by Minnie Darke
‘Hello, cat,’ Tom said. ‘I hope you know you’re only decor.’
Tom gave the cat a cursory pat on its head and passed through into the living room. Here there was art, and this was Henry’s doing. Tom’s stepfather was seriously into art, although he chose his pieces according to some kind of organising principle that Tom couldn’t understand. The walls were cluttered with specimens, but Tom couldn’t identify the connection between the abstract pieces with their inch-thick paint and the dainty pencil drawings of ugly children, or the huge silvery photographs of women, glamorous as Hollywood starlets, who were shown all in black and white except for one or two strange, watercolour details – like a salmon-coloured fish-fin for a hand, or a lemon yellow duck’s bill for lips. On the other hand, Henry’s music collection was easy to understand; on a previous visit, Tom had flicked through his CDs and taken almost no time to understand that the connecting factor was that all the music was popular and a little bit cheesy, fitting neatly within what Tom called ‘the Neil Diamond spectrum’.
It wasn’t until he reached the kitchen that Tom detected his mother’s influence. A floor-to-ceiling cork wall panel was covered with colour photographs – hundreds of different images from every era of her life, all jumbled together. There was a picture of herself as a baby right next to one of Tom as a toddler, a recent picture of her and her husband and her younger son at some kind of blue-sea-blue-sky resort next to an image of her teenage self dressed as a Halloween vampire. Best of all, to Tom, there were pictures of him and her sitting in the back of her Kombi van. Along with Cassie herself, that vehicle was the one constant of his childhood. They used to pack it up and take it with them whenever it was time to move cities, whenever his mother’s heart had been broken, or her latest job had reached its inevitable dead-end. Always there would be a new apartment, with leaks and draughts in new places, and eventually a new batch of hand-me-down furniture.
It wasn’t until Tom was grown up and gone that his mother met Henry and stepped into the pages of Vogue Living. Tom was already eighteen, but Cassie was only thirty-four when she had her second child, and after Felix was born, Tom found himself straying further from home and coming back less often.
The truth was that everything hurt him, even though he didn’t want it to. He wasn’t the materialistic sort, or at least he didn’t like to think he was, but it stung him: the way the birthday party invitations matched the serviettes at Felix’s third birthday, the goose-down parkas that kept Felix toasty through Canadian winters, Felix’s brand-name shoes, the fine gold chain around his perfect little neck, the cello lessons (Tom had taught himself guitar out of a library book), the cello itself (Tom had delivered catalogues for years to buy himself a crappy, second-hand steel-string), and maybe worse than any of that, the way his mother and Henry would sit together at Felix’s recitals, eyes shining with pride.
‘He’s a real talent, isn’t he?’ Henry would ask Tom, slapping him on the back with a vigour normally reserved for someone choking on a piece of unchewed steak.
Henry was a skinny guy with an oversized head and eyes that stuck out just a bit too much, and it wasn’t until he grew his beard and it came out thick and bright red that you could see where Felix’s colouring had come from. That was another galling thing about Felix. Somehow, in the split-millisecond of conception, the little brat had managed to sift out every one of Henry’s good features and every one of Cassie’s, and stitch them all together in such a way that the result was far more than the sum of its parts. Felix was the baby that stopped people in the streets, the kindergartener chosen to be photographed for the school brochure, the token boy on the birthday party invitation list of every girl in his primary school, the heartthrob of his high school.
The most annoying thing about Felix, though, wasn’t his designer clothes or his poncy cello music, or his thousand-watt smile, or how quickly and easily everyone loved him. It was the fact that Felix loved Tom, adored Tom, revered and idolised Tom with a sick devotion that made Tom feel like the most unworthy pile of shit ever to be produced in the entire history of faecal matter.
Tom thought kids were supposed to have some amazing sort of sixth sense that told them when somebody didn’t like them, but Felix – although he seemed to be smart as paint in every other department – somehow managed to miss the fact that Tom radiated irritation and hostility whenever Felix stood too close to him, breathing on him with his hot little breath, touching him and his stuff with his sticky hands.
For his younger brother’s whole life, Tom had hated – most of all – the ungenerous way that Felix made him feel, because he, Tom, was not an ungenerous person. He never passed a person living on the streets without giving something – a coin, a sandwich, the jacket off his back. Among his friends, he never shirked his round at the bar; on stage at a gig, he never hogged the limelight. Tom knew himself to be a person with a big heart, who gave. He gave things and he gave of himself, but when it came to his brother he somehow turned into a miser. Occasionally, when he was travelling he’d send Felix a postcard from some far-flung place, or he’d throw a CD in the mail. The truth was, though, that he didn’t really do it for Felix. He did it for Cassie, who wanted nothing more than for Tom to love Felix even half as much as Felix loved him.
Cassie.
She’d been so much younger than all the other mums. In Tom’s childhood, she’d never told him off for swearing, and she never brushed his hair in public. She didn’t make him tuck his shirt in, or take to his grubby chin with a licked hanky. She’d let him sleep in her bed if he was feeling sick, or just for any old reason really, and she’d let him watch cartoons on a Saturday morning for as long as he liked. There were a lot of nights when she served up a bowl of breakfast cereal for dinner.
If it was that version of Cassie he could visit, Tom thought, then he’d never breeze through Vancouver without stopping by. He’d love to see that Cassie again, to spend some time alone with her, way more than he wanted to see the Cassie whose key he could now hear turning in the front door lock. He could imagine the way she’d look, fifty-one years old and trim in her denim jeans, but with her hair made straight in some way that wasn’t quite natural, and coloured a deep burgundy to cover up the beginnings of her grey.
‘Hey, Cassie,’ he called out.
That was how he referred to her – Cassie – and he’d been doing it since he’d worked out, at the age of eighteen, that it irked her. It was a way of taking her job away from her, minimising her role. It was his way of saying, you’re not my mom any more. Why had he been so nasty?
‘Tom? That you, honey?’ she said, coming into the kitchen with a market basket full of ripe tomatoes and a huge bunch of white roses.
‘Prodigal son,’ he replied, aware of the slightly hunched figure he was cutting, there in front of the photo-board.
Cassie put the basket down and came towards him with her arms already outstretched. When his mother held him, held him tight the way she always did, he sensed the little shudder in her breathing that was not a million miles away from tears, and Tom felt the weird twin emotions that he always felt in these moments: the longing to sag into her and cry, and the need to pull away.
‘How are you, love? How long are you in town? Are you staying? Can I get you a coffee? Hey, I have banana bread. You want some? Are you tired? You look a little tired. Not that I mean you look bad. You don’t look bad, you look gorgeous. You’re a sight for sore eyes! Have you been travelling? Where have you come from? Oh, listen to me . . .’
‘Coffee would be awesome,’ Tom said, with a sideways smile.
‘Just coffee?’
‘Straight black.’
‘Nothing to eat? I can’t feed you anything?’
Tom shook his head. ‘Where is everyone today?’
‘Henry’s out sailing,’ Cassie said, in a bless-his-heart way. Tom knew his stepfather had recently gone thirds – with two other art-collecting medicos – in a racing yacht.
‘And how’s Felix?’
‘Felix is excellent,’ Cassie said, with a sigh and a roll of her eyes.
‘Oh?’
‘In love.’
‘I see,’ said Tom, who was not in love, and who – at the age of thirty-five – was already wondering if being in love was just some glorious trick of the hormones that happened to you when you were young and then, when nature was all done with your bloom, bang, you lost the hang of it altogether. ‘So, who’s the lucky girl?’
‘She’s English. He met her in Edinburgh.’
‘Edinburgh?’ Tom raised an eyebrow.
‘Yeah. At band camp.’
‘Many a cherry’s popped at band camp,’ Tom said, accepting the steaming cup of coffee his mother held out to him. ‘So I hear.’
There was a silence.
‘I know, love. I do know. I wish I’d been . . . when you were younger. I wish I’d been able to give you all the things I’ve been able to give Felix,’ she said, and her sincerity was a million times more effective at bringing out his guilt than defensiveness would be.
Tom knew he shouldn’t have said that. So I hear. Why was he still so nasty? If he had bad feelings about his little brother swilling around in his gut, that didn’t mean there was any excuse to let them bubble up through the cracks where Cassie could see them.
‘Hey,’ he said, ‘you were an awesome mom. Are, as well.
’ Cassie’s smile was tight.
‘So where is our young Romeo?’ Tom asked.
‘He’s down on Granville Island. Busking. It’s how he spends his entire weekend. Saving up for a plane fare to London, you see. Hey, we could go down there. You want to go check him out? He’s pretty amazing.’
Tom shrugged. Poncy cello music wasn’t really his thing, but the look of entreaty on his mother’s face was enough to turn his shrug into a reluctant nod.
When his coffee was finished and the smell of his mom’s banana bread – toasting – had got up his nose so that he’d accepted a piece after all, Tom and Cassie walked up the rise and down the other side to the waterfront in the crisp springtime sunshine. The only other passengers on the tiny little ferry were a pair of middle-aged tourists, earnest in their brand-new outdoorsy clothes and brand-new Canucks scarves, studying their unfolded maps like they were any minute going to be made to sit an exam on the topography of the Vancouver waterways. Tom and Cassie exchanged a mildly amused look that was all the conversation the two of them needed to have on the topic, and Tom remembered that this was how it was when he was with Cassie – they could say a lot to each other without so much as opening their mouths.
Tom knew that the ramshackle-ness of Granville Island was as carefully curated as the stalls inside its marketplace, but he loved it anyway. The place was a patchwork of corrugated iron buildings coloured deep red and turquoise, umber and silver grey. In the middle of everything there was a place for buskers, a semi-circle of pavement rimmed with rustic timber benches. And there sat Tom Wendale’s little brother, Felix Carter, with his electric cello between his lanky knees. Felix sat on a chunk of tree stump, the spike of his cello driven into a gap between the interlocking pavers, with a battery-powered amplifier at his feet. Cassie nodded in Felix’s direction, and the nod meant something like, there he is, right there, isn’t he great? And Tom nodded back that yes, there he was indeed.
But this wasn’t the Felix that Tom remembered. There wasn’t a single poncy thing about this tall, red-haired young man in his green combat boots, his ripped trousers and his slightly grotty parka. He didn’t look, any more, as if his mother dressed him. Or cut his hair. Or insisted that he shave that bit of russet-coloured facial hair that Tom could see drifting down around the sideburn region and creeping along his chin. His brother. His little brother. Well, holy shit. Felix was turning into a man.
The music wasn’t poncy either. The electric cello was strange – a lean, mean, black and skeletal version of its acoustic cousins. Something about its shape made Tom think of a stingray, and somewhere underneath the cello’s fretboard a tiny red light blinked like a heartbeat. Felix was playing a classical mash-up, while his amplifier thumped an accompanying beat that radiated outward like a thick, dark but friendly cloud, drawing in the passersby. There were couples and families, tourists and locals, their toes tapping, their hands reaching into their pockets. Felix’s cello case was, Tom saw, nicely sprinkled with paper notes and coins.
Tom felt his mother’s hand slip into his own. When he was little, she’d had this thing where she’d squeeze his hand twice in quick succession, and that was code for ‘I love you’. She did it now, and Tom returned the message.
Felix swayed as he played, side to side, his eyes closed as if nobody at all were watching him. After a while Tom heard a hint of something new creeping into the backbeat, a hint of Asian bells – gong, gong, gong – which gave the music a whole new texture. It was, he had to admit, a pretty cool touch. A guy with market bags full of groceries strolled up and threw a five-dollar bill into the cello case, and Tom watched the way Felix somehow knew it was the right moment to open his eyes and, not so much smile as glow, by way of thanks. When the mash-up came to an end, the gathered crowd – including Tom and Cassie – applauded.
‘He’s all right, isn’t he?’ Cassie said.
‘He’s all right,’ Tom agreed, still clapping.
‘Hey, I’ve got some stuff to do at home. You want to stay here? Come back with Felix when he’s done?’ Tom could sense his mother’s uncertainty. ‘You know you’re welcome to stay. The night, the week, as long as you like. You know that, right?’
Tom watched Felix fiddling with his phone and amplifier, getting ready to play a new song. Looking at that was easier than looking at his mother’s face. Shit, Tom thought. Were those tears in her eyes?
‘I know, Mom,’ he said. ‘I do know that.’
‘All right. See you when you get home?’
Home.
Felix kicked an effects pedal, launching into the air a rich, techno backing track. For a moment, the young cellist let that sound fill the circle around him, and then he began to play his instrument, plucking the notes of a bittersweet melody.
Then Felix touched the pedal again with his heavy boot and switched from pizzicato to bow. Now there was more reverb in the techno track and the volume was going higher.
As the beat built in speed and volume, Felix began to play faster and faster, as if he was scribbling sound on the air, like someone writing with a sparkler on the darkness, and when at last the song came to an end, Felix’s face creased with some kind of emotion that Tom didn’t fully understand. The last time Tom had seen Felix he’d been maybe fourteen, but that gangly boy was gone now, all grown up.
When Felix opened his eyes, he caught sight of Tom and put his cello down with the kind of haste that Tom wasn’t sure was good for an instrument so expensive. Leaving his cello and his case unattended, he headed straight for his brother, and Tom – who’d busked in cities all over the world – wanted to tick him off for being so careless, but there was a light in Felix’s eyes as he stepped easily over a timber bench that made Tom feel . . . what was that feeling . . . chosen?
Felix didn’t hug; instead, he grasped Tom by the whole forearm.
‘Hey, man. What’re you doing in town?’ he asked, delighted.
Tom shrugged. ‘Got a gig playing slide on a few tracks for some buddies. Nothing huge. Thought I’d swing by and say hi to you and Mom. And Henry.’
‘Hey, can you hang out? I can go pack up my stuff?’
The big brother sized up the little brother. Felix was tall. He’d pass for nineteen, surely.
‘Come on then. I’ll buy you a beer.’
Tom saw a tiny speed wobble in Felix’s new-found grown-up-ness, but he recovered with style and said, ‘Awesome.’
When they reached the island’s brewery, Felix – to be on the safe side – took a seat in a far corner of the taproom while Tom ordered from the bar. They raised glasses full to sloshing point.
/> ‘So, Mom tells me there’s a girl. An English girl.’
‘Part Spanish.’
‘Whoa! Fiery.’
Felix blushed. ‘Her name’s Beatrix. She lives in London.’
‘London’s a long way away, buddy.’
‘I’m saving for an airfare. Going over there again this summer.’
‘So, it’s serious then?’
‘I love her,’ Felix said.
The open-heartedness of him struck Tom as something dangerous and wild, like a creature he really ought to warn Felix about. You’ll get scratched, little bro. But all he said was, ‘Sweet.’
‘So, you got a girlfriend, or anything?’
‘Anything?’ Tom repeated. ‘What are you asking?’
‘It’s not good to assume,’ Felix said, a little too seriously.
‘Man, things have changed,’ Tom said.
‘So? Girlfriend?’
‘No, buddy. I reckon I might have grown out of love.’
‘I don’t believe that,’ Felix said, tapping a rhythm on his knee.
‘You don’t?’
‘Nope. I don’t believe anybody grows out of love. No matter how old they get.’
‘Hey,’ Tom said, ‘that last piece you played?’
‘You liked it?’
‘You wrote that?’
‘I wish, hey? It was a gift. From Beatrix.’
‘She wrote it?’
‘Nah. Her dad heard someone play it somewhere, apparently.’
‘Well, it was awesome.’
‘There you go then,’ Felix said, grinning. ‘You can’t have grown out of love.’
‘Why so?’
‘That piece? You know what we call that piece?’
‘All right . . . tell me.’
Felix grinned. ‘“Love Song”.’