Whiskey & Charlie

by Annabel Smith

  Whiskey

  A couple of days after the mediation with his mother, Thomas phoned Charlie and asked if they could meet again.

  “I didn’t want to say this before the issue of Whiskey’s life support had been resolved,” Thomas said carefully, “but I’ve thought a lot about your meeting with Victor, and although I think his approach was flawed, to say the least, I think one of his suggestions perhaps had some merit.”

  “I doubt that very much,” Charlie said.

  “Hear me out, Charlie,” Thomas persisted. “We’ve talked very little about the possibility of Whiskey dying, but we both know the statistics. Even if you choose to keep Whiskey on life support for the time being, there’s still a possibility that his condition may deteriorate. I think Victor’s recommendation that you start thinking about the funeral is a good one. It will be painful for you, but thinking about the funeral is a way of practicing acceptance, of allowing the possibility that this is something you may have to accept eventually. It’s a good place to begin.”

  “I’m not ready for that.”

  “It doesn’t have to be all at once. Is there one small thing you could consider, something you might like to say about Whiskey, for instance?”

  “I suppose I could give it a try,” Charlie said.

  x x x

  Charlie was fairly certain that if the worst did happen, neither Rosa nor his mother would be fit to speak at Whiskey’s funeral. Mike too was out of the running. Charlie knew what Mike would say if he asked, that he hadn’t actually met Whiskey, that he was completely unqualified to speak about him, that most of Whiskey’s friends did not even know who Mike was, and it was too complicated to explain. There was a reasonable chance Bill would not return from England, and Charlie knew that even if he did come, he could not be relied upon to make a speech. Therefore, it would fall to Charlie to speak about Whiskey on behalf of the family, to convey something meaningful about his life, to give those who came to acknowledge his life and death something to take away, something humorous, something poignant, something comforting. Here was Charlie’s punishment for failing to make things right with Whiskey: known to most of Whiskey’s friends and acquaintances as the brother Whiskey didn’t get along with, it was nevertheless he who was left with the painful, impossible task of summing up Whiskey’s life.

  Charlie did not feel up to it. The very first night he allowed himself to imagine the funeral he had a terrible nightmare. In the dream, the funeral was taking place in the church in the village in which they had grown up. The organist was ready, the choir standing behind Charlie in their blue robes. Whiskey was in an open casket, wearing a light brown suit with a blue shirt and a yellow silk tie embroidered with a map of South America. The church was full in a way Charlie had never seen it, every pew crammed with people. There were friends from grade school, still only eight or nine years old, high school friends and teachers, advertising colleagues. Some of the mourners were dressed for the funeral, the women in dark dresses and coats, the men in somber suits and ties. Many of their school friends were wearing their school uniforms—shorts and short-sleeved shirts—despite the cold in the church. One pew was filled with Whiskey’s model ex-girlfriends, dressed as if for the Spring Racing Carnival in frilly outfits and silly hats with feathers and flowers.

  From where he stood, Charlie could see everyone. He was standing, not at the lectern, where members of the congregation usually stood to give readings, but in the pulpit, where only the priest ever stood. Looking down at the sea of faces made him dizzy, so he focused on his notes, began to read the words he had written to honor Whiskey’s life.

  Almost as soon as he began to speak, he heard a murmuring in the church. The mourners began to shift uncomfortably on the hard, wooden seats, to lean toward the people sitting beside them and whisper under their breath. Charlie tried to ignore the muttering, but as he continued to read, it grew more insistent. Distracted, he lost his place in his notes, and in that pause, he distinctly heard a voice say, “He doesn’t even know Whiskey!” In the silence that followed this comment, someone else interjected, “They never got along.”

  “He’s been jealous of Whiskey all his life,” a third voice said. Then everyone started speaking at once, defending Whiskey, accusing Charlie, calling him a traitor, a fraud.

  Charlie woke up sweating and shaking.

  “What’s wrong?” Juliet asked, putting her hand on his arm, drawing him out of the church, back into their bedroom. “Was it a nightmare?” she asked, switching on the lamp.

  Charlie nodded.

  “What happened?”

  He closed his eyes, saw the congregation again before him. “I can’t remember,” he lied. “It’s gone already.”

  “That’s good,” she said, switching off the lamp, curling around him. “Just a bad dream,” she said, already nearly asleep again.

  Charlie wished it were true.

  x x x

  “I don’t know what to say about him,” Charlie confided to Marco when they met up at the pub that weekend. “How would you describe him, if you had to say something?”

  “I’m sure my perspective wouldn’t be of much interest to anyone. I don’t know a tenth of what you know about him.”

  “I need some help here,” Charlie said.

  “Well, most of what I know about Whiskey comes from you anyway,” Marco said. “Apart from when we were in high school, when I was a bit scared of him, if I’m honest. He was on to me, long before anyone else was—used to make snide comments about me being gay. I lived in terror of being exposed then, and I think he knew that, and it gave him a kind of power over me. For what it’s worth, my impression is that he was full of shit when he was younger, but he seemed to get over all that in the last few years, especially after he met Rosa. He seemed to be a lucky scoundrel though. It seemed like everything fell into his lap. Until this, of course.”

  Charlie thought about what Marco had said. “Do you really think he was lucky?”

  Marco shrugged. “Who knows? Probably not. I hardly knew him really. Why?”

  “I don’t know,” Charlie said. It was what he’d always told himself, that Whiskey had never had to try as hard. But since the accident, he’d started to wonder if it was just an excuse he’d made because Whiskey was more successful. Whiskey had gotten his first job as a copywriter when he was twenty. While Charlie was still messing around at college, repeating courses he could easily have passed the first time, Whiskey was already being headhunted by a better advertising agency.

  “I always told myself he was lucky,” Charlie said. “But maybe he was just more talented than I was.”

  “Maybe he just knew what he wanted.”

  “But he knew how to get it too. Perhaps that was part of his talent. It couldn’t have all been luck, could it?”

  “I’m not sure what you’re asking me, Charlie.”

  Charlie sighed. “I’m not sure myself. I’ve been so jealous of him.”

  “It’s been a long time since you’ve had reason to be jealous of Whiskey.”

  Charlie shrugged. “Some habits are hard to break.”

  It was only now that Whiskey was in a situation no one could envy, now that just by being able to breathe and eat and talk for himself, Charlie had everything Whiskey could ever really want, that Charlie could see things clearly.

  “I’ve been so wrong about him, Marco. I’ve been jealous of him for so long, I don’t have any idea who he really was.”

  “Don’t doubt yourself so much,” Marco said. “Go back to the beginning. You know who he was.”

  x x x

  Charlie thought no one would know the beginning as well as his mother. So he asked her, to try to help him remember.

  “It was a shock having twins,” she said, filling up the kettle. “One newborn baby is hard enough, but two!” She rolled her eyes. “Your dad was pretty much useless, as you�
�d expect, although in that day and age, he was no exception to the rule. Went and played rugby a couple of hours after you were born. The midwife was disgusted.”

  Charlie’s mother gave him his cup of tea, sat at the kitchen table opposite him with her own. Charlie couldn’t count the number of times they had sat like that, talking, but he didn’t know if he had ever heard this story before.

  “You didn’t look identical to begin with,” she said, pushing the biscuit tin across the table. “William was completely bald, and you had a great mop of hair like a toupee. Lots of people bought you matching outfits, but I never dressed you the same. I had this notion that I wanted you to form your own identities. Still, once you started to look the same, people thought it was a great novelty. I used to have this double stroller, and as soon as you were old enough to clutch things, one of you would always be gripping onto the other.” She smiled at the memory of this. Charlie wondered if he should be writing it down.

  “You used to turn your face away and close your eyes when strangers held you, whereas William would smile and gurgle on demand, even when he was only a few months old.”

  She started to cry as she recalled these things, but she didn’t stop talking. She pulled a tissue from the box on top of the sideboard, blew her nose, and kept going, wiping away the tears as she spoke.

  “You shared a room,” she said. “You had your own cribs, but when William got big enough, he used to climb out of his and get into yours. They were supposed to be clamberproof, but I’d come in most mornings and find him lying next to you. His name was the first word you said, before even Mum. You called him Wim.

  “When you were toddlers, you were inseparable. Even when you were surrounded by other kids, you’d always be playing together. If anyone picked on you, he used to give them a good thump. You made up all the games though. William always had to play what you wanted. You could outtalk him, and you’d never back down—you were stubborn like that.”

  Charlie was surprised by these stories. He couldn’t remember it for himself, of course, but he thought he remembered his mother telling it differently before, that in the stories he had heard previously, Whiskey had always been the boss.

  “He couldn’t wait to go to school, whereas I think you’d have been happy staying at home forever, playing with your LEGOs and your plastic soldiers,” Charlie’s mother went on. “On the first day, William ran off without even saying good-bye, and you wouldn’t get out of the car. Then when you got used to it, you loved it and he hated it. You used to come home and tell me what you’d learned, and William would tell me jokes he’d heard and stories from the playground. In first grade, he cracked his head open falling off the monkey bars. I nearly had a heart attack when the nurse rang me.”

  Elaine shook her head, pressed the tissue against her eyes. “After that, it seemed like every time he left the house he’d come back with something broken. You probably can’t remember,” she said to Charlie, “but I lost count of the times we had to rush him to the hospital.”

  “I remember,” Charlie said.

  “He turned my hair gray by the time I was thirty. He’d try anything, always take a dare, nothing scared him, and that terrified me. And then when he got bigger, he was always in trouble at school. I was forever walloping him or sending him to his room without any dinner.” She stopped speaking, lost in thought, seemed to have forgotten Charlie was there.

  “We thought he’d never amount to anything, your father and I. But he proved us all wrong, didn’t he? He’s had a successful career, found himself a lovely wife. He had to do his settling down in his own time, that was all. He’s been a good husband to Rosa, hasn’t broken a bone since that snowboarding accident, what was that, eight years ago?” She laughed mirthlessly, the thread of the story she’d been telling Charlie lost. “Eight years without breaking a bone—we should ring the Guinness Book of World Records!” She started to laugh again, and then Charlie saw she was crying, really crying this time.

  He stood up and went around the table to hug her, but she pushed him away.

  “You’ve got no idea what it’s like for me, Charlie,” she said, suddenly angry. “We were so hard on him. We didn’t believe in him. Can you imagine how that makes me feel?”

  “Come on, Mum,” Charlie said helplessly. “Whiskey knows you’re proud of him.”

  But she wasn’t listening.

  “Do you know the worst part, Charlie, the reason why I’ve been going to see Victor every week for eight bloody months? The worst part is that I used to wish he was like you. I used to wish that instead of a broken-boned daredevil I’d had another boy just like you. And when I sit with him now at the hospital, all I can think about is whether he knows that. Whether he knows that his own mother couldn’t just love him for who he was. I want to tell him I’m sorry, that I was wrong about him, that I wouldn’t change a hair on his head. But I can never tell him now. He’ll go to his grave thinking you were my favorite, and I can never forgive myself for that.”

  Charlie could not believe what he was hearing. All these years of thinking Whiskey had been his parents’ favorite; to find out now it had been the other way around all along, it changed everything. Charlie could hardly take it in.

  His mother had her face in her hands, shaking and crying. Charlie tried again to put his arms around her, and this time she let him, sobbed into him until his shirt was soaked through.

  Ever since the accident, Charlie had been so consumed by thinking about his own problems with Whiskey it had never crossed his mind that others too might have regrets, that his mother and father, even Rosa, might have spent the last eight months feeling as guilty as he did, continually rehashing the past, wishing they had done things differently. Hearing his mother express the same feelings that had tormented him, Charlie had a sudden flash of clarity about the pointlessness of it.

  “Don’t think about it like that. It doesn’t matter anymore, Mum,” he said. “We’ve all made mistakes. But there’s no point going over it all now. Whiskey wouldn’t want us to do that. He knows you love him. That’s all that matters.”

  And speaking the words, Charlie knew them to be true.

  X-ray

  Charlie was already awake when the phone rang. For days he’d been waking in the space between night and morning, in that haunted hour when it was no longer dark but not yet light, when time seemed to stand still. He’d been waking and lying and thinking about Whiskey’s funeral. At first, he had thought mostly about the logistics: where the service and the wake would be held, how many people might attend, what food and drinks should be served. It had taken him a few days to allow himself to think about the part of Whiskey’s funeral that scared him the most: his own speech. In particular, he had spent a lot of time wondering how to address the issue of his estrangement from Whiskey.

  Initially he had decided it was better not to mention it at all. Then he changed his mind. If he wanted his speech to do justice to Whiskey’s life—and he did—he had to start by acknowledging the mistakes he had made, the ways in which he had been wrong about his brother.

  Charlie had never had to make a speech before, not in any formal sense. He had never been a prize winner, or even a best man. But he did not need experience to know that this was the most difficult and important speech he would ever have to make. He would not insult Whiskey with some half-baked collection of clichés. For once in his life, Charlie would do his very best, for himself as well as for Whiskey.

  He had not written anything down. He knew that once he had found the right words, he would not forget them. So far, what he had was this:

  Right after Whiskey’s accident, I remember thinking that if he died, I would not know which songs to play for his funeral. But it turned out I did know. And though there are plenty of things about Whiskey I don’t know, that I wish I knew, that I’ll never now have the chance to find out, what I’ve learned in the months since Whiskey’s acciden
t is that I know a lot more about my brother than I thought I did.

  The phone rang as Charlie was thinking about his next line. Even as he lay planning the speech, he hoped he would never have to use it. The sound of the phone ringing stopped his heart. He didn’t know what time it was, but he knew it was early, that a phone call at that time could only be about Whiskey.

  “Charlie?” Juliet murmured.

  Charlie didn’t answer her, didn’t move.

  “Charlie?” she said again groggily, reaching to turn on the bedside lamp. “Do you want me to answer it?” she asked, sitting up.

  The phone stopped ringing. Then from another room, they heard his mobile begin to ring.

  “We better see who it is,” Juliet said. She disappeared, following the phone’s inane ringtone, came back with it still ringing.

  “It’s Rosa,” she said looking at the screen. “Do you want me to talk to her?”

  Charlie shook his head. Juliet sat down next to him on the bed. The call went to voice mail.

  Charlie closed his eyes. For a long time he had avoided thinking about this moment, when Rosa or his mother would call to say, “It’s over. We’ve lost him. He’s gone.” Lately, with a lot of help from Thomas, Charlie had been trying to prepare himself for this. But now that it was upon him, Charlie knew he wasn’t ready for it at all, that he wasn’t even close to being ready, that in fact, nothing could prepare him for his brother’s death. He felt terrified, more frightened than he had ever been. If he hadn’t been lying down, he was certain he would have passed out.

  “Did you hear me, Charlie?” he heard Juliet say. He opened his eyes and looked at her.

  “Rosa’s left a message,” she said gently. “Do you want me to listen to it?”

  Charlie nodded, the slightest of movements, as though stillness could prevent the inevitable. Juliet dialed his voice mail, frowning as she held the phone to her ear. Charlie knew she too was expecting the worst. He was afraid to look at her, afraid to look away.