Zeke
Zeke
“You’re different,” Brady tells me, cocking his head back to drink his beer from the bottle.
“Probably,” I say, staring at the living area of our Putney flat, with its secondhand leather sofas and the rug we got from the Aldi middle aisle.
It’s smaller than I remember. And darker. And…moldier. It’s actually kind of making The Merry Dormouse look good. Did we usually leave the place this dirty?
“You’ve always had that slightly, you know, wounded vibe,” Brady goes on, sliding a beer my way along the kitchen countertop. “But now you’ve gone proper dark.”
I catch the beer with one quick hand, like a cowboy in a bar. I think about how Lexi would tease me for that, what she’d say about me drinking lager when we all know I’m a gin and tonic guy. I mean, who am I trying to impress? Brady? I slide the beer back down the counter to him, ending up whacking it into an unwashed bowl. Brady has to scramble to save it from falling over the edge.
“I nearly died,” I say, going to the fridge for tonic water. There isn’t any. “That changes you.”
“All right, Jason Statham,” Brady says, watching me over his beer. “You sure it’s not just that you didn’t get the girl for the first time in your life, and it’s made you pouty?”
I stare at him. He smiles, head tilted, face warmer than his words make him sound. I know what he’s doing: trying to snap me out of this, the way he does when I’m mopey or overthinking.
But this…is a little more than that.
“She just won’t even speak to me,” I say.
My voice rasps. I’ve been drinking too much, staying up too late. Everything feels so irrelevant. I’ve not gone back to work yet—journalists keep camping out at the restaurant, and Davide thinks it won’t be good for me to be back in the kitchen environment yet. What he means is, the restaurant will be full of gawkers, and that’ll be crap for everyone.
We’re all just waiting for the world to lose interest in me. It won’t be long, especially with Lexi staying completely off the radar, too. There are only so many “Are the lost houseboaters in love?” articles that can run when the two of us won’t give them any new photos.
“What did you do? That’s the question,” Brady asks, leaning against the countertop. “Or, because it’s you, let me rephrase. Who did you sleep with that you shouldn’t have?”
“Piss off, Brady,” I say. Suddenly I can’t bear to be around him. I know he’s trying to help, but it’s like he’s got the wrong script, like he’s shooting lines meant for someone else.
“All right, Zeke, whatever you need,” Brady says softly, and I close my eyes for a moment, then reach for the beer I chucked his way.
“Sorry,” I say.
“That’s all right. You’re probably a bit, you know, PTSD and shit.”
I don’t say anything. I am—I’m constantly on edge, as if at any moment someone’s going to jump out at me with a knife, which is weird, because I don’t remember feeling that way on the houseboat. But that’s not why I snapped at Brady.
“Is this what real life is?” I say suddenly. “Sitting around and drinking beer, talking shit?”
“Yeah, pretty much,” Brady says. “Why?”
“I don’t know,” I say. “I don’t know. I think I just…remembered it being better.”
Mum couldn’t believe I went back to London. She only let me go when I said I’d be back in two days, and I felt a bit bad, because I’m not back up north for my family.
“You again,” is how Marissa greets me when I enter The Anchor on Friday night.
It’s quiet. The journalists and trauma-tourists have all left now, probably chasing some other poor person living their personal nightmare.
Marissa pours me a gin and tonic without asking and sets it down in front of me as I settle in at my favorite bar stool.
“Just so you know,” she says, “you’ve become an old regular. That is very sad at your near-prepubescent age.”
“How is she?” I ask, sipping my drink. I’m still hungover from drinking beers with the boys yesterday, pretending to enjoy myself.
“Healing,” Marissa says after a moment.
I nod. That’s good. I want that for her.
“Zeke?” says a man beside me.
I feel Marissa stiffen, and I flick my gaze her way before I look at the man who’s pulling up a bar stool next to me. He’s got sensible glasses and short hair, kind of city smart, but there’re holes in his ears where piercings used to be, so I’m guessing he had a different vibe once.
“Nicholas,” he says, holding out his hand for me to shake.
“Journalist?” I ask, not shaking it.
“Sort of. Researcher.” At my raised eyebrows, he adds, “I work for Morning Cuppa .”
Morning Cuppa is probably watched by millions of people a day. I look to Marissa.
“This one’s been hanging about like a bad smell,” she says. “I’ve seen him here most nights since you got back.”
Interesting. He’s waited until now to come over and talk to me.
“Your story, what you’ve been through—honestly, Zeke, it’s incredible.”
Nicholas has a real candor to him. A kind of intense earnestness. I imagine he’s very good at his job.
“Our viewers would love to hear from you and Lexi. When you’re ready to talk.”
“Not interested,” I say. “But thanks.”
“That’s such a shame,” he says. “Especially when I’ve got Lexi on board.”
My gaze flies up to Marissa again. She blinks. She didn’t know, either.
“Lexi said yes? To going on TV?” I ask, finally giving Nicholas my full attention.
He nods. “Absolutely. The money was too good to pass up, I think. Obviously you know she’s looking for her own place, and she’s got her niece to look after…”
“Not her niece,” Marissa says abruptly.
“Oh, no?” Nicholas says.
“Not her niece,” Marissa repeats. She rubs emphatically at the glass she’s drying with a cloth. “Lexi wouldn’t say yes.”
“Call her,” Nicholas says. “She’ll tell you.”
Marissa narrows her eyes and pulls out her phone. Lexi’s number is in that phone. Marissa’s messaging her right now, just throwing a few words out there like it’s nothing at all, when every moment of the day I’d kill for the chance to talk to her.
While we wait for Lexi’s reply, I inspect Nicholas. He looks very relaxed. He smiles at me.
“Honestly, I have so many questions,” he says. “But I don’t want to put that on you right now. Not until you’re ready.”
I say nothing. In the last week I’ve encountered a full range of people who want things from me. It’s incredibly weird. Most people like the story of us, I’ve realized—they aren’t really interested in talking to me, they’re just interested in telling other people they have. So when it comes to the actual conversation, they don’t really say much.
Journalists are different. They want sound bites. They want to walk you into a little trap that gets them the exact arrangement of words they need, so they ask questions like, And do you feel like loving Lexi made the journey harder, or did it keep you going?
Basically, they don’t want to know about the oil rig or the storm, they just want to know if Lexi and I were having sex.
“She’s doing it,” Marissa says in surprise. “She says…yeah. The money. It would mean she could move out and buy her own place, and there’s somewhere for sale in the same building as Mae and Penny, so she wants the cash fast.”
I cling to all the details this gives me. Lexi’s stuck to her decision to move out and find her own place: good. She’s rebuilt things with Penny and is prioritizing what matters to her most, time with Mae—also good. She’s ready to talk about what happened on the boat to the entire nation, but won’t talk to me: less good.
“You want me and Lexi on at the same time?” I say, turning to Nicholas. “Together?”
“Absolutely,” he says.
I study him for a moment. Wondering how much he knows. How much he’s figured out. He’s seen that it was Marissa, not me, who messaged Lexi—that probably tells him plenty.
“I’ll do it,” I say. “Just tell me when.”
“You look miserable,” Jeremy says, as we walk through the grounds of Alnwick Castle three days later, looking for the perfect picnic spot.
Lyra has very strict criteria. No direct sunlight—she burns easily. No bugs. Nothing prickly. Basically, Lyra prefers not to go outdoors unless it’s absolutely unavoidable, so she likes her picnic spot to be as indoorsy as possible.
“Is this why I’m here? Sibling intervention?” I say.
“Bonding time,” Lyra says. “Mother’s insistence.”
“Ah.” I should’ve guessed.
I catch Jeremy shooting Lyra a look, like, Play nice, would you?
The day after I got back, Lyra announced she was sick of walking on eggshells around me and I’d just have to tell her if she said something “triggering” (her quote marks) because she was no good at this weird fake thing everyone was doing. I’ve never felt more grateful for Lyra’s bluntness. The weird fake thing’s horrible. People fix on a smile when I turn up, and then they exclaim everything. Zeke! How are you! Wow! So good to see you safe and well!
“We would also like to spend time with you,” Lyra adds, widening her eyes as though this should have been obvious. “Here, this’ll do,” she says.
Jeremy spreads out the blanket on the grass in a spot shaded by the castle wall.
“Would you like to…talk about it?” Jeremy asks eventually.
You can hear the effort it takes him. The strain in his voice. We’re all a bit tense, especially Lyra, who has already announced she’s on her sixth coffee of the day.
“The boat, you mean?”
I think of the ship’s logs. The secrets once tucked into the houseboat’s walls, now deep in the ocean. Everything Jeremy doesn’t know, and whether it’s my responsibility to tell him. My therapist’s response to this question was an annoying Only you can know, Zeke . I keep turning up at his office and waiting for him to make me feel better, and he keeps saying, You know therapy is a slow process , and I want to scream at him that there’s not time for slow. I can’t go on like this, without her.
“What else would we mean?” Lyra says.
“I dunno,” I say, but I think, Lexi . Everyone assumes it’s the trauma of getting stranded at sea that’s got me so lost and depressed, but I know it isn’t that.
“You bought the boat looking for answers,” Jeremy says after a moment. He glances sideways at me. “Did you find them?”
“Yeah, your whole Dad’s-not-your-dad thing,” Lyra says, turning her body toward me, the way she does when she’s really listening. “How did that play out?”
My eyes flick to Jeremy. I didn’t know he’d told Lyra about this. He looks back, unapologetic. Of course—the two of them share pretty much everything.
“It’s all under the sea now, I guess,” I say, looking down at the bag of food between us.
I start unpacking. I’m surprised to find my eyes pricking at the thought of Dad’s logbooks being gone for good—I didn’t realize that was bothering me. But it’d been like meeting him again, reading those passages, and I wish I’d had him for longer.
“I always thought it was a bit of a mad theory,” Lyra says, reaching for a Scotch egg. “Jeremy’s thing about Dad hiding stuff in the boat. The idea that something would still be there.”
“They were still there,” I say, noncommittal. “Some of Dad’s logbooks, and some papers.”
“Oh! So?” Lyra pushes. “What did you find out?”
“Lyra,” I say.
“Yeah?”
“I don’t think we should talk about it now.”
“You say that about literally everything at the minute.”
“Yeah, well, I’m not feeling chatty.”
“How unusual!”
“Can you not?” I snap. “I’ve had a difficult fortnight, in case you didn’t know.”
She rolls her eyes. “I liked you better when you’d just got off the boat.”
“Excuse me?”
“This,” she says, waving her hand at me. “Sad victim Ezekiel. Lonely you-don’t-get-me Ezekiel. He’s come back over the last week. But when you got off that boat you had some grit to you for the first time in your life.”
“Lyra.” It’s Jeremy this time. He sits forward, taking a can of lemonade. “Back off.”
“No, you’ve always gone too easy on him, Jer.” She rounds on me. “You have so much potential. You could be someone. And you just waste it dossing around and whining. This whole experience could be the making of you.”
The making of you. Like I’m currently unmade, a messy bed.
“I know you’re different from me and Jeremy. I know you don’t have the focused gene—I know you missed out on the Ravenhill IQ, but— What?”
I think I sort of snorted.
“Nothing.”
“No, what? That wasn’t nothing.”
“It doesn’t matter. Go on. I’m useless, you and Jeremy got all the good genes…”
“That’s not what I said at all.”
“She’s just trying to say she gets that you’re not quite like us, Ezekiel,” Jeremy says. “It’s not your fault. It’s just the way you were made.”
His tone is so patronizing, and suddenly it just doesn’t seem to matter, holding this back. I don’t want to. I’m miserable, and for a nasty split second I don’t see why I should have to be miserable and everyone else gets to live in blissful sunny ignorance.
“Actually, I wasn’t made different. You were.”
Jeremy frowns behind his square glasses. He used to wear dorky round ones, but his wife, Veronica, chose him these. She’s been slowly improving him, polishing him up to shine like the successful man he is.
“What?”
“You weren’t Dad’s kid.”
As soon as I’ve said it, I regret it. This is all wrong. Jeremy’s everything I’m not, but he’s still my brother—I still love him. And I don’t want to hurt him.
“Jer, I’m sorry,” I say, rubbing my forehead. “I shouldn’t have told you like this.”
He lowers his drink. Behind him, a group of children run by, yelling something about invaders coming to the castle. One straggles behind, using his sword as a walking stick to help him scale the slope.
“You’re serious?” Jeremy says. “Dad? He…”
“I’m sorry. It was all…He had this folder of documents hidden on the boat. Paige knew, you know, his neighbor?”
“The weird one?” Jeremy says. He sounds slightly strangled.
“Yeah. It was her brother. He was your biological dad.” My heart pounds. “Mum had an affair with him in the nineties.”
“ Mum did?” Lyra says. “I mean, obviously Mum did. I just can’t…” She trails off, staring blankly at me. “I cannot imagine that. Are you sure ?”
“I’m sure.”
I guess this part’ll be harder for them than it was for me. I always thought my mum had cheated on Dad. I always thought she was a liar. It was never particularly hard to believe, either: my mum’s good at secrets, one of those stiff-upper-lip people who’ll never show you even a hint of their trauma. Her emotions are so packed away I’m not sure she’d know how to start talking about them. The idea of her making a bad decision is pretty mind-blowing, but the idea of her hiding it from us? Not so much.
“But…Paige’s brother died,” Jeremy says. His forehead’s wrinkled.
“Yes,” I say quietly. “He did.”
I’m pretty sure he died before I was born. I don’t know if it’s better or worse to know that the man was gone by the time he wrecked my parents’ marriage, but it hurts to think that he never had the chance to know Jeremy.
“Oh,” Lyra says.
She reaches for Jeremy’s hand. I look away. Lyra’s never once held my hand. I don’t know how it happened—how the two of them became a two. But I’m so sick of desperately wanting to worm my way into the space between them when they’ve never left me room.
“So my dad wasn’t my dad,” Jeremy says slowly. “He was your dad.”
“Yes.”
“And Lyra’s dad.”
“Yes.”
“And my dad…He’s dead.”
“I’m sorry.”
“Right,” Jeremy says, blinking rapidly. “Well. I suppose I’ve still got a dead dad, so it’s not all that different, really.”
I stare at him. Lyra’s nodding.
“Right, totally,” she says, patting his hand. “That’s such a good way to look at it.”
They’re like…they’re a different species to me. The thought that my father wasn’t really my father ate away at me for years—it changed me. But Jeremy’s taken it on board as though I’ve just rescheduled his Waitrose delivery.
“Thank you for telling me,” Jeremy says. He clears his throat. “I’ll go for a walk, I think.”
“I’ll come,” Lyra says, already standing, but he waves her off.
We watch him walk away for a while, and then, on impulse, I stand and chase him.
He looks around in surprise. He’d expected Lyra, I guess. He should’ve known better. I’ve always been the one chasing behind him.
“I really am sorry, Jeremy,” I say. “I know this is a lot.”
He nods. “I suppose it is,” he says. He looks toward the castle, squinting in the sunlight. “Right now it just seems a bit odd.”
I feel a moment of kinship with my brother. Things’ve been feeling a bit odd for me lately, too.
“It’ll need to sink in.”
“I’m sorry as well,” he says, glancing at me as we walk. “I did always think it was…you. That you were the odd one out.”
“I am,” I say. “I’m kind of realizing now that this really doesn’t change that. It was an excuse, I guess. I wanted something to explain it. Other than me being, you know, basically just shitter than you two.”
Jeremy frowns. “Ezekiel. You’re not ‘shitter’ than me and Lyra. You’re different. You’re the creative one. Your brain works in ways the two of us don’t understand. That’s not worse, or better, it’s just not the same.”
He’s never put it like that before. To be honest, we’ve never really had a conversation like this before. The closest we’ve ever come was that pint we had together, the night when we discussed buying back the houseboat.
“Look. Things have—Veronica and I have been going through a bit of a tough patch over the last few months,” Jeremy says, without looking at me. “And she’s asked me to do some work on…feelings, and expressing them, and…She’s asked me to step up, actually.” He shoots me a quick glance. “It’s made me look at myself rather differently.”
“God, I’m really sorry to hear that,” I say, a little shaken. Veronica and Jeremy have been together since I was a kid. I don’t know Veronica well, but the two of them have always seemed unshakable—the young suburban power couple.
“We’re working through it. But I’m learning some rather uncomfortable things about myself in the process,” Jeremy says, pressing his lips together. “It’s occurred to me lately that as children…Lyra and I weren’t always as kind to you as we should have been. I’m sorry for that.”
I swallow down on the sudden tightness in my throat and resist the temptation to brush that off.
“Thank you,” I say instead. “Thanks. That’s…yeah.”
“This Lexi,” Jeremy says. He’s still not looking at me, just walking, eyes downcast against the sun. “She’s what’s getting you down?”
“I know you think we just had some kind of weird…trauma romance…”
I see him wince at that and it almost makes me laugh.
“But I fell in love with her. I love her.”
He nods. He’s trying.
“And she’s gone completely silent?”
“She won’t speak to me.”
“Perhaps she can’t bear to, after what happened to you both. It was a trauma, Ezekiel.”
“I know,” I say.
I’m actually kind of grateful to hear him say that—Lyra’s been acting like I went on a sailing trip and keep complaining about it, and she’s right, it’s bringing out the victim in me. I don’t know what I want people to say, really. What I need seems to change all the time.
“But I don’t think it’s because of the trauma. When we got back, Lexi was with all her family, and then suddenly, she just…” I flatten down my curls, trying to think. “Someone pulled her away really fast. At the time, I thought she was just going for some quiet time with Mae—that’s Lexi’s best friend’s kid. Lexi helped raise her, she’s almost a mother to her, really. But the more I think back on the whole thing, how quickly they pulled Lexi away…I don’t know. I wonder if something happened . Brady said this stupid thing about how I must’ve done something wrong, and now I can’t stop thinking about it.”
“Done something wrong?” Jeremy asks.
“Actually, he said I probably slept with someone I shouldn’t have,” I say, with a laugh I don’t mean.
Jeremy says nothing for a while, just walking along, hands linked behind his back.
“Lexi helped to raise her friend’s child?”
“Yeah. I told you, she’s amazing.”
Jeremy adjusts his glasses, pausing to look out at the view over the green fields surrounding the castle. The sunlight’s lower now, giving each tiny blade of grass a shadow.
“Where’s the dad? Is he not in the picture?” he asks.
I shake my head. “A one-night stand who didn’t want anything to do with the baby, apparently.”
Jeremy hmm s again.
“When you came up to sell Dad’s boat,” he says, “did you stay in Gilmouth for long?”
He’s using that measured voice he slips into when he’s solving a puzzle.
“Just one night,” I say, watching a family clearing up their picnic below us. The castle looms behind, and for a strange second its bulk reminds me of the shadow of the oil rig.
“Alone?”
“Pardon?” I turn to stare at Jeremy.
“Did you sleep with someone that night? If I remember correctly, during that year after Dad’s death, you were out every night with a different woman.”
There’s only a hint of judgment in his voice—not bad, by Jeremy standards.
“I think I…Yeah, I brought someone back to my hotel room.”
“Where did you meet her?”
“Where are you going with this?” I say, but my heart is starting to beat too fast. “I met her at the pub. There’s, like, one pub in Gilmouth.”
“The pub where you met Lexi?”
“I mean…yeah.”
Like a gust of wind, it comes over me: I’d had that weird feeling of déjà vu at the pub on that first night, hadn’t I? I knew I’d met someone chatting across that bar before. I’d wondered for a split second if it had been Lexi, but then—like I’d told her—I figured it can’t have been, because I would’ve remembered her.
At the time when I sold the boat, Lexi was away, but Penny was working behind the bar at The Anchor. Lexi told me all about how Penny was in those days, how she drank too much, how she always ended up going back with someone.
What if…what if that someone had been me?
“Can’t you remember her? The woman you slept with?” Jeremy asks, and this time the judgment’s definitely there.
And justified, I guess. It’s just…at that stage of my life…I was going out almost every night, drinking, and the women did…blur.
“You think I slept with her best friend?” My voice is croaky.
“Worse,” Jeremy says, his mouth set in a grim line. “How old is this woman’s kid?”
My hand flies to my chest.
“What?”
“How old is she?”
“No, I’m always—I always used protection even when I was a stupid teenager.”
I suddenly feel like it’s hard to breathe.
“Condoms are only ninety-eight percent effective even if used perfectly,” Jeremy says, raising his eyebrows slightly behind his glasses. “And I don’t think a drunk teenage boy counts as perfect. I believe the percentage drops to eighty-something in reality.”
“ Eighty- something?” I’m clutching at my chest, gripping the fabric of my T-shirt.
“Even if you used it perfectly, Ezekiel, ninety-eight percent means that if you have sex one hundred times, two of those times, some sperm—”
“Oh my God.”
“So the kid,” Jeremy says, infuriatingly calm, “how old is she?”
“She’s…She’s…” I can’t sort through the fog of my mind. “Four. She’s four.”
I remember the conversation Lexi and I had on the floor of the houseboat bathroom. How Lexi had said Mae is four and two months, to be precise, which she always prefers you to be .
“Four and two months,” I say. I feel like my heart’s straining to reach my hand, shoving against my ribs. I’m light-headed. Dizzy. This can’t be true.
“Four years and two months, plus nine months, that’s just shy of five years.”
There’s no judgment or mockery in Jeremy’s face now. He’s entirely serious.
“Dad’s heart attack was five and a half years ago,” he says. “It took about six months to sort all the legal business after that, didn’t it? Do you recall when you sold the boat? You got rid of it pretty sharpish, if I remember rightly.”
“It was about a week after I turned eighteen,” I say hoarsely. I remember because there’d been loads of faff about my age—at seventeen, I was too young to sell it, so I’d had to wait until after my birthday.
“Well, then. The dates add up perfectly.”
“No. No. It can’t be that.”
I stagger toward a tree by the path, needing something to lean on. I rest my back against the trunk, turning away from the sunshine to stare at the cold castle wall.
“You said Lexi’s friend pulled her and the child away. You said—”
“I know,” I snap, “but it can’t be that. It can’t be that.”
Because if I am Mae’s father, then Lexi will never, ever forgive me.