The Other Son (23 page)

“So you
don’t
have them?”

“No,” Matt confirms. “No bullrings in England, thank God. Though
the
Bullring’s not much better. It’s just a different kind of carnage.”

“Is that your favourite kind of dog?” Bruno asks, mentally trying out the idea of dog-as-birthday-gift and mentally rejecting it even before Matt can reply.

“You know it is,” Matt says.

“But I meant out of all the other brands of dogs that exist out there.”

“I think they’re referred to as
breeds
,” Matt says, laughing.

“OK,
breeds
then,” Bruno repeats in a silly voice.

“And yeah. I think so. I really love those Tibetan Mastiffs too. But they’re crazy big. Like, seventy kilos or something. So...”

“Seventy?!”

“Yeah. But they look like big teddy bears. They’re amazing.”

“But other than that, you like those Spaniels, eh?” Bruno asks, nodding vaguely in the direction of the couple with the dog.

“Yeah. Especially the Roans. They’re really mellow. They’re the black and white ones like we saw the other day. Anyway, why all the questions? Are you going to buy me one?”

“Sure,” Bruno says. “I’m gonna buy you a dog so we can never go anywhere ever again.”

“Oh well,” Matt says, feigning disappointment. “I guess I’ll just have to make do with my existing pet. I call him Bruno.”

Bruno laughs and jabs Matt in the ribs.

They reach the steps up to the top of the dam and Bruno pauses, one hand on the railings. “Across or back?” he asks.

“Back, I think. I’m starving.”

Bruno pulls his phone from his pocket to check the time. “It’s not even seven.”

“My stomach doesn’t seem to know that. I’m still starving.”

“So your folks wouldn’t let you have a dog?” Bruno asks, as they start to walk back.

Matt snorts. “It was worse than that,” he says. “They promised me one and then changed their minds.”

“That’s shitty.”

“Oh yes,” Matt agrees. “Shitty, it was.”

The dog was to have been Matt’s reward if he passed his Eleven-Plus exam. Matt had never wanted anything more and he had never worked for anything harder.

When he wasn’t at school, or at home – revising his vocabulary lists or his hated times tables – he was at Heavy Petting beneath the Bullring, leaning against the window, and, when invited in by Janine the owner, caressing the constant stream of puppies which passed through her shop.

Matt had isolated himself from the few friends he had in order to study for the exam. The Eleven-Plus had been phased out in the Midlands by then, but Matt (or rather Ken) had “elected” to take it anyway. The hope was that by so doing he would be able to go to the local King Edward grammar school rather than the Bournville Comprehensive where Tim went. Matt would, for the first time ever, be one-up on his brother. Or so the theory went.

When the day came, he passed the exam with flying colours. His grade had been one-hundred and fifty-two which everyone said was “exceptional.” It was certainly beyond Ken’s expectations. And it definitely put competitive Tim’s nose out of joint.

But on the evening before Matt’s interview at King Edward’s, Ken had come home drunk and in yet another drama-filled evening, he had wiped out any hope of a dog. He had changed his mind, he said, matter-of-factly.

Matt failed to turn up at King Edward’s for the interview the next morning. He was peering into the window of Heavy Petting with tears in his eyes instead. And a week later, when the interview was rescheduled, he had hid in the park. If he wasn’t getting his dog then he wasn’t going to King Edward’s, that was for sure.
Cutting off his nose to spite his face
, Alice had called it. And perhaps it had been.

For a while he kept returning to look at the dogs. Sometimes it made him cry, and sometimes Janine invited him in to help her clean out the cages and he got to cuddle the puppies too. But ultimately, that only made him feel worse. He wasn’t a child who had a lot of friends at school, and Tim, who was older, was less and less interested in playing with him, or even being seen with him. The dog was to have been his new best friend, his confidant. Without it, he felt lost.

He bought a dog lead, too, he remembers now – a pathetic gesture of defiance, a child’s declaration that one day he
would
have his dog. He had even put the collar on Tim’s old teddy bear, Barney, and dragged it around the room. He had made Barney’s fur wet with tears. Yes, the dog incident had been a huge childhood trauma for him. Perhaps unreasonably huge.

Many years later he discovered in therapy that it had also been a turning point in his life, a crucial event in the construction of his “self” as the shrink had put it.

Because from that moment on, Matt made sure that he
never
met Alice or Ken’s expectations of him again. Those expectations were, he had learnt, movable goalposts. Nothing would ever be enough.

Even Tim – who, with his suits and his cars must be a member of the One Percent that everyone loves to hate these days – never quite seems to have succeeded enough for Alice and Ken. And that
really
proves the hopelessness of the endeavour.

“You’re so lucky to have your parents,” Matt says, linking his arm through Bruno’s.

“Hey, Mom never let me have a dog either,” Bruno says. “The closest I ever got was a guinea pig.”

“OK. But they never
promised
you a dog either, did they?”

“No,” Bruno admits. “No, I guess they didn’t. Like I say. That was a shitty thing to do.”

“So what about if your parents go back?” Matt asks. His mind has jumped back to a previous conversation.

“I’m sorry?”

“If your folks moved home. Would you still stay here then?”

Bruno shakes his head. “They aren’t going home. This was always the plan. As long as I can remember they’ve been saying they’d retire to France and open a little gallery.”

“Running a gallery isn’t really
retirement
,” Matt comments, pausing to hunt for flat stones he can skim on the surface of the lake.

“Well, Mom was a counsellor,” Bruno says. “She spent her life counselling grieving kids. Kids who’d lost their parents. Kids who’d lost brothers and sisters. Kids, sometimes, who’d lost everyone. That was her specialty. So I guess that compared to
that
, running a gallery probably
does
feel like retirement.”

“Yes. I suppose that must have been pretty full-on,” Matt says, spinning a stone and watching it hop magnificently across the surface of the water.

“Some days we couldn’t talk to her when she got home,” Bruno says. “She was never mean or anything, but some days she didn’t have the energy left to talk back.”

“I can imagine.”

“She’s much happier nowadays. Much more relaxed.”

“So that’s it? They’re where they want to be.”

“I guess,” Bruno says. “And you? Are you where you want to be?”

Matt launches another stone, this one less successful than the last, and then straightens to look at his boyfriend. He smiles. “You know I am,” he says.

“So I won’t have to follow you back to rainy England?”

“Nope,” Matt says. “Nope, I don’t think that’s going to be necessary.”

Bruno’s features relax, so Matt is glad that he said it, even if he’s unsure if it’s true.

It’s not that he ‘misses’ rainy England, that much is certain.

His boyfriend is perfect. He’s beautiful and calm and sexy and clever; he’s young yet mature, he’s tall and bearded. He’s everything that Matt ever hoped for.

His adopted family are amazing, too. It’s no exaggeration to say that Matt feels more relaxed, more welcome, more
loved
in fact, than he ever felt back home.

His life, here, is lovely. The house is cute – like living in some children’s picture-book – and even his job, washing up in a hotel restaurant, he enjoys. Katya, who he works with, is cheeky and funny. Stephane, his boss, is polite and understanding. So, yes, everything here is as perfect as it can be.

And yet, and yet... it feels like something is missing. It feels like something is still gnawing away at his subconscious, and this on most of the days, and most of the time.

Sometimes he thinks it’s his country calling to him. Sometimes he puts it down to a simple lack of Marmite, or Doctor Who, or stumbling upon Graham Norton on the telly doing the Eurovision. At other times he suspects it’s his family, who, for all their failures, are just too far away for comfort. Certainly he still thinks about them a lot. Despite the years of psychoanalysis, he still dreams about his childhood, he still wakes up scared and sweating.

Then again, it could be his lack of material success that’s tripping him up. He fights this one on a daily basis, seeing it as a great capitalist myth. Buy this and look better, the adverts say. Buy this and feel like you’ve succeeded.

Most of the time, Matt feels he’s moved beyond the advertiser’s reach, believes that he really has risen above the poor manipulated masses. But then something on the car will break and Bruno will have to ask Joseph to pay for it to be fixed and he’ll feel insufficient all the same. Something in the house will get broken and he won’t mention it because he’s not able to afford to replace it, and he finds himself feeling like a scared child all over again. He thinks, sometimes, of Tim, swimming in wealth,
drowning
in wealth, and he imagines how Alice would see his own life in comparison. Yes, he wishes, still, that he could make his parents proud.

Perhaps that
is
the one, perhaps that’s what’s still causing the gnawing feeling. Maybe even now, even at forty-two, that’s what’s eating away at him: the lack of parental recognition, the destabilising knowledge that his mother, his father, his brother, and along with them much of modern society, would still look at his life and see nothing but failure.

How amazing to still be waiting for a pat on the back at forty-two. Maybe that’s something that you just never lose, because recognition is the one thing that you never get. Or, at least, not in a form you can recognise, not in the way you need.

When they open the door to the cabin a cloud of smoke bellows out. “Looks like it’s gonna be packet soup tonight,” Bruno comments as he calmly crosses to remove the burning pan from the stove.

Matt grabs an LP from the rack to use as a fan – it’s Kurt Vile’s
Smoke Ring for My Halo
which strikes Matt as amusingly appropriate. He stands in the doorway and fans the smoke from the kitchen and watches as it mixes with the rapidly chilling evening air.

Secretly he’s glad that Bruno has burnt the soup. Though Bruno is incredibly proud of his home-grown, home-cooked leek soup, it’s not really that good, and Matt prefers, by far, the packet kind. Whatever chemicals they put in it simply taste better than Bruno’s snow-damaged, muddy leeks.

MAY

Matt carries the tray downstairs to the kitchen. It’s his birthday today and Bruno, who has already brought him a cooked breakfast in bed (eggs, tomatoes, mushrooms and some sumptuously delicious spinach), is preparing dishes for lunch.

“Thanks,” Matt says, sliding the tray onto the drainer. “That was gorgeous.” He pecks Bruno on the cheek and then reaches out to dip his finger into one of the bowls. “Home made hummus!” he says. “Yum.”

Bruno slaps his hand away in exactly the same way Connie always slapped his own little fingers away from the cake mix. “Not until lunchtime!” he says. “Now go and make yourself look handsome while I get this all ready.”

“You’re a bit full-on, aren’t you?” Matt says mockingly, glancing at the kitchen clock. “What time are they coming?”

“Not till twelve-thirty or one. But there’s lots to do, so
bzzzz!”
He makes a shooing gesture at Matt, who laughs bemusedly and wanders off to the bathroom.

Once he has dressed in his new birthday shirt and the Levis Joseph gave him, he steps out into the garden. The table is yellow with pine-pollen, so he returns for a sponge and begins wiping down the table and chairs.

It’s a stunning May morning and the air is still and fragrant. A bird, unseen, is tweeting crazily from one of the taller pine trees. It sounds uncannily like a nineteen-eighties Trimphone.

“Perfect day for it, eh?” Bruno says from the doorway. Matt turns to see him proffering a red, checkered tablecloth.

“Tablecloth? Really?” Matt says. “My we’re feeling fancy this morning.”

“It’s not every day your partner hits forty-three,” Bruno says.

“This is true,” Matt replies, pushing out his bottom lip.

“What?”

“I can’t help but think about the big one,” Matt says. “Fifty. Imagine that.”

“And after that comes sixty and seventy and eighty and ninety and then we get buried,” Bruno says.

“Don’t be like that, I was only thinking about–”

“Yeah, but there’s no point, is there?” Bruno interrupts. He waves the folded tablecloth at Matt again, and once he has taken it, returns inside the house.

Bruno has a particular aversion to any discussion about age. Perhaps, Matt thinks, it’s because his age difference with Matt is a sorer subject than he likes to admit.

But he’s right. The philosophers are right, too. Neither the future nor the past exist. There is only now. But
forty-three...
All the same!

At five past twelve, Joseph’s car appears at the bottom of the sloping, twisting, dusty driveway. Though his car is a four-wheel drive and though even the C1 manages the track with ease, Joseph always parks at the bottom of the slope next to Bruno’s little motorbike. “I just prefer it that way,” he says whenever anyone challenges him about it.

“Do you want me to come down?” Matt calls out.

“No, we’ve got it, honey,” Connie calls back. She’s carrying a large cake box and Joseph a woven picnic basket.

Once the contents of the basket – pots of tapenade and olives and pats of smelly goat’s cheese – have been added to Bruno’s mezze type spread, and once the cake box (a secret! No peeping!) has been placed in the refrigerator along with the Champagne, Bruno asks, “So what about the other thing?”

“What other thing?” Connie asks. “Oh,
that!”

Matt glances one by one at the faces around him. Everyone is looking strangely amused.

“I might need Matt to help me with that,” Connie says. “It’s a bit unmanageable for one person.”

Matt frowns in puzzlement. Everyone still looks amused, but somehow also
expectant.
They look like the
thing
in the car might not be
any
old thing.

Despite years of training to keep his expectations low, Matt starts to feel excited as he accompanies Connie back down the track. She is making smalltalk about their drive out from Aix this morning, but there’s something in her tone, some artificiality, something mocking almost, that reveals it for what it is: a carefully designed distraction from whatever’s in the car.

The fact that Bruno and Joseph also follow on, either to help carry the thing or to witness Matt’s reaction to it, makes him feel even more excited, and by the time they reach the car his heart is racing a little. He feels like a child at Christmas.

“Here,” Connie says, reaching for the handle to the Dacia’s hatchback. “I threw a blanket over it to keep the sun off.”

As the hatchback opens, Matt glances back at Bruno. He’s chewing his top lip, nervously. And are those tears in his eyes?

And then there’s a sound: a whimper, a scuffle. Matt’s head snaps back towards the open boot of the car. A lump forms in his throat. He stops breathing.

“We didn’t have time to wrap it,” Connie is saying, still in her false, disinterested voice. “But you can remove the blanket yourself. That’s almost the same thing, really, isn’t it?”

Matt reaches out, and there it is again. That noise. A strangled little squeak. He tremblingly grasps the blanket. He tugs it away.

Through vision instantly blurred by tears, he peers in at the contents. He opens his mouth to speak, but only manages to gasp.

The puppy – a tiny Roan Cocker Spaniel – rolls onto his back and writhes around and continues to whimper. He looks the same,
exactly
the same, as the one Matt chose all those years ago in the window of Heavy Petting. Matt pushes his fingers through the bars of the cage and as the puppy starts to lick them he begins unexpectedly to weep.

Bruno places one hand on Matt’s shoulder, but this only makes things worse. His sobs intensify to the point where he is forced to crouch down onto the dusty earth.

“Don’t you like him, honey?” Connie asks, her voice, too, trembling with emotion.

Matt links his arms around his knees and begins to rock a little. “I’m sorry,” he mumbles, still peering through tears into the rear of the car. “It’s not that... I’m not, you know... He’s beautiful. I just... I can’t... breathe.”

Connie crouches down and wraps her arms around Matt. “Honey,” she says, simply. Bruno joins her, and then Joseph too, until all three of them are crouched down in the dusty earth, their arms surrounding shuddering, gasping Matt.

Eventually, Matt’s tears subside, only to start up again when Bruno removes the puppy from the cage and places it in his arms.

“This is for you, too,” Joseph says, reaching into the car for a carrier bag full of dog food and dog bowls and toys.

“I think he wants to walk,” Bruno says as they start back up the track towards the house. The puppy is writhing madly in Matt’s arms.

“I wouldn’t put him down just yet,” Connie says. “I’d wait till you have a lead on him.”

“He needs to learn to be cuddled,” Matt says. “He’s going to have lots of cuddles, aren’t you?”

“He is the kind you wanted, isn’t he?” Joseph asks. “Because they did say that if he’s the wrong kind...”

“He’s perfect,” Matt interrupts. He can’t even bear for Joseph to finish that phrase. His voice breaking again, he continues, “I can’t even begin to tell you how perfect he is. And I can’t think how to thank you both, either.”

“It’s Bruno’s gift, really,” Connie explains. “Bruno chose him for you.”

“When did you do that?” Matt asks.

“Last Friday.”

“When you had the car trouble?”

“When I had the car trouble.”

“So there was no car trouble?”

“None,” Bruno laughs.

“
Our
gift to you,” Connie says, “is more practical.”

“Practical?”

“Yes. It’s not the dog. It’s our commitment to the dog.”

“I’m not sure I understand,” Matt says. In truth he doesn’t much care about anything now. He just wants to bury his face in the puppy’s fur and forget everything else.

“If you ever want to go away, we’ll look after him,” Connie explains.

“I always wanted a dog,” Joseph says.

Bruno seems shocked. “Really? I never knew that.”

“He did,” Connie admits. “But you were bad enough on your own. Imagine if you’d had an ally.”

“But then why couldn’t we have one?” Bruno whines.

“We used to travel a lot,” Connie says, choosing to explain to Matt rather than her son. “We went to India and Asia and all over Europe. We couldn’t have done any of that if we’d had a dog.”

“And then we wanted to move here,” Joseph adds. “To France. And that would have been complicated too.”

“Anyway, now we’re settled,” Connie says. “We’re not going anywhere. And we love this little chap.” She reaches over and tickles the puppy’s head. “So any time you two want to go anywhere, you just leave him with us. That’s our gift. A puppy. And no ties.”

When they reach the house, everyone sits down except for Matt. The puppy, after a two hour drive, is frantic, so Matt puts the lead on him and gives him a tour of the garden. He pees against every tree and every bush.

“Why did Matt get so upset?” Connie asks, while Matt is away.

Bruno shrugs. “I think he wanted him a lot. I think he just wanted him a real
crazy
lot.”

“I hope he’ll be OK. I hope we haven’t opened some old wound.”

Bruno shakes his head. “Look at his face,” he says, nodding at Matt who is walking back up the garden with a face-splitting smile.

“Have you thought of a name?” Connie asks, when Matt reaches them.

“Raspberry,” Matt says instantly. “Or maybe... What’s Raspberry in French?”

“Framboise,” Connie says. “But it sounds like a girl’s name.”

“Framboise. I like it,” Bruno comments. “But why?”

“Because...” Matt starts. But he can sense fresh tears rising up, so he changes his mind. “You know, I’ll tell you another time if that’s OK? It’s a long story.”

“His official name has to begin with an L,” Joseph says. “It’s a weird French thing because he’s a pure breed. The letter this year, is L.”

“But they said if you’re not putting him in for competitions, you can call him anything you want,” Bruno explains.

Matt pulls a face. “No,” he says. “No competitions. And it’s Framboise. Definitely Framboise.”

“OK,” Bruno agrees with a shrug. “It’s your dog. Framboise it is, then.”

Once the birthday cake has been eaten (a triple chocolate extravaganza), and Champagne has been drunk; once Connie and Joseph have moved to hammocks at the bottom of the garden to “sleep it all off”, Matt tells Bruno a little more of the story of the puppy he never had. Framboise is sleeping beside him on a deckchair and Matt gently caresses one ear as he speaks.

When he finishes the story, Bruno shakes his head dolefully. “That’s a terrible story, babe,” he says. “That’s horrific.”

“I know. When I was in therapy, it came up again and again,” Matt says.

“I’m not surprised. I mean, parents are like gods at that age. And if even
they
don’t keep their promises...”

“I know.”

“And your Mom didn’t stand up for you?” Bruno asks.

Matt shrugs. “She tried. But no one could ever stand up to Ken.”

“I’m not sure I want to meet him after all.”

“Well, no,” Matt agrees. “I don’t think you do.”

It’s a strange experience for Matt telling these stories. Because for Matt, growing up in the midst of Ken’s madness, it had all seemed normal. It wasn’t until he saw a therapist in his twenties (for an “inexplicable” bout of depression) that he started to understand that most childhoods were not like this.

But even now that he has assimilated this fact, he’s still always taken by surprise when he sees the shocked reactions on other people’s faces.

Bruno, right now, is staring at him wide-eyed. And yet Matt hasn’t even told him the full story. He still hasn’t told Bruno (or anyone except his shrink, in fact) what happened
following
Ken’s change of heart about the dog.

For though he sometimes needs to explain just enough of his past for people to understand his own, sometimes bizarre, reactions, he draws a line at making people hate his father unconditionally. Whatever understanding he might require to get by, he still doesn’t want anyone seeing his mother as the helpless, hopeless victim that she was. And so, with the exception of when he was seated opposite the therapist, he has always edited certain details out.

Like the fact that Alice
had
tried to stand up to Ken that night. Like the fact that she was furious at Ken for breaking his promise to their child. Like the fact that she had insisted, over and over that Matt
must
have his dog.

The more Alice had gone on about it the angrier Ken had become, and the angrier he became the more bottles of beer he consumed and eventually, once Matt and Tim were in bed, he had started hitting her. He had wanted her to “shut up,” that was “all.” And she wouldn’t shut up. She would not stop.

Matt had, as ever, hidden under the covers. He had plugged his ears with his fingers, but tonight they couldn’t block out Alice’s shrieks, and they couldn’t block out the resonance of the body blows which seemed to carry through the walls and floor.

Crying in his bed, Matt had tried to beam a message to Alice, Star-Trek style.
THE DOG DOESN’T MATTER
, he told her, over and over.
GIVE IT UP.

But Alice wasn’t receiving him. On and on she went about “that poor boy,” and, “all the work he’s put in,” and what a bastard Ken was. Matt had never heard her rage so violently against what was, after all, Ken’s almost constant injustice.

About eleven p.m, Tim had prodded Matt through the covers, and he had winced first, then dared to peep out. Through tears, he had seen Tim in the moonlight, fully dressed and holding a cricket bat. “We have to stop him,” he had said, above the background noise of screams and thumps. “He’s gonna kill her this time.”

Matt doubted the ability of an eleven-year-old and a thirteen-year-old, or indeed, the ability of anyone, anywhere, of any age, to stop the monster that was Ken on a bender. But he had nodded and wiped his face on the blanket and summoned all of his bravery and got up.

The boys had crept down the staircase as far as the final landing from whence they could see the scene through the open lounge door: Alice, bloody-nosed, still swearing, still fighting, and Ken shouting, then slapping, then shouting some more.