The Other Son

by Nick Alexander

  ‘Yeah, especially the roans – they’re really mellow. They’re the black and white ones like we saw the other day. Anyway, why all the questions? Are you going to buy me one?’

  ‘Sure,’ Bruno says. ‘I’m gonna buy you a dog so we can never go anywhere ever again.’

  ‘Oh well,’ Matt says, feigning disappointment, ‘I guess I’ll just have to make do with my existing pet. I call him Bruno.’

  Bruno laughs and jabs Matt in the ribs.

  They reach the steps up to the top of the dam and Bruno pauses, one hand on the railings. ‘Across or back?’ he asks.

  ‘Back, I think. I’m starving.’

  Bruno pulls his phone from his pocket to check the time. ‘It’s not even seven.’

  ‘My stomach doesn’t seem to know that. I’m still starving.’

  ‘So your folks wouldn’t let you have a dog?’ Bruno asks, as they start to walk back.

  Matt snorts. ‘It was worse than that,’ he says. ‘They promised me one and then changed their minds.’

  ‘That’s shitty.’

  ‘Oh yes,’ Matt agrees. ‘Shitty, it was.’

  The dog was to have been Matt’s reward if he passed his eleven-plus exam. Matt had never wanted anything more and he had never worked for anything harder.

  When he wasn’t at school or at home – revising his vocabulary lists or his hated times tables – he was at Heavy Petting beneath the Bullring, leaning against the window, and, when invited in by Janine the owner, caressing the constant stream of puppies that passed through her shop.

  Matt had isolated himself from his few friends in order to study for the exam. The eleven-plus had been phased out in the Midlands by then, but Matt (or rather Ken) had ‘elected’ to take it anyway. The hope was that by so doing he would be able to go to the local King Edward Grammar School rather than Bournville Comprehensive where Tim went. Matt would, for the first time ever, be one up on his brother. Or so the theory went.

  When the day came, he passed the exam with flying colours. His grade had been 152, which everyone said was ‘exceptional’. It was certainly beyond Ken’s expectations. And it definitely put competitive Tim’s nose out of joint.

  But on the evening before Matt’s interview at King Edward’s, Ken had come home drunk, and in yet another drama-filled evening, he had wiped out any hope of a dog. He had changed his mind, he said, matter-of-factly.

  Matt failed to turn up at King Edward’s for the interview the next morning. He was peering into the window of Heavy Petting with tears in his eyes instead. And a week later, when the interview was rescheduled, he had hidden in the park. If he wasn’t getting his dog, then he wasn’t going to King Edward’s, that was for sure. Cutting off his nose to spite his face, Alice had called it. And perhaps it had been.

  For a while he had kept returning to look at the dogs. Sometimes it made him cry, and sometimes Janine invited him in to help her clean out the cages and he got to cuddle the puppies too. But ultimately, that only made him feel worse. He wasn’t a child who had a lot of friends at school, and Tim, who was older, was less and less interested in playing with him, or even being seen with him. The dog was to have been his new best friend, his confidant. Without it, he felt lost.

  He had bought a dog lead, too, he remembers now – a pathetic gesture of defiance, a child’s declaration that one day he would have his dog. He had even put the collar on Tim’s old teddy bear, Barney, and dragged it around the room. He had made Barney’s fur wet with tears. Yes, the dog incident had been a huge childhood trauma for him. Perhaps unreasonably huge.

  Many years later he discovered in therapy that it had also been a turning point in his life, a crucial event in the construction of his ‘self’, as the shrink had put it.

  Because from that moment on, Matt made sure that he never met Alice or Ken’s expectations of him again. Those expectations were, he had learnt, movable goalposts. Nothing would ever be enough.

  Even Tim – who, with his suits and his cars must be a member of the One Per Cent that everyone loves to hate these days – never quite seems to have succeeded enough for Alice and Ken. And that really proves the hopelessness of the endeavour.

  ‘You’re so lucky to have your parents,’ Matt says, linking arms with Bruno.

  ‘Hey, Mom never let me have a dog either,’ Bruno says. ‘The closest I ever got was a guinea pig.’

  ‘OK. But they never promised you a dog either, did they?’

  ‘No,’ Bruno admits. ‘No, I guess they didn’t. Like I say, that was a shitty thing to do.’

  ‘So what about if your parents go back?’ Matt asks. His mind has jumped back to a previous conversation.

  ‘I’m sorry?’

  ‘If your folks moved home. Would you still stay here then?’

  Bruno shakes his head. ‘They aren’t going home. This was always the plan. As long as I can remember they’ve been saying they’d retire to France and open a little gallery.’

  ‘Running a gallery isn’t really retirement,’ Matt comments, pausing to hunt for flat stones he can skim on the surface of the lake.

  ‘Well, Mom was a counsellor,’ Bruno says. ‘She spent her life counselling grieving kids. Kids who’d lost their parents. Kids who’d lost brothers and sisters. Kids, sometimes, who’d lost everyone. That was her specialty. So I guess that compared to that, running a gallery probably does feel like retirement.’

  ‘Yes, I suppose that must have been pretty full-on,’ Matt says, spinning a stone and watching it hop magnificently across the surface of the water.

  ‘Some days we couldn’t talk to her when she got home,’ Bruno says. ‘She was never mean or anything, but some days she didn’t have the energy left to talk back.’

  ‘I can imagine.’

  ‘She’s much happier nowadays. Much more relaxed.’

  ‘So that’s it? They’re where they want to be.’

  ‘I guess,’ Bruno says. ‘And you? Are you where you want to be?’

  Matt launches another stone, this one less successful than the last, and then straightens to look at his boyfriend. He smiles. ‘You know I am,’ he says.

  ‘So I won’t have to follow you back to rainy England?’

  ‘Nope,’ Matt says. ‘Nope, I don’t think that’s going to be necessary.’

  Bruno’s features relax, so Matt is glad that he has said it, even if he’s unsure if it’s true.

  It’s not that he ‘misses’ rainy England, that much is certain.

  His boyfriend is perfect. He’s beautiful and calm and sexy and clever; he’s young yet mature, he’s tall and bearded. He’s everything that Matt ever hoped for.

  His adopted family are amazing too. It’s no exaggeration to say that Matt feels more relaxed, more welcome, more loved, in fact, than he ever felt back home.

  His life here is lovely. The house is cute – like living in some children’s picture book – and even his job, washing up in a hotel restaurant, he enjoys. Katya, who he works with, is cheeky and funny. Stephane, his boss, is polite and understanding. So, yes, everything here is as perfect as it can be.

  And yet, and yet . . . it feels like something is missing. It feels like something is still gnawing away at his subconscious, and this most of the days and most of the time.

  Sometimes he thinks it’s his country calling to him. Sometimes he puts it down to a simple lack of Marmite, or Doctor Who, or stumbling upon Graham Norton on the telly being hilariously sarky about the Eurovision contest. At other times he suspects it’s his family, who, for all their failures, are just too far away for comfort. Certainly he still thinks about them a lot. Despite the years of psychoanalysis, he still dreams about his childhood, still wakes up scared and sweating.

  Then again, it could be his lack of material success that’s tripping him up. He fights this one on a daily basis, seeing it as a great capitalist myth. Buy this and look better, the adverts say. Buy this and feel like you’ve succeeded.

  Most of the time, Matt feels he’s moved beyond th
e advertisers’ reach, believes he really has risen above the poor manipulated masses. But then something on the car will break and Bruno will have to ask Joseph to pay for it to be fixed and he’ll feel inadequate all the same. Something in the house will get broken and he won’t mention it because he’s not able to afford to replace it, and he finds himself feeling like a scared child all over again. He thinks sometimes of Tim, swimming in wealth, drowning in wealth, and he imagines how Alice would see his own life in comparison. Yes, he wishes still that he could make his parents proud.

  Perhaps that’s the one, perhaps that’s what’s still causing the gnawing feeling. Maybe even now, even at forty-two, that’s what’s eating away at him: the lack of parental recognition, the destabilising knowledge that his mother, his father, his brother, and along with them much of modern society, would look at his life and see nothing but failure.

  How amazing to still be waiting for a pat on the back at forty-two. Maybe that’s something you just never lose, because recognition is the one thing you never get. Or at least, not in a form you can recognise, not in the way you need.

  When they open the door to the cabin a cloud of smoke bellows out.

  ‘Looks like it’s gonna be packet soup tonight,’ Bruno comments as he calmly crosses to remove the burning pan from the stove.

  Matt grabs an LP from the rack to use as a fan – it’s Kurt Vile’s Smoke Ring for My Halo, which strikes Matt as amusingly appropriate. He stands in the doorway and fans the smoke from the kitchen and watches as it mixes with the rapidly chilling evening air.

  Secretly he’s glad that Bruno has burnt the soup. Though Bruno is incredibly proud of his home-grown, home-cooked leek soup, it’s not really that good, and Matt prefers by far the packet kind. Whatever chemicals they put in, it simply tastes better than Bruno’s snow-damaged, muddy leeks.

  10

  MAY

  Matt carries the tray downstairs to the kitchen. It’s his birthday today and Bruno, who has already brought him a cooked breakfast in bed (eggs, tomatoes, mushrooms and some sumptuously delicious spinach), is preparing dishes for lunch.

  ‘Thanks,’ Matt says, sliding the tray on to the drainer. ‘That was gorgeous.’ He pecks Bruno on the cheek and then reaches out to dip his finger into one of the bowls. ‘Home-made hummus!’ he says. ‘Yum.’

  Bruno slaps his hand away in exactly the same way Connie always used to slap his own little fingers away from the cake mix. ‘Not until lunchtime!’ he says. ‘Now go and make yourself look handsome while I get this all ready.’

  ‘You’re a bit full-on, aren’t you?’ Matt says mockingly, glancing at the kitchen clock. ‘What time are they coming?’

  ‘Not till twelve-thirty or one. But there’s lots to do, so bzzzz!’ He makes a shooing gesture at Matt, who laughs bemusedly and wanders off to the bathroom.

  Once he’s dressed in his new birthday shirt and the Levis Joseph gave him, he steps out into the garden. The table is yellow with pine pollen, so he returns for a sponge and begins wiping down the table and chairs.

  It’s a stunning May morning and the air is still and fragrant. A bird, unseen, is tweeting crazily from one of the taller pine trees. It sounds uncannily like a 1980s Trimphone.

  ‘Perfect day for it, eh?’ Bruno says from the doorway. Matt turns to see him proffering a red checkered tablecloth.

  ‘Tablecloth? Really?’ Matt says. ‘My, we’re feeling fancy this morning.’

  ‘It’s not every day your partner hits forty-three,’ Bruno says.

  ‘This is true,’ Matt replies, pushing out his bottom lip.

  ‘What?’

  ‘I can’t help but think about the big one,’ Matt says. ‘Fifty. Imagine that.’

  ‘And after that comes sixty and seventy and eighty and ninety and then we get buried,’ Bruno says.

  ‘Don’t be like that. I was only thinking about—’

  ‘Yeah, but there’s no point, is there?’ Bruno interrupts. He waves the folded tablecloth at Matt again, and once he has taken it, returns inside the house.

  Bruno has a particular aversion to any discussion about age. Perhaps, Matt thinks, it’s because his age difference with Matt is a sorer subject than he likes to admit.

  But he’s right. The philosophers are right too. Neither the future nor the past exist. There is only now. But forty-three . . . All the same!

  At five past twelve, Joseph’s car appears at the bottom of the sloping, twisting, dusty driveway. Though his car is a four-wheel drive and though even the C1 manages the track with ease, Joseph always parks at the bottom of the slope next to Bruno’s little motorbike. ‘I just prefer it that way,’ he says whenever anyone challenges him about it.

  ‘Do you want me to come down?’ Matt calls out.

  ‘No, we’ve got it, honey,’ Connie calls back. She’s carrying a large cake box and Joseph a woven picnic basket.

  Once the contents of the basket – pots of tapenade and olives and pats of smelly goat’s cheese – have been added to Bruno’s mezze-type spread, and once the cake box (a secret – no peeping!) has been placed in the refrigerator along with the Champagne, Bruno asks, ‘So what about the other thing?’

  ‘What other thing?’ Connie asks. ‘Oh, that!’

  Matt glances at the faces around him, one by one. Everyone is looking strangely amused.

  ‘I might need Matt to help me with that,’ Connie says. ‘It’s a bit unmanageable for one person.’

  Matt frowns in puzzlement. Everyone still looks amused, but somehow also expectant. They look like the thing in the car might not be any old thing.

  Despite years of training to keep his expectations low, Matt starts to feel excited as he accompanies Connie back down the track. She is making small talk about their drive out from Aix this morning, but there’s something in her tone, some artificiality, something mocking almost, that reveals it for what it is: a carefully designed distraction from whatever’s in the car.

  The fact that Bruno and Joseph also follow on, either to help carry the thing or to witness Matt’s reaction to it, makes him even more excited, and by the time they reach the car his heart is racing a little. He feels like a child at Christmas.

  ‘Here,’ Connie says, reaching for the handle to the Dacia’s hatchback. ‘I threw a blanket over it to keep the sun off.’

  As the hatchback opens, Matt glances back at Bruno. He’s chewing his top lip nervously. And are those tears in his eyes?

  And then there’s a sound: a whimper, a scuffle. Matt’s head snaps back towards the open rear of the car. A lump forms in his throat. He stops breathing.

  ‘We didn’t have time to wrap it,’ Connie is saying, still in her false, disinterested voice. ‘But you can remove the blanket yourself. That’s almost the same thing really, isn’t it?’

  Matt reaches out, and there it is again. That noise. A strangled little squeak. He tremblingly grasps the blanket. He tugs it away.

  Through vision instantly blurred by tears, he peers in at the contents. He opens his mouth to speak, but only manages to gasp.

  The puppy – a tiny roan cocker spaniel – rolls on to his back and writhes around and continues to whimper. He looks the same, exactly the same, as the one Matt chose all those years ago in the window of Heavy Petting. Matt pushes his fingers through the bars of the cage and as the puppy starts to lick them, he begins unexpectedly to weep.

  Bruno places one hand on Matt’s shoulder, but this only makes things worse. His sobs intensify to the point where he is forced to crouch down on to the dusty earth.

  ‘Don’t you like him, honey?’ Connie asks, her voice, too, trembling with emotion.

  Matt links his arms around his knees and begins to rock a little. ‘I’m sorry,’ he mumbles, still peering through his tears into the rear of the car. ‘It’s not that . . . I’m not, you know . . . He’s beautiful. I just . . . I can’t . . . breathe.’

  Connie crouches down and wraps her arms around Matt. ‘Honey,’ she says simply. Bruno joins her, and
then Joseph too, until all three of them are crouched down on the dusty earth, their arms surrounding shuddering, gasping Matt.

  Eventually, Matt’s tears subside, only to start up again when Bruno removes the puppy from the cage and places it in his arms.

  ‘This is for you too,’ Joseph says, reaching into the car for a carrier bag full of dog food and dog bowls and toys.

  ‘I think he wants to walk,’ Bruno says as they start back up the track towards the house. The puppy is writhing madly in Matt’s arms.

  ‘I wouldn’t put him down just yet,’ Connie says. ‘I’d wait till you have a lead on him.’

  ‘He needs to learn to be cuddled,’ Matt says. ‘He’s going to have lots of cuddles, aren’t you?’

  ‘He is the kind you wanted, isn’t he?’ Joseph asks. ‘Because they did say that if he’s the wrong kind . . .’

  ‘He’s perfect,’ Matt interrupts. He can’t even bear for Joseph to finish that phrase. His voice breaking again, he continues, ‘I can’t even begin to tell you how perfect he is. And I can’t think how to thank you both either.’

  ‘It’s Bruno’s gift really,’ Connie explains. ‘Bruno chose him for you.’

  ‘When did you do that?’ Matt asks.

  ‘Last Friday.’

  ‘When you had the car trouble?’

  ‘When I had the car trouble.’

  ‘So there was no car trouble?’

  ‘None,’ Bruno laughs.

  ‘Our gift to you,’ Connie says, ‘is more practical.’

  ‘Practical?’

  ‘Yes. It’s not the dog, it’s our commitment to the dog.’

  ‘I’m not sure I understand,’ Matt says. In truth he doesn’t much care about anything now. He just wants to bury his face in the puppy’s fur and forget everything else.

  ‘If you ever want to go away, we’ll look after him,’ Connie explains.

  ‘I always wanted a dog,’ Joseph says.

  Bruno seems shocked. ‘Really? I never knew that.’

  ‘He did,’ Connie admits. ‘But you were bad enough on your own. Imagine if you’d had an ally.’