Vivaldi in the Dark

by Matthew J. Metzger

  Right now, he liked this secret.

  * * * *

  “Oi!”

  Scott interrupted a YouTube recording of Vivaldi’s Winter by hammering on Darren’s door, interrupting both the music and Darren’s attempts at rearranging the score. Mr. Weber had decided, after a wave of complaints from his students, that they wouldn’t do Vivaldi for the summer recital. Strictly speaking. Instead, each string section would elect a soloist and play the proper movement as an accompaniment to the soloist’s edited version.

  Darren had hated the idea the moment it had been voiced, and sure enough, the other violinists had instantly dropped him in it. So what if he was the best violinist in the orchestra? That didn’t mean he wanted to spend hours creating a new twist on Vivaldi’s work. The Four Seasons was boring enough as it was—give Darren Tartini or Paganini any day. At least they were technically interesting.

  “What?” he called, scribbling out his notes and sliding the sheet back into his music case. He was tempted to play Paganini anyway and get detention for a month. It would be worth it to not have to play Winter for the fifteen millionth time.

  “Jeff says can it until Misha’s piano lesson is over,” Scott said, sticking his head around the door. “What you doing, butchering a cat?”

  Darren’s father was the source of musical ability in the family—and was Scott’s stepfather, so Scott was about as musically gifted as a tone-deaf tomato. That had been made into ketchup.

  “Tuning the cat,” Darren said blandly, and they both grimaced as Misha’s ‘playing’ (banging the keys) stomped up the stairs like a rude houseguest. “Okay. I’m quiet,” he said, stopping the video. “Now go away.”

  Scott lingered. “You going out again on Saturday?”

  “Dunno.”

  “Where you been?”

  “Out.”

  “Seriously, what happened?” Scott scowled at him. “You used to be chatty.”

  “No, I wasn’t.” In fact, Darren was fairly certain he’d been the quietest child on the face of the earth. Mute kids had talked more than he had at Misha’s age.

  “You were with me,” Scotty said and wandered across the room to flop across Darren’s bed, messing up his chemistry notes. Darren rolled his eyes. “You used to tell me all about your day. Now you just tell me to get out.”

  “Which you’re notably not doing.”

  “Come on.” Scott kicked the back of his chair; Darren nearly hit the laptop screen. “Where’ve you been?”

  “Out, Jesus.”

  “With who?”

  Darren fought the urge to say whom. He then fought the urge to text Jayden in the worst text-speak possible to make up for the lapse. “A mate.”

  “Riiiiight.”

  “What do you want?”

  “Have you got a girlfriend?” Scott pushed.

  “Nope.”

  “A boyfriend?”

  “Nope.” Fifteen years of it made Darren a good liar; over his shoulder, Scott huffed.

  “Well, you’ve been out with someone. And I heard Jeff yelling at you about letting practice slide, so don’t fob me off with the orchestra losers.”

  “Scott, what do you want?”

  “I want to talk to my baby brother!”

  “I’m like four years younger than you.”

  That was a mistake; Scott promptly launched to attack him in a hug, pinning him into his chair, and started ruffling his hair into a frenzy. Darren knew better than to fight, so screwed up his face and stayed put, waiting it out.

  “Still my baby brother!” Scott crowed and used Darren’s hair to pull his head back until they made eye contact. “Come on,” he said, shaking Darren’s head like a toy. “What have you been up to? New girlfriend?”

  “Why do you care?”

  “I need to know these things.”

  “No, you don’t, now sod off.”

  “Yes, I do!”

  “Come off it, Scott, when have I got time for a new girlfriend?”

  “When you’re not practising all those dead Italian musicians like Jeff says you should.”

  Darren wrinkled his nose. “That sounds sick.”

  “Urgh, yeah, kind of does,” Scott agreed and let go of him to collapse back on the bed. Darren finally turned his chair to watch, tucking his feet up under himself. “So you in Saturday or not?”

  “When?”

  “Evening.”

  “…Why?”

  “Well, maybe you’re out all the time now being sociable or whatever, but I did some spying and Mother has one of her stupid dinner parties, and Misha has a sleepover at Katy’s.”

  “Kitty’s.”

  “Whatever. My point is: ‘rents are out, kid sister is out, we have the sofa and the widescreen, my DVD collection and takeaway Chinese. My treat,” Scott said and grinned. “I haven’t watched any shitty action films with my baby brother in waaaay too long. You do know Bad Boys II is shit without your running commentary?”

  “It’s shit anyway.”

  “Hush your sacrilegious nonsense,” Scott said loftily. “Book it in your diary and tell your slag to sod off for the night.”

  Darren rolled his eyes. If Jayden were a slag, he’d have gotten some by now.

  “And when you decide to come out of the closet and tell us you’re hitting up Lucy Love from last year’s music camp, you know where to find me,” Scott said, peeling himself off the mattress and ruffling Darren’s hair again for good measure.

  “Oh, piss off.”

  Scott stooped to hug him again, nearly strangling Darren with his shoulder. “Seriously,” he said lowly in his ear, “you haven’t properly talked to me since you were like twelve. I miss you, bro.”

  Darren squashed the twinge of regret in the middle of his chest. “Call me ‘bro’ again, and you’ll be missing me from the seventh circle of Hell,” he threatened and shoved Scott off. The guy was like an octopus.

  “Yeah, yeah. It’s adorable when you try to be a man.”

  Darren hit him; Scott darted out the door, cackling like a madman, and Darren slammed it for good measure, ignoring Father’s thunder of “BOYS!” from the living room where Misha was still punching the shit out of the piano.

  He eyed the rumpled sheets where Scott had ruined the cleaner’s attempts at tidying Darren’s room, and pinched the bridge of his nose. His contacts were itching, he had a headache, and…he had a bit of chest-ache too, at Scott’s admission. They hadn’t really talked for years, and Scott wasn’t the only one who missed it, but…

  But the shadows nudged at the back of Darren’s brain, and he knew that telling Scott would be the stupidest thing he could do. Scott didn’t get it. Scott was the bumbling, lucky, cheerful idiot of a big brother who had been handed confidence, skill, looks, and brains on a plate and never had to do anything he didn’t want. He had the brass that Darren envied; he had the sheer force to barrel over everything Mother and Father said, and…

  And Darren didn’t. Darren sat in his room shuffling around Vivaldi’s already dull creations and pretending that he was fine with it. Pretending that Father really did know best. Pretending that one day, once he was done with Weber and Vivaldi, he would enjoy the violin.

  But he’d never enjoyed it in the first place.

  There was no fun to a violin. There never had been. His lessons had been sombre from the beginning: Paganini and Bach, Vivaldi and the lilting strings in Holst. There had been skill, yes, and Darren knew if he’d been handed anything, it was the ability to just listen to a piece of music and replicate it, draw out the finest qualities of it and stun a room into silence with his talent…

  But he hated it. The trombone had always been a laugh, because there was no grace or finesse to it. The piano could be entertaining, flexing to fit the music. But the violin was a sad, solemn instrument, and it had taken Darren with it. He knew that. He knew, the way the darkness gnawed into his chest when he played, the numbness in his fingers when he listened and composed, the way he felt so hollowed-out an
d empty after every practice, every rehearsal, every recital.

  He had been ten when he’d been given the violin. He had been eleven when he had performed in his first recital. He had been twelve the first time that he’d locked himself in a dark room, played until his hands were shaking too badly to finish the piece, and scratched a six-inch mess of skin away from his bow arm.

  He had stopped telling Scott everything the moment he’d looked at his arm and realised what he’d become.

  What he still was.

  He hadn’t hurt himself—physically—in a few months now. It was his longest streak. The penknife was still locked in his bottom drawer; he still found himself biting around the edges of his thumbnail in music classes. But he hadn’t done it properly for months. Not since August. He’d come back from music camp, looked at the mess of scars and fresh, blurry wounds on his left arm in the downstairs bathroom, and decided that he’d had enough.

  So far, he’d been lucky. Bloody, bloody lucky.

  And he wasn’t going to be able to keep it up. Darren knew himself. His moods—his good days, and his bad ones—followed the music. The run-up to Christmas was quiet, because the string orchestra were never involved with the Christmas melee, so he could make it sometimes weeks at a time without a really bad day. But after…when the spring came, and the recital dates were booked, and Weber started frothing at the mouth with how bad they all were and how he should have stayed in Dresden teaching deaf children the drums…

  The bad days would come.

  Darren sat on the edge of his bed, grinding the heel of his left hand into his face. What was he doing? Getting involved with someone else while he was still so fucked up in the head—what the hell was wrong with him? He wasn’t blind; he knew the way Jayden looked at him, like he had all the answers to everything. Like he knew what he was doing. Like he was fucking perfect.

  And what happened when Jayden found out that he wasn’t? What happened when Jayden found out why Darren woke up some mornings and couldn’t move, or when he found out why Darren had broken both legs two summers ago? What about when he found the scars? Darren was just lucky that he hadn’t yet, just lucky.

  “You’re a fucking idiot,” he muttered to himself and swallowed. He couldn’t do that to him. Jayden deserved more than that; he deserved more than Darren, period, but if he insisted on being interested in the first place, then the least Darren owed him was a little bit of honesty. A little bit of laying it out on the table and letting Jayden make a proper choice, an informed one. Let him know just what he was letting himself in for.

  And if he decided he couldn’t deal with it, then…

  Then fine.

  It wasn’t fine—but it was, because Darren knew better than to think anyone was going to put up with the shit his brain threw at him. Even he didn’t want to put up with it and had tried to check out three times now. Jayden wouldn’t want to either—but Darren would rather let him walk away, with only the facts to go on, than to get tangled up in the shadows in his head and the numbness in his hands without having the first clue about what he’d gotten himself into.

  Saturday.

  He’d tell him Saturday, then come home and veg out with Scott and criticise films until he could forget having told Jayden at all.

  Because, inevitably, Jayden was going to walk away.

  Chapter 11

  Things changed in the first week of December.

  Darren texted on Saturday morning, effectively rescuing Jayden from helping Dad with the car, and invited him to hang out in town. It had been the usual, poorly spelled, horrifically unreadable sort of invitation, and Jayden hadn’t thought anything of it, really. He had hoped, vaguely, to invite him over later in the day and hide up in his room while Mum and Dad were at the shops. He had vague designs, after seeing Darren’s sinful range of clingy T-shirts, of getting him out of the clingy T-shirts.

  They met at Milzani’s. Jayden had never been in the daytime, and its evening energy was muted. It was fairly quiet, still too early for the Christmas shoppers to have given up in exhaustion, and Darren had beaten him there, leaning against the wall by the door in the icy wind, looking gorgeous in that jacket.

  “Thank you,” Jayden said, sliding his hand into the crook of Darren’s elbow. “You rescued me from another lecture on the workings of a car engine.”

  “You’re welcome, I guess.” Darren shrugged, holding the door open for him. “I take it you’re not into cars?”

  “No. And Dad loves his car,” Jayden huffed and fumbled for his wallet. “No, I’ll get this one,” he insisted. He squinted at Darren’s face. “You all right?”

  Darren looked…not unhappy, exactly, but serious. In a way. Well, he always looked a bit serious, he wasn’t the smiley type, really, but…he looked…heavier, maybe? A weight to his face? Whatever it was, Jayden began to get the first impressions that something wasn’t quite right.

  But Darren said, “Yeah,” and summoned the barista with one glance. It was the eyes, Jayden thought privately. The colour. Or maybe the fact that Darren could look perfectly innocent and ridiculously attractive with exactly the same expression. When she blushed and started playing with her hair, Jayden knew he was right.

  “You’re zoning out,” Darren said as they waited.

  “Your fault.”

  “How?”

  Jayden shrugged and tried not to smile. “Just is. She fancies you.”

  “Eh.” Darren shrugged and tipped a hand in that ‘so-so’ gesture. “Too much makeup. And hair. And the sex would be boring at best.”

  Jayden flushed and hid it behind the coffee that she supplied right at that moment. The side of Darren’s cardboard cup had a phone number scrawled on it. “Does that always happen?” he asked as they found a corner table, crushed in by the plate-glass window. The wintry sunlight was barely warm through the glass.

  “Nah, not really,” Darren said and leaned his elbows on the table. “We need to talk.”

  It was like getting a bucket of icy water dropped over his head. “You don’t want to do this anymore,” Jayden breathed.

  Darren raised both hands, ducking his head and sighing heavily. “Just hear me out,” he said. Oh God, he wanted to break up. “I need to be honest with you.” What? “It’s really, really not fair to drag you into this mess without fair warning, and when you hear that fair warning, trust me—it’ll be you who doesn’t want to do this anymore.”

  Jayden fidgeted with his cup, staring. Darren was looking anywhere but at him: at his cup, out the window, at his sleeves. He was uneasy, shifting in his seat and picking at the sticker on the ridged edges of the cup. If furtive had a look, it was sitting opposite Jayden Phillips in that coffee shop. “What?” he pushed eventually. “I mean…what? Seriously, do you…I mean…I thought you wanted to…go out. You asked me!”

  Darren sighed again. It sounded like a breeze through a copse: shivery and wary. “In a really raw way, yeah, I do,” he said. “Come on, I was attracted to you the minute you interrupted practice. So yeah, I do. I think it’s pretty obvious that I like you. But it’s not that easy, not…not right now. Maybe not ever. And it’s not fair to not tell you.”

  “Do you have a boyfriend?” Jayden asked.

  It had happened to his mother. She’d been eighteen years old and had fallen for a gorgeous college student. A photographer. After eight months, she told him she was pregnant. He promptly told her he was seeing someone else, and that was that. And okay, Jayden couldn’t exactly do the whole pregnant-and-alone thing, but…

  Darren actually laughed. Not much, but he did: a low snort of laughter that had him ducking his head and hiding behind his hand until the broad grin eased. Something about it released a little of the tension in Jayden’s chest. “Yes,” Darren said, “because I have lines of boys outside my door just waiting for me to give them the time of day.”

  “You should.”

  “Get real. No, I don’t have a boyfriend. I’m not that crass.” Darren started outright shreddin
g the label. “I’m not…I don’t…”

  Jayden wanted to take his hands. Wary of the public atmosphere, he instead slid a foot across the slightly sticky floor to tap Darren’s ankle with his shoe. “Just tell me,” he said. It couldn’t be that bad, right? He’d said not now. So maybe Jayden could change it, or wait it out, whatever it was, and then things would be fine. Maybe it was like Darren had some other worries or something.

  “I’m not normal, all right?”

  Jayden blinked. “What’s that meant to mean?”

  “Sometimes…” Darren paused and huffed that laugh again. Suddenly, it didn’t sound so good. “I get these…spells. Bad days, when I don’t…function properly. When everything just kind of disappears and I just…I’m numb. I don’t feel anything. I don’t want to do anything. Like I’m disappearing. I feel paralysed, some days, and those days, I’d do any amount of stupid shit to make it stop.”

  Jayden could feel his heartbeat speeding up. Darren was staring out the window, blank and empty. There was something painful about the void—the nothing—in his expression. Something missing in those pale green eyes. Anything? What was anything?

  “Sometimes, I’m fine. And other times, I can’t cross the railway bridge without wanting to jump off it,” Darren said flatly. Jayden drew in a sharp breath. “I withdraw, I cut people off, I don’t want to do anything, see anyone, nothing.”

  “Have you…are you…” Jayden stumbled over the question and finally blurted out, “Are you suicidal?” in a rush.

  Darren’s face twitched at the question, and he dropped his gaze to the shredded cup label, sifting through the remains with his fingers. “Sometimes,” he muttered. He took a breath, and his voice strengthened. “At night, usually. And it’s not…I can’t explain it. It’s like…I don’t want to die. I mean…I don’t want to want to die. You get me? I want the feeling to stop. And I know it’s stupid because it’s not like I’m living in a crack house on a council estate with a pit bull and an alcoholic single mum, but I can’t make it go away. I can’t make myself go away.”