by Tom Butler
James made it easy for her.
‘I already know,’ he said. ‘That’s why I missed my train. I needed to tell Noah.’
‘Oh, I see,’ she said. ‘How did he take it?’
‘Much as I expected. You know Noah. Never gives anything away.’
‘How was he? Is he eating enough?’ she fussed.
‘Stick thin as usual. But he won’t starve.’
‘And the concert?’
‘Pretty good. In fact, very good,’ It almost hurt him to admit it.
‘I keep phoning and texting him, but he never replies,’ she said with a pained expression.
‘Stop worrying, Noah’s fine. The band are going places, I reckon. He got lucky with that lot.’
The pained expression wasn’t going anywhere, and James knew what was to come.
‘Your sister will have to be told,’ she muttered, her eyes welling up.
James was ready. ‘I’ll do it. I don’t mind.’
Sylvia thought about this.
‘We could tell her together if you like, or you tell her, and I’ll just be there for her. What do you think?’
He wasn’t sure. Was it something he needed to do on his own? It was a lot to ask of a fifteen-year-old, but he knew he could cope. That’s all he had ever done since that fateful day. Nothing had changed.
But Sylvia might be hurt if he didn’t involve her. And Mary might have gone running to her anyway for comfort and a shoulder to cry on.
‘We do it together,’ he said with a compassionate smile. ‘And thank you for not telling her before I got home.’
She smiled back. ‘I was imagining I might have to break the news to both of you at the same time. But I’m glad you know though I doubt it will make things any easier for Mary. You are both such incredible kids. And I’ll always be here for you.’
Though boys of his age avoided hugs if they could, this was one time he didn’t mind one bit. They held each other and tried not to cry.
Through watery eyes he asked her, ‘When shall I tell her?’ and she smiled.
‘As soon as possible,’ she said.
It would, of course, rock Mary’s world, but she was fully aware of her father’s critical condition. A year ago, he had been diagnosed with a malignant brain tumour and considered it to be life’s retribution for what he had done. The tumour was operable, and there was every chance he would survive surgery and make a full recovery whether that was morally wrong or not, given the fact he gave Angelica no choice to live or die.
But there was never a chance he would go that way. Not even a suggestion he might toss a coin and see which way it landed. He was told he could live on for years with the tumour growing inside him or perhaps only months. It was not an exact science. He didn’t shun painkilling drugs to ease the headaches because he wanted to be able to think straight about what was about to happen to him. And he did give the children much thought and, in a perverse way, couldn’t wait to be reunited with his Angel once more.
Alone with his thoughts, he was dying a slow death, not sure when the headaches would suddenly stop for good. He was willing it to happen, and when it did, he was asleep or at least that’s what the text message had said.
James would tell that to Mary, and Sylvia would be there to hug them both and chase away their collective tears. It was what even the most makeshift of families did in times of adversity. They stuck together.
It was over an hour before Clare could be distracted away to allow James time with his sister. She was remarkably resilient and wasn’t the cry baby her brothers remembered when they thought back to pillow fights and arguments over the TV remote control. There was only a hint of a tear, and Sylvia soon stepped in to hold them both but only for a few seconds. It had been perfectly executed, and Clare was soon back on the scene to add her support to Mary, coaxing her outside to play on a garden swing.
Sylvia could see from his face that James wasn’t absolutely sure about Mary, and she reassured him.
‘She’s going to be fine. I’m so proud of you. That was not an easy thing to do.’
He shrugged, still unsure. ‘We’ll keep an eye on her, make certain she’s okay.’
‘Yes, we will. We all will,’ she agreed before changing the subject. ‘Get changed and give Phillip and Luke a hand. We need all the labourers we can get.’
He pulled a face at physical endeavour but did as he was asked. The sooner he finished, the sooner he could get back to his room and his new guitar and do his utmost to annoy the neighbours again.
Wes Crowley had promised to forfeit his Sunday lie in and run him through his paces, and James was anxious to speak to his wife Liz again about reclaiming his rights to Peaceful Man. On the train this morning, he had scribbled down the lyrics to another song and had decided to share these with Wes and hopefully gain a subjective opinion.
He had spent too much time fooling about with melodies and lyrics in the past, and that’s how Noah had taken advantage of him. Some would call it blatant ‘exploitation’, and all James wanted was what was rightfully his whether it caused bad feelings or not.
He had read with interest recently about the animosity between Liam and Noel Gallagher and the breakup of Oasis and thought there was a kind of poignant parallel to be drawn. The Swans were in no way famous yet though Noah had his first foot on the ladder, but did simply being brothers qualify them to empathize with those who had already achieved such notoriety? He didn’t know. In the great scheme of things, he was a naïve fifteen-year-old. But he was still focussed on what was needed to be done and the underlying consequences of his actions if he took it all the way without compromise.
If Liz Crowley had given him false hope, she perhaps wished she hadn’t. It was enough that she had been denied a lie in on a Sunday and was forced to listen to him extracting noises from his guitar without having him badger her about the same old thing relating to his exploitative brother.
‘Law suits are so expensive and something like that could cost you thousands,’ she informed him. ‘Then there’s no guarantee you would win.’
James looked a little forlorn but wasn’t giving up.
‘But you said I had good grounds to win back the song. And I do have a witness.’
‘You still need a lot of money to get a legal person to hopefully get back what you claim is yours.’
‘So what do you suggest I do? The song’s mine; he stole it.’
It was a hard question to answer.
‘Confront him again and make him see sense. That’s the only way unless you have a really rich uncle living in the attic.’
This wasn’t what he had wanted to hear. Before, she had made it sound so simple.
To add to what his wife was saying, Wes thought confrontation was the best way to go.
‘Just tell him straight that the song’s yours. He’s your brother. Try maybe compromising with him. You really don’t want to be going down the legal route. Quite apart from money you don’t have, it might take years to resolve.’
‘I could see if I could borrow the money,’ he said, not ready to give up.
Wes and Liz looked at each other, both a bit bewildered.
Wes shook his head at the idea. ‘I wouldn’t advise it. I thought you told us this witness was Noah’s best friend. Won’t he just side with your brother? He’s not what anyone would call a reliable witness. You could lose all the money and land yourself with court costs. It’s far too risky. I don’t know much about song royalties, but surely Noah wouldn’t deny you a share of them. That’s what I would call a reasonable compromise.’
‘But that wouldn’t be fair. He didn’t do a thing. The song was all mine.’
‘I believe you, James. But how do you prove it? Possession is nine tenths of the law, and the way I see it is Noah’s holding all the ace cards.’
James tried not to show he was sulking. How on earth did famous songwriters manage to protect their work and safeguard their share of the money coming in? And how foolish had he been t
o trust an older brother who was never going to let him have what was rightfully his back?
James’s face said it all. Why was there suddenly so much injustice in the world? And why weren’t people falling over themselves to help him? He was clearly short on options. Talking to Noah was all he had left and the thought of being rebuffed again filled him with gloom.
Putting aside his despondency, he suddenly reached inside a back pocket of his jeans to pull out a piece of paper. He unfolded it.
‘I did this on the train yesterday,’ he remarked, quickly changing the mood. ‘Thought we could put it to music. It doesn’t have a title yet.’
The Crowley’s looked at each other in amazement, and Wes took the paper, dropping his spectacles to the bridge of his nose to study it.
‘It’s supposed to be a rock ballad, but it might work better with a quicker tempo,’ James went on.
Wes glanced through it and never once looked disinterested.
He’d been in a member of a punk rock band in the eighties and nineties prior to getting regular work as a session musician. He had also dabbled in writing stuff himself, so he knew exactly what it meant to James.
Suddenly the guitar coaching ceased, and Wes was sitting at his Yamaha keyboard with James alongside, both of them competing with each other to pick out a melody. James’s father had spent time teaching him to play piano, and he had also excelled at getting notes out of a trombone, both of these coming in useful when school concerts came round.
Embarrassed as he was by his falsetto singing voice, he had mastered the art of keeping in tune, and whether Liz objected or not, he was now exercising his tonsils and not sounding so bad given the lyrics were somewhere between macabre and depressing.
If Peaceful Man was thought provoking and uplifting, the as yet untitled work, penned on a Great Western express train yesterday, was brutally harsh. It took Wes back to his punk days when bands dared to be groundbreakingly different, but that’s perhaps what had reeled him in. OK, so they were the unexpurgated jottings of a somebody experiencing bitterness in their life and maybe a tad semi-autobiographical. But happy people wrote sad songs and vice versa. There were no real constraints to creativity.
‘Heavy stuff,’ Wes commented, neither praising it nor condemning it. ‘Let’s have a play around with it.’
James changed several lyrics at a stroke to make them fit the melody Wes had tinkered with which made it even more up-tempo than James had initially envisaged. But it worked, and Wes was becoming quite animated.
Liz had long since left them to it to phone her mother, and a supposed two-hour guitar lesson stretched to a four-hour long song-writing marathon. At the end of it, a song called Black Orchid had emerged, safely stored on Wes’s computer and James made the man who had helped him and who was three times his age a solemn promise.
‘It’s as much yours as it is mine. We share it. OK?’
‘If you say so,’ Wes shrugged, pretending to spit into the palm of his hand and high fiving James instead of offering a handshake.
‘Crowley and Swan, composers,’ he smiled. ‘It has a ring to it.’
James gave him a puzzled, sideways glance.
‘Don’t you mean Swan and Crowley,’ he said cheekily.
Wes nodded. He was in no position to argue.
‘Whichever way you want it. The next great musical partnership. Suits me.’
Another year older and wiser, James thought. If only he had gone about things differently with his song thieving brother. Black Orchid might prove too sinister to be liked, but it was fresh, and there was plenty more to come. Wes was a man with contacts, he knew the boss of a Leicester recording studio and a D.J. on local radio and was generally tuned in to the locality’s music scene. Above all else, James liked him and felt he could be trusted. Trust was paramount. An absolute essential.
Most adolescent boys were obsessed with something. Computers, phones, social websites, football, girls, staying thin. Any of these and more. But right now, for James there was only one pre-occupation. Black Orchid was just the start. Despite of his age and with Wes Crowley’s help and encouragement, there was more to come, much more.
He showed more appetite for schoolwork, having promised Sylvia his truancy days were over and scribbled down song lyrics like they were going out of fashion. Anything that came into his head. Subconsciously, he knew he had to keep his mind on his father, and when on Thursday the official letter came, he still didn’t know what to do.
Modern funerals were celebrations of a life and not all about grieving, but what did you do when a parent died whilst serving time for the most inexplicable of crimes. He showed the letter to Sylvia and then sent a text to Noah. He could do no more than notify his brother and let his conscience decide for him whether to attend or not. As for himself, he felt somewhat empowered to go. If still unsure it was the right thing to do. There was no right or wrong anymore, the world was a cold place.
‘I don’t think you should go there alone if you did decide,’ Sylvia said, protectively. ‘I could ask Phillip to take you. I’m sure he won’t mind.’
James was shaking a little. He had every right to. He was damned if he did and damned if he didn’t. Sylvia turned the clock back to happier times. It was what she believed people did who were deep in dilemma over the loss of a family member who had fallen from grace.
‘At the end, your father wasn’t the person he was when you were born. The doting dad who watched over you and your brother and sister as you grew. Took you on holiday, to the park, stood over you when you played your first solo piece on the piano. Applauded you when you performed on stage. Remember those things. They are important.’
James tried to think back to all such things. It was hard.
‘So you’re saying I should go then and be there at the end?’ he asked her.
’I think you should weigh up everything before deciding. Give it some time.
Something so final merits time. You may live to regret a hasty decision.’
After thinking some more he asked her straight, ‘What would you do if it was you?’ and waited.
Wishing he hadn’t asked the question, she sidestepped an answer.
‘Like I said, it can’t be an instant decision. Take a day or so. Think about it. And you must talk to Noah and Mary. They have a decision to make too.’
He had almost forgotten Mary. How could he? She had every right to be there if she so wished. It didn’t matter what anyone else thought. She was a teenager herself and old enough to cope with emotional side of things, and slowly her mental scars were healing. She had coped well with news of her father dying on a bed in the isolation of a Kent hospice where he had been taken to die. She could surely make her own mind up about next week’s cremation. Or call upon those who cared for her if she needed guidance. It wasn’t simple, but equally it didn’t have to be so hard. Life was a series of decisions, and every one of them counted.
The following day, she was shown the letter, and she recognised its importance immediately. Even those who had done terrible things during the course of their lives had to be laid to rest in order to close an imaginary book and allow those affected to open the page to another.
‘We’ll go together,’ she told James without even guessing what was circulating around his head. ‘Noah should come too. We should all hold hands and pray. And we should all think nice thoughts too and try not to cry.’
James was speechless. He could never have felt more proud to have a sister like her. United in prayer conjured a wonderful picture in his head, but now he had to sell the idea to Noah who was not like them. Or perhaps he didn’t have to. Mary could do it, he thought. Putting it the way she had to him how could Noah refuse. Even without being asked, she said she would. Sylvia had already said she would liaise with the authorities to arrange everything for them. It would be a sad day, and it would also be the first time in a year that the three siblings would be together, uniting them to pray together for their father’s soul.
Amazingly, just when it seemed their joint efforts had failed, there was the briefest of text replies from Noah’s phone, and James got Sylvia to phone the authorities to arrange additional transport. The news made Mary very happy though she thought it inappropriate to smile and simply rejoiced in the powers of perseverance.
But would there be a second turn about on the cards, now Noah had had his heart strings pulled and succumbed to sibling pressure. James doubted it very much. Some things were just that much harder to go back on.
******
Chapter Eleven
Maidstone crematorium with its functional buildings looked a bleak and inhospitable place. Certainly, if you were still classed as a child not somewhere, you would want to dwell for very long. Though the threatening rain had so far held off, swirling black clouds were gathering at a pace and making the sunny periods forecast broadcast on the car radio minutes ago look idiotic. James and Mary had travelled together and had barely spoken on route from Leicester. They had been picked up at six, both nodding off at stages on the first half of the journey which had taken them to a service station near Beaconsfield. Neither ate much there and preferred instead to nibble on biscuits and cereal bars and drink apple juice after the car had resumed its long and necessary journey.
Their polite, smartly suited driver was named Oliver, and their personal chaperone was a woman who introduced herself initially as Mrs Herbert but who was now insisting on them addressing her as Audrey. She was neither young nor old in their eyes, displaying a suitably solemn but still reassuring face under a greying fringe. Her dull but wholly appropriate clothes matched the weather and did nothing to help diminish her rather rounded frame, and she most certainly hadn’t forgone a full English breakfast, including a second helping of toast, believing it to be a perk of the job.