could have had if he’d been someone different. That doesn’t make sense, I know.”

“It makes perfect sense,” Bruno says.

“Yeah, well... Is that soup ready?”

“It needs to simmer for half an hour.”

“Then we have time for a walk around the lake?” Matt asks, nodding towards the door.

Bruno stands. “Sure,” he says.

Matt pulls on Bruno’s thick aran jumper. He loves to wear his boyfriend’s clothes (even though they’re all too big). Wearing Bruno’s jumper feels like being wrapped in Bruno’s arms.

The two men leave the doors to the cabin unlocked (there’s no one around for miles) and head across the garden and then on into the pine forest that surrounds them. This walk is a daily ritual and their footsteps have worn a track in the feeble undergrowth.

But today, a trunk has fallen across their usual path. Bruno is able to step over it but Matt, being short, has to take Bruno’s hand and climb.

“What days did you say you’re doing at the restaurant this week?” Bruno asks as the first glimpse of the lake comes into view through the trees.

“Just Wednesday,” Matt says. “Plus the weekend.”

“The whole weekend?”

“Yep. That’s when the plates get dirty.”

“Damn. I wanted to go over the border to San Remo or Bordighera,” Bruno says. “Just for a day trip. Get some real Italian pizza and some cheap booze, you know?”

“We can go during the week,” Matt offers.

“You know I work weekdays.”

“I know. But you could make an exception. You could work through the weekend instead.”

Bruno nods. “OK,” he says. “I’ll do that. Do you think it’ll last all summer? At the restaurant, I mean.”

“I should think so. The season lasts till September. And they like me. I’m a very good washer-upper apparently.”

“And
after
September?”

Matt shrugs. “Maybe the ski resorts again? If we need the money.”

“I think
I
need to get a proper job,” Bruno says.

High above them, a large bird, perhaps a vulture, perhaps even an eagle, screeches and flies away. “I’m twenty-nine,” Bruno continues. “And I’ve never had a job.”

“It’s over-rated,” Matt tells him. “Anyway, you
do
have a job. You earn almost as much as I do.”

“Only because Mom pretends to sell all my work.”

“She doesn’t
pretend
,” Matt says. “You’re just being paranoid.”

“Huh. You know, she tried to give me two hundred euros today?”

“Yeah?” Matt replies, feeling suddenly guilty. Because Bruno’s father made
him
take two hundred euros, too. “Bruno won’t take it,” he had said, “So I want you to. That way his pride doesn’t get hurt
and
he gets to eat.”

Bruno’s parents’ generosity always feels so alien to Matt that he’s at a loss to know how to respond. So he alternates between awkwardly refusing and awkwardly accepting their help. Today it seems that he was accepting even as Bruno was refusing. He wonders if he should tell him. “I think it’s sweet,” Matt says, testing the subject. “The way they look after you is really touching. They really care about you.”

They reach the lake and begin to walk towards the dam along the scrubby beach. “Water’s low,” Matt comments.

“We need rain,” Bruno says. “And I know it’s
sweet,
but I’m twenty-nine.”

“You keep saying that like it’s old,” Matt says. “Are you
trying
to make me feel bad?”

“I just mean that I need to stand on my own two feet. It’s important at a certain age to say, ‘Yes, I’m your child, but I’m an adult now.’ You know what I mean?”

Matt wrinkles his nose. Because though in a way he understands exactly what Bruno means, in another, having stood on his own two feet since he was sixteen, he also doesn’t. And Bruno’s life is so tied up with his parents’ lives, Matt can’t see how you could even begin to separate them out. They do, after all, sell his work. And the boys are living in Bruno’s parents’ summerhouse rent-free. They’re driving Connie’s car, too. Matt struggles to imagine what standing on his own two feet might imply for Bruno, or indeed for both of them.

“Do you miss Canada?” Matt asks.

“Why do you ask?”

“I’m not sure,” Matt says. “I suppose I’m wondering if standing on your own two feet implies your going back there.”

“No,” Bruno says. “It doesn’t.”

“But do you miss it at all?”

“I miss poutine,” Bruno says, laughing.

“What’s poutine?”

“It’s like cheese and french fries and gravy all mixed up. It’s dee-lish.”

“Sounds good.”

“And Coffee Crisps.”

“Which are sweets presumably?”

“Candy bars. Yes.”

“But that’s it?”

“Uh huh. I miss the people too, sometimes. Canadians are very relaxed.”

“That’s what everyone says. Your folks certainly are.”

“It’s true,” Bruno tells him. “You Europeans are all so
intense
.”

“People,” Matt says, pointing along a footpath to their right where a couple are coming towards them. “Oh my God!” Matt exclaims, starting to stride towards them, or, more specifically, towards their brown Cocker Spaniel.

Once the dog has licked every inch of Matt’s face (unhygienic, but, Bruno knows, inevitable) and the couple have dragged their reluctant dog away, the men continue towards the dam.

“That’s the kind of dog I wanted when I was a kid,” Matt explains, glancing regretfully back. “There was a pet shop below the Bullring and I used to cycle there after school to muck around with the puppies. I used to go almost every night.”

“You have bull-rings in England?” Bruno asks in dismay. “I thought that was, like, a Spanish thing.”

Matt laughs and links his arm through his boyfriend’s. “It’s just a shopping centre,” he explains. “Or a
mall
as you’d say.”