The Other Son

by Alexander, Nick

  Alice nods. She runs her tongue across her front teeth. Hadn’t Matt said that there was only one bedroom here? “How lovely,” she says, after a pause. “So how about you show me around the house? I don’t think I’ve ever been in a log cabin before.”

  Bruno shows Alice around the house and it doesn’t take long for her to garner the only pieces of information that really interest her. Yes, there is only one bedroom. No, the couch does not convert into a bed. Yes, there are two toothbrushes in the bathroom. The day feels suddenly even stranger.

  “It’s lovely,” she says, once the short tour is over and they are back out in the sunshine.

  “There’s an outbuilding too,” Bruno says, “behind the plum trees. Come.”

  For a moment, as they cross the lawn together, the dog yapping at their heels, Alice breathes more easily. But the outbuilding is really just a shed — a tatty, ramshackle shed at that. It’s filled with pottery equipment and bags of clay. In the corner is an electric kiln.

  “This is where I work,” Bruno explains.

  Alice peers in and smiles weakly.

  “You can go in,” Bruno tells her.

  “Um, thanks,” Alice says, stepping tentatively inside. Once her eyes adjust to the gloom, she sees that the rear wall is covered in roughly-cut shelving containing roughly-glazed, roughly-shaped pots. It’s all very rough.

  “Those are mine,” Bruno says.

  “How nice,” Alice says, unconvincingly. Her mind is far more occupied with the sleeping arrangements than with finding the right thing to say about Bruno’s ugly vases. “Are you, um, having trouble with the varnish thing?”

  “I’m sorry?”

  “The, er, glaze? Is that what it’s called?”

  Bruno laughs. “Ah, yeah,” he says. “And, no. Not really... It’s called Raku. That’s what it looks like.”

  “It’s meant to look like that, then? It’s meant to look all cracked and burnt?” Alice asks, only vaguely aware that she’s being tactless, and still too distracted to compensate.

  “Yep,” Bruno says. “You pull it from the kiln and plunge it into sawdust to get it that way. Otherwise it would look like every other pot.”

  “I see,” Alice says, blandly. “How interesting.”

  “Here you are!” Matt exclaims from the doorway. “I thought you had both run away together.”

  “Nope,” Bruno says in an unusually sarcastic tone of voice. Matt glances at him questioningly, but his face remains expressionless.

  “Bruno’s been showing me his pots,” Alice says.

  “They’re gorgeous, aren’t they?”

  “They’re certainly very novel,” Alice replies – it’s the best she can offer. “I... I’m just going to nip to the loo if that’s all-right?” Feeling a little trembly, she squeezes past Matt and scurries off in the direction of the house.

  “Did I miss something?” Matt asks. The atmosphere in the shed feels strained.

  Bruno shrugs. “Not a big fan of Raku, apparently,” he says drily.

  “Mum’s not a fan of anything. I did warn you.”

  “You did tell her about us, didn’t you?” Bruno asks.

  “I’m sorry?”

  “You did tell your mother who I am?”

  Matt looks at him blankly.

  “Matt?”

  “I just introduced you,” Matt says. “I said ‘Mum, this is Bruno. Bruno, this is Mum.’ What do you want?”

  “You know perfectly well what I mean.”

  Matt continues to look blank, but it’s an unconvincing, bad-faith kind of blank that makes Bruno start to feel angry. “God, you didn’t, did you?” he says.

  “Didn’t what?”

  “Matt!” Bruno says. “You cannot be telling me this. You can not be telling me that you invited your Mom to come and stay in our house without telling her that I’m your boyfriend, surely?”

  Matt shrugs. “She’s old, Bruno,” he says. “And anyway, I don’t see a problem. Is there a problem?”

  “You don’t see a problem?”

  “No! If she wants to come and stay then she has to accept me for who I am. I don’t have to justify myself to my mother. Not at forty-two... Not at forty-three, I mean.”

  “Unbelievable,” Bruno says, shaking his head slowly.

  “What’s so unbelievable?” Matt asks, repeating the word in a mocking voice. “That I didn’t say, ‘Hi Mum, this is Bruno, we fuck?’ Is that what you wanted?”

  “Jesus,” Bruno mutters. “You asshole.”

  “Bruno,” Matt whines. He steps towards him and opens his arms, but Bruno sidesteps him. “No,” he says. “Just no, Matt.”

  “Babe,” Matt pleads. “Look. Your folks are all young and trendy, OK? And you can sit up till three a.m discussing your sexuality with them, and that’s grand. But Mum’s not like that. She’s from a whole different generation. And that’s not the kind of relationship we have.”

  “So... what?” Bruno asks. “She has to work it out for herself? Because you’re too damn scared to tell her you’re a fag?”

  “A fag?” Matt repeats disgustedly.

  “It’s a term people who don’t like gays use to describe gays,” Bruno says. “People like you.”

  “Now you’re being ridiculous.”

  “I'm being ridiculous?” Bruno splutters. “Jesus. No wonder she’s freaked.”

  “Plus, you know what?” Matt says. “I haven’t been thinking that much about telling her I’m a fag, recently, if that makes any sense to you. I’ve been worrying about getting her away from my violent father before he kills her.”

  Bruno nods. “Well, aren’t you just the greatest guy around, eh?”

  “Bruno,” Matt pleads. “Don’t be like this, babe.”

  “Babe?” Bruno says. “I thought I was just the guy you fuck.”

  “I didn’t say that.”

  “You did, actually.”

  “Then I didn’t mean that.”

  “OK. Then apologise. Because that is what you said.”

  “Then, I’m sorry,” Matt says. “I, I... wasn’t thinking clearly.”

  “Fine,” Bruno says, though he doesn’t look to Matt like he’s fine at all. “Now go tell your Mom.”

  Matt pulls a face. “Go tell her?” he repeats.

  “Yes. Go tell her.”

  “It’s like I said,” Matt says. “She’ll work it out for herself.”

  “Why?”

  “Why?”

  “Yes, why can’t you tell her?”

  “Because... Because...”

  “Yeah?”

  “I don’t know,” Matt says. “Because, like I said. That’s not the kind of relationship we have. We don’t talk about things. We just...” he shrugs. “I don’t know. We observe how things are. We... watch what’s happening, and we work it all out from there.”

  “Hey, you know what? If your mother is staying in my parents house, then the least you can do is tell her I’m your partner. Unless you’re too ashamed of me. In which case that’s a different conversation that we need to have.”

  “But she’s not really staying here,” Matt offers in a tiny voice that implies that he knows just how pitiful he’s being by saying it.

  Bruno raises his hands. “I give up,” he says, stepping out of the shed. “You’re pathetic. Just... just stay away from me. Stay away from me until you’ve found the balls to tell your mom who I am. No, you know what? Stay away from me until you’ve found the balls to tell your mom who you are.”

  In the bathroom, Alice stands, flushes the toilet, but then puts down the lid and sits back down again. She has often favoured the cold, clean surfaces of bathrooms at times of crisis. She couldn’t explain why, but it has always seemed easier to think in a bathroom or a kitchen than in the cosy clutter of a lounge or a bedroom.

  She looks around the room. She’s stalling, taking time out before she forces herself to confront that thing she needs to think about.

  Here in the bathroom, the external walls are also
made out of massive tree trunks. They form a series of rounded horizontal bumps. Dust has collected on the more difficult to reach ones. Men, Alice thinks. Why can’t men dust?

  Only the wall around the bath has been boarded and tiled, and this many years ago judging from the old-fashioned tiles. But despite the age of the place, the entire house still smells of pine sap. It’s rather lovely, like having a built in air-freshener.

  Alice looks out of the small window at a branch tapping in the breeze. She can hear a bird tweeting maniacally too. She coughs. She swallows. She lets the thought surface. Matt. Her son. Homosexual?

  She feels a little tearful, but isn’t sure why. She thinks, unexpectedly, of Jeremy Thorp. She tries to remember what his lover’s name was. Norman Bates, perhaps? No, that was the son in Psycho. Norman something, anyway.

  The surprise is that it makes sense. She remembers a science fiction film they had watched one Christmas at Tim’s. It had been terribly confusing and she hadn’t really been concentrating properly but in essence everyone had been lost in some kind of virtual reality contraption. But when they ate the blue pill (there were other colours, as far as she can remember) everything was revealed and everything that had never quite made sense suddenly did make sense. She feels a little as if she has just eaten the blue pill herself. Because though she feels shocked (and she really does) she also feels instantly as if she understands everything she ever struggled to understand about Matt, from his strange childhood taste in toys (the My Little Pony flashes through her mind’s eye) through his random grasping fashion changes from Goth to Punk to whatever it was that came next, to his eyeliner, his piercings, his desperate need to get as far away as possible from home. He wanted to transform without witnesses, she thinks. She remembers her conversation with Dot. Dot was right, then. He has been finding himself.

  She wonders if Ken’s violence made Matt that way. She wonders if she did. But she’s read enough, she’s seen enough TV about homosexuality to know that no-one is really to blame. That’s what they say, anyway. But even so, Ken can’t have helped things, can he?

  And Bruno. He’s so young. Can he really be Matt’s boyfriend? Despite herself, she shudders at the word, not because she has any great problem with homosexuals – gays, that’s the preferred term, isn’t it? – it’s just that an image of Matt and Bruno, you know... doing it... flashed through her mind, and it wasn’t pleasant. That, she supposes, is like trying to imagine one’s own parents having sex. Best never to go there.

  But wouldn’t Matt have told her? Perhaps she has it all wrong. With everything she knows thus far, could she have got completely the wrong end of the stick? She asks herself the question. She wrinkles her nose in reply.

  So Matt, she supposes, will now tell her at some point. Or he’ll ask her if she’s worked it out. Or he won’t. Maybe he’ll tell her about some girlfriend in Marseille. And perhaps it will be true, and perhaps it will be a lie.

  A spider on the ceiling catches her eye. Tim had been terrified of them when he was little, and to avoid feeding his phobia, Alice had trained herself to catch them bare handed, to throw them out of the bathroom window. You can get used to anything if you try.

  When he tells her, she’ll be calm, then. She’ll be calm and accepting. She won’t ask any difficult questions, either. She doesn’t want to know who plays the man and who plays the woman anyway. But seeing as Bruno is much younger, Matt must play the boy, mustn't he? She thinks that in some strange way she’d prefer that to... She shudders again. Yes, definitely best not to go there.

  And Aids. God, she hopes neither of them have Aids. They say that they live normal lives these days, don’t they? They say that the treatments have got better. But all the same. She’d find that far harder to deal with, she thinks.

  Outside, she hears Matt shouting Bruno’s name. “Bruno, please!” he is calling, pleadingly.

  If they look like a couple, and they sound like a couple, Alice thinks. She takes a deep breath and stands.

  When Alice steps back into the garden, she finds Matt leaning against a tree, chewing a finger. “Everything OK?” she asks.

  Matt nods. “Uh huh,” he confirms.

  “It’s really time you stopped chewing your fingernails,” Alice tells him. She can’t help herself. It’s a parent thing.

  “Um?” Matt says, distractedly. Then pulling the finger from his mouth, he adds, “Oh, yeah, I know.”

  “Where’s Bruno?” She wonders for a moment whether Matt will reply that he has “gone home.” She wonders if that would make the day seem more or less peculiar.

  “He’s taken the dog for a walk around the lake,” Matt says.

  “Ah, the lake, yes. I haven’t seen that yet.”

  “Yeah, I’m, erh, sorry, Mum,” Matt says. “But I’m working tonight – I told you that, right? And I’m going to have to get moving pretty soon. But Bruno will be back. He said he’ll take you down to Virginie's place and get you set up and everything. I’ll drop your case off as I go past so you don’t have to lug it down the road.”

  “Oh, OK,” Alice says, a little distraught at the idea of being left with this stranger, Bruno, before she even fully understands who he is. “And you? What time are you back?”

  “Midnight,” Matt replies. “Maybe one.”

  “Right,” Alice says. “That’s OK. I understand. And there’s no need to worry Bruno. I’ll just sort myself out.” After a month at Dot’s place, the idea of an evening alone with her thoughts is surprisingly appealing.

  “Only you can’t really,” Matt tells her. “There’s no food in Virginie’s place. We have to sort that out tomorrow. But Bruno said he’ll cook for you tonight.”

  “I could perhaps take something from here to heat up?” Alice offers. “Or just some bread and cheese perhaps?”

  “No, Bruno’s looking forward to it,” Matt says. “He’s not a particularly good cook, but what he lacks in skill he makes up for in enthusiasm.”

  “Right. But...”

  “Sorry, but I really do have to...” Matt says, pointing back towards the house.

  “Of course,” Alice says. “Feel free.”

  Once Matt has vanished indoors in order to change for work, Alice walks down to the car and retrieves her e-reader from her suitcase. She sets herself up beneath the widest of the plum trees and switches the device on. But though her eyes keep scanning the on-screen page, her mind refuses to take in the meaning of the words today, so she gives up and stares out at the garden. She watches three butterflies flirting or perhaps fighting amongst some wildflowers. She sees a bird soar overhead. She listens to the cicadas. What a strange day, she thinks again.

  Almost as soon as Matt has driven off, Bruno reappears with the dog. “Hi Alice,” he says as if they haven’t seen each other for a while. “Did Matt get off all-right?”

  “I think so,” Alice says. “Everything OK?”

  Bruno nods nonchalantly. “Just a tiff,” he says. “You know how it is.”

  “I think I do,” Alice says hesitantly.

  “I...” Bruno begins. He hesitates, then ties the dog to a branch in the shade before pulling a chair over beside Alice. “An e-reader, huh?” he comments, nodding at Alice’s Kindle. “That’s modern.”

  “Tim bought it for me a couple of Christmases ago. It’s easier on my old eyes,” Alice replies. “I can make the characters as big as I like. I have to hold paperbacks so far away these days... I’ll be needing longer arms soon.”

  “Right,” Bruno says.

  He looks a little sad, so Alice asks again, “Are you sure everything’s OK?”

  Bruno nods vaguely. “I just regret letting Matt go,” he says. “Without making up, I mean.”

  “You argued, then?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “I hope it wasn’t about me.”

  “Not really.”

  “Oh,” Alice laughs. “That sounds ominous.”

  “I was just angry that Matt hadn’t told you,” Bruno explains. “About m
e, I mean.”

  So I was right, Alice thinks. And even though she had prepared herself for this, her heart flutters a little. “You’re... together, then?” she asks.

  “You worked it out. Matt said you would.”

  Alice smiles knowingly. “I counted the bedrooms.”

  “Huh. Well, he should have told you.”

  “Maybe.”

  “Definitely.”

  “You know, it’s not all his fault. We’re not a very chatty family.”

  “No. That’s what Matt said.”

  “Your parents know, presumably?” Alice says, thinking that it’s a rather good, relaxed thing to say. “I mean, if this is their place and everything.”

  “Oh yeah. They’ve always known.”

  “Always?”

  “Pretty much. Mom’s best friend was a gay guy, so I never even imagined there might be a problem, you know?”

  “It’s a generational thing, I think. I mean, I’m not sure I’ve ever known a... a gay person... not in real life.”

  “In real life?” Bruno asks, grinning. He seems to think this a rather ridiculous thing to say.

  “On the telly,” Alice explains. “And in books. Actually, maybe my hairdresser...” Bruno laughs again, so Alice says, “That’s a horrible cliché, I suppose.”

  “Most clichés are horrible. And most of them are based on reality, too.”

  “Yes,” Alice says. “I suppose they are. How old are you Bruno? Do you mind me asking that?” She’s thinking that he seems exceptionally mature compared with his youthful looks.

  “Twenty-nine,” Bruno says. “Why?”

  “No reason.”

  “And you?”

  Alice smiles. “Me? I’m sixty-nine,” she says. “But people don’t generally ask women of my age that kind of question.”

  “OK,” Bruno says, thoughtfully. “And how do you feel about it? I mean, are you OK about Matt and me?”

  Alice tries to locate her feelings about Matt being gay, about Matt living with Bruno, but she finds them absent, or at the very least too confused to be quickly identified. She fears that her “feeling” circuits have been overused recently leaving her a little slow on the uptake, a little numb, a little dumb, even. “I think so,” she finally replies. “Why wouldn’t I be?”