by Jones,Lesley
The only other communication I’d had with Liam was a text message. It was sent late the same night he’d seen me with Will on my doorstep. I’d cried myself to sleep, and the vibration of my phone had woken me around midnight. I’d debated opening it, but in the end decided not to, just in case it was him telling me what a double-standard little whore I was. I already knew that and didn’t need it spelled out to me. I’d felt bad enough already, so I went back to sleep. I ignored it the next day too, and every day since. It was like a little challenge to myself. By not opening that text message, I somehow proved I was doing fine and moving on.
I’d gotten my period the week after the weekend that I won’t talk about, and definitely don’t think about over and over . . . and over again. In no way whatsoever was I ready for a baby, but I’d felt both elated and devastated at the same time when I’d woken in the night to the familiar cramping in my belly. For a brief moment, when I’d looked down at the spots of blood in my knickers, I felt like I’d once again lost and Olivia had won. She had everything. She had him, and she had his baby. I had a broken heart and period fucking pain.
***
Christmas Eve fell on a Monday that year, having that Sunday before all of the crazy began was like a day to draw breath after the weeks of build-up. Luke had warned me that Liam would be joining us, so I was sort of prepared to be in his company. My anger towards him had dissipated over the weeks, my heart still hurt and despite only being together a month, I missed his company but I was surviving, I’d get by.
Sasha was having lunch with her parents and would arrive later in the evening. Having that extra day was nice, instead of rushing around manically on Christmas Eve, the day would be spent chilling with all of my favourite people.
Lunch that year would include myself, Luke, Will, Liam, Shain, Sasha, and Callum, an old school friend of my brother’s. Sitting at the dinner table with both Liam and Will was not something I was looking forward to and I just hoped that everyone would be on their best behaviour.
I’d drawn Shain in the Kris Kringle. The budget we set was one hundred pounds, it sounded a lot, but it barely covered the cost of some perfumes or aftershaves, and some years, it was the only decent present we got.
Despite not knowing him personally, the fact that I knew he was from Aus made it easy for me to decide on an Armani scarf as Shain’s gift. I picked it up at an outlet store and it fit the budget.
I still had the scarf of Liam’s I’d been wearing on the weekend we won’t mention. It most definitely had never found its way under my pillow, and it would be ridiculous to even suggest that on occasion I may have sniffed it, worn it and cuddled it, but anyway, yeah. Shain was Australian, he was bound to be feeling the cold, so a scarf it was.
Despite the Kris Kringle, I still bought extra gifts for Sasha, Luke, Will, and at the very last minute, Liam, too. I didn’t want to make things awkward, so it was nothing too personal.
I was the first to arrive at Luke’s. I’d helped him tidy the house and make up the beds in the two spare bedrooms. We’d then polished off a bottle of red as a treat for all our hard work. Luke had gone all out and bought a real Christmas tree, which was impressively decorated with ribbons, bows, and baubles, nothing sparkly or tinselly in sight. He switched on the clear white lights that were woven through the branches and stood aside, looking very proud of himself.
“Oh wow. I love it, Luke, it’s gorgeous.”
“Yeah, took me hours.” He shrugged.
He headed over to the fireplace and knelt down in front of it. When he turned and looked up from where he was building a fire.
“You didn’t decorate it, did you?”
He tilted his head to the side and smiled.
“Sunshine. Do I look like Laurence Llewelyn fucking Bowen? Of course I didn’t decorate it. I gave Lizzie the keys to this place and a few hours off Thursday morning after I saw what a great job she did decorating the office.”
I felt a little put out. I was always the one to decorate the tree at our grandparents’ place.
“I would’ve done it.”
“I know you would have.” He blew on the newspapers he’d twisted up and lit. They were set under the wood and coal in the reclaimed wrought iron fireplace he’d added to the room when he’d renovated. The open fire was one of the reasons I loved coming here.
“So why didn’t you ask me?”
“Pick up your bottom lip and stop sulking. I wanted to surprise you. You did the tree every year at Nan’s. I haven’t been here for the last few Christmases, so I thought I’d get a proper tree and decorate it nice for you.”
He sat back on his knees and stared into the fire as the lit paper began to burn and the first flames took hold of the wood.
I suddenly felt emotional. He’d had the tree decorated exactly the way I would’ve done it.
“Well she did a beautiful job, thank you. I love it.”
Luke was, and always would be, my hero. I worried sometimes when I was growing up that the way I worshipped him wasn’t normal. I’d grown paranoid that maybe I had a crush on my own brother, but it was nothing like that. He’d just been the one true constant in my life. My grandad was too old to be a father figure, so it was Luke that I idolised growing up. I still did.
“I’m glad you’re home for Christmas this year. I’ve missed you.”
He stood and brushed his hands down his jeans.
“I’ve missed you, too.”
I stepped forward and wrapped my arms around his waist. I was barefoot and felt tiny up against his six-foot-four frame.
“I know travelling and working abroad was a dream come true for you Luke and I’m glad you got to do it, but the selfish side of me is so glad that you’re here, especially this year.”
He kissed the top of my head and I let out a long breath, one that it felt like I’d been holding in for weeks. I was hurting, but I hadn’t realised exactly how much until that moment. Until I was wrapped in the safety of my big brother’s arms.
“When I left, I wasn’t leaving you, Sunshine. I need you to know that.”
I had my ear pressed against his lower chest and could hear his words rumble through him.
“I do know that. I’ve never thought that you did.”
He let out a long breath.
“And I never meant to stay away for so long. I never planned it that way.”
I looked up at him, but he wasn’t looking down at me, he was looking at the fire.
“I’ve never thought for a minute that you deliberately stayed away, but after everything that happened with Mel, I sort of got why you didn’t come back.”
I watched as he shook his head.
“It wasn’t even about her really. I was just . . .”
He finally looked down at me.
“I love you, I’d lie down my life for you, you know that right?”
My eyes filled with tears and my throat felt tight, all I could do was nod.
“I wouldn’t change anything about our lives. I don’t want you thinking I wished things were different, because I don’t. I just, I had to get away. I needed to travel, to go and do something for me. My entire life up until that point had been spent looking after other people.”
He brushed a tear from my cheek with his thumb.
“I’d looked after mum from the moment I was of an age to realise she needed to be looked after. Then I looked after you pretty much from the moment she brought you home from the hospital.”
We rarely talked about the time before our mother’s death. It was as if our childhoods didn’t begin until we moved in with our grandparents. It was easy for me to forget Luke was around eleven by then.
“I had to make a choice. She was an adult, a fucking grown up, and you . . .”
He scratched at the top of his head, it wasn’t itchy, not really. I knew he was just trying to get his words in order.
“You were this little tiny, innocent baby. I had no choice really. I was seven years old, about to turn eigh
t, I tried to look after both of you for a little while, but I couldn’t do it. I tried to look after her, to make sure she ate and showered, and I tried to make sure that you were fed and changed. I gave you baths, and I put clean clothes on you.”
He laughed through his tears, although there was nothing funny in what he was saying, nothing at all. He was a child, a little boy. He’d stepped up and done the job that our father, an adult, had run away from.
I don’t like to think of my childhood as tragic, I was lucky, I was too young to remember the worst times but Luke wasn’t. Luke was old enough to remember it all, and my heart broke for him.
“I even did the washing so you would have clean clothes to wear. When she wouldn’t or couldn’t get up off the sofa or out of bed, I worked out how to use the machine, and I washed our clothes, but I bought the wrong soap powder the first time. I was a little boy, I had no clue there was a difference between hand and machine wash powders. There were bubbles everywhere. She ended up having a good day that day. She came out into the kitchen and slipped on the tiles while I was trying to clean up with a towel. She knew . . . she knew straight away what had happened, and she laughed. She called me over, sat me in her lap, and told me she loved me.”
My heart, oh my poor heart, ached so fiercely for my brother as he almost choked on his words.
“She told me I was a good kid and thanked me for trying to help. We cleaned up the kitchen together, and then she ran down to the corner shop and bought the right soap powder before showing me how to sort the colours. We did the washing and hung it all out on the line together. I thought it was the best thing ever. When we got it in and had it all folded into piles, one for each of us, it felt like Christmas.”
He took in a few breaths and then reached up and wiped each of his eyes on the sleeves of his hoodie. I wrapped my arms tighter around his waist, rested my chin against his chest and looked up at him as I swayed us both from side to side.
“But the next day, it all went to shit again. She went out and left us on our own. It was a Sunday and she was gone from lunchtime until late that night, and I don’t think she got out of bed at all for about a week after that.”
I watched as he licked his lips and swallowed.
“You had a bad week that week, too. It was like you knew things weren’t right with her, you sensed it. I felt bad, Sarah. I hated leaving you with her during the day, but I had to go to school. I’d watched a show or a film a few months before and the mum was a junkie and the little girl was trying to look after everyone and stopped going to school. The welfare people finally got involved, and the kids all got separated and put into different foster homes. I was terrified that would happen to us. That they’d take us away, split us up.”
I turned my head and rested the side of my face back against his chest. I couldn’t watch him talk anymore. Hearing the words was painful enough, watching Luke’s face as he retold the story of our early life was shattering my soul. Not for me, not for what I went through. I was a baby, I remembered none of it. It was shattering for him, the little boy who struggled to keep his family together who lived inside the strong confident man. The man who carried the tortuous memories inside him every day.
How had my brother survived all of that and grown up to be the amazing person that he was, how?
I watched on the news almost daily, stories about kids from broken homes going out and getting into trouble, using the fact that they’d never known their dad as an excuse. Luke had never brought the police to my grandparent’s door, never. Yeah, he and his mates had a reputation for being able to handle themselves in a fight, but they never got into trouble for it.
“That week, I fell asleep twice in class. My teacher, Mrs Benson kept me in one playtime and asked me if everything was okay. I lied and just told her that the new baby was noisy and was keeping me awake. Luckily, I had nice clean clothes on and didn’t look in any way neglected, so she believed me. I decided then, though, that I couldn’t do it all.
“I would look after you the best I could. I used to make up your bottles for the day and leave them next to mum’s bed so all she had to do was feed you when you cried. I left her with your changing bag filled with nappies and wipes and cream and powder, everything that she could possibly need. One afternoon I got home and you were screaming the place down. We were so lucky that nobody had called the police.
“When I got up to the bedroom, she had an empty bottle of vodka in the bed with her and her Valium were tipped out over the bedside table. I didn’t care if she was dead, I hoped she was. What I did care about was the fact that she hadn’t fed or changed you the entire day. You were eight weeks old, and you’d skipped two bottles and was lying in a nappy soaked through with your own shit and piss.”
I felt his chest and belly move as he took in more deep breaths.
“I shoved a bottle in your mouth while sitting in the bath with you. Once you were clean, dressed, and fed, I put you in my bed and you slept right through till your next feed. In the meantime, she’d come to, and I told her that I’d come home from school and you were dead. She was hysterical, running around the house and looking for you. When she found you in my bed and realised I was lying, she smacked me around the face, I smacked her back and told her what a bad mum she was.”
I felt like I should say something, but what? I didn’t know if he had ever confided in anyone with all of this. He’d never told me before, and I had no clue if my nan and grandad knew.
“She got a little better after that, staying coherent enough during the day to feed and change you at least. Then she’d just clear off all night. Sometimes she’d come home with a bloke, sometimes on her own.”
He was quiet for a few moments, so I braved a look up at him just as he looked down at me.
“I need a drink. Want one?”
I nodded.
We moved over to the kitchen table, where Luke opened another bottle of red and poured us both a glass.
The only illumination in the room was coming from the glow of the fire and the lights on the Christmas tree. It set a mood of calmness and serenity, which was a stark contrast to the story that Luke was retelling.
“When she died and we moved in with Nan and Grandad, I finally felt like I could breathe. It was still hard. We both had nightmares, obviously at just three years old it was so much harder for you to vocalise everything that you’d experienced in that car accident. We both saw counsellors, and it helped me massively, not just to deal with the accident but to also deal with everything that went on before it. You used to wake up screaming and refusing to sleep on your own.”
I reached across the table and covered his hand with mine, he slid it out and covered mine with both of his. Always the protective big brother.
“Anyway, you grew out of that, and I think that despite everything, we both ended up pretty decent adults.”
We clinked our glasses together.
“Here’s to us,” he said.
“Here’s to amazing big brothers that let me paint their nails, sleep in their bed, and sing and dance along to NKOTB with me when no one else is around.”
“Yeah, no need to go public with that last one.”
“Why, you made a great Joey McIntyre.”
He shook his head.
“Anyway, all of that is the reason that I wanted to travel. You turned eighteen and were going off to college, so I thought a bit of separation would be good for both of us. I figured that if I were ever going to travel, that would be the best time. To be honest, I was already over Mel before I found out she was fucking her boss. When I did find out what she’d been up to, it freed me a little bit more.”
We both sipped on our wine, the house was so quiet that I jumped when the fire crackled and spat.
“I had people keeping an eye on you, so I knew you were doing okay. Nan and Grandad weren’t getting any younger, and I knew that at some stage, we would have to look after them in their old age, so I just stayed away.”
“Do you th
ink you’ll ever go back? Would you prefer to live there, not here?”
“You know what, I think I would, but I’d just miss you too much.”
“You can’t live your life for me, Luke. I’d make the effort to get out and see you if you did ever go back. We could have one Christmas here, the next over there. Take it in turns.”
He gave me a one-shouldered shrug.
“We’ll see. There might just be some English girl about to sweep me off my feet, then I wouldn’t wanna be anywhere else but here.”
I smiled. My brother had never really spoken to me about what he wanted with regard to love, settling down, and marriage. I didn’t even know if he wanted children.
“Is that what you’d like?”
“After watching what you and Del have put each other through this past month, I’m not exactly sure. And once you throw that bitch of an ex of his into the equation, no. I think I’m probably better off single. That woman’s priceless, what she tried to do to Del, you couldn’t make that shit up.”
It was my turn to let out a deep breath. I was a little confused by what he’d said about Liam’s wife. What did he mean by “what she tried to do”? I assumed they would be spending Christmas together, and I’d wondered why they weren’t since Luke told me Liam would be joining us.
I had a moment of panic, at the prospect of Liam bringing her along for dinner.
“How come he’s here for Christmas? Why didn’t he go home to his wife?”
“Why the fuck would he go home to his wife? He hopes the new offer he put forward will be enough for her to sign the divorce papers and fuck her off out of it for good.”
My stomach wasn’t sure what way it wanted to go and decided to simply churn inside me.
“They’re still getting a divorce, what about the baby?”
“Not his problem, Sarah.”
I was shocked. After reliving everything we’d gone through during our childhoods spent with a single mum, I thought he’d have a little more empathy for Olivia.