Chapter Six #2
“You mean like running a bloody tech start-up?” Bastian speaks the last three words like they are the equivalent of drinking toilet water. Eric merely sighs, as if he has heard it a million times, and gives me a wan smile.
“You’ll forgive me, I’m on the way out. I have a dinner meeting in London.” He turns to Bastian. “Behave.”
“You, too,” Bastian says. His tone is so flat and cold that I want to blush with the awkwardness, but I try not to. Eric is walking to the door of the flat, looking at his phone again as he opens the front door and presses the button for the lift.
“It was nice to meet you, Landen,” he says.
“Lando,” Bastian corrects fiercely, but his dad has stepped into the lift and the doors have closed with a musical ding.
“Christ,” I mutter to myself, thinking that if father-son relations got any colder, we would have to relocate to the Arctic.
“What does that mean?” Bastian snaps.
“Nothing, I just—”
“Wondered why he’s such an asshole?” Bastian slams his own glass down on the marble countertop. I try not to flinch.
“No, I just … you know, you’re clearly so…” I gesture to his necklaces and see his jaw tighten, but I can’t seem to stop speaking. “I guess I expected your dad to be like you.”
“Right, because you know exactly who I am. Having a tech bro dad who couldn’t give a shit about witchcraft doesn’t conveniently fit into the elitist witch home you’ve imagined for me, does it?”
Bastian’s voice is so harsh, so visceral, so familiar that I respond without thinking.
“What did he do?” I blurt out. Bastian stares at me coldly.
“I don’t know why I should tell you.”
“You don’t have to.” I swallow hard and look at the setting sun, descending like a wilting orange marigold below the dazzling line of the skyscraper in front of us, casting Bastian in shadow.
I decide to give him a bit of honesty because I get the uncomfortable feeling I’m one fuckup away from being thrown out. “But … I do get hating your parents.”
“I don’t hate my dad.”
“I didn’t say you did.” On the edges of the room, the sunset dances brightly but we’re sat in the shadow. “I just said … I get it.”
There’s a long pause. I hold my breath, wondering if I’ve made it worse.
“He didn’t do anything,” Bastian says quietly.
“Is it just you and him?”
I nod to the only photo in the flat, stuck on the fridge.
The woman, who I assume is his mother, is smiling and looks to be only about twenty.
She’s got milky skin with a spattering of freckles and auburn hair and she’s leaning against a much younger version of Eric.
His dark hair is thicker and his eyes are livelier than the man I just met.
Bastian grimaces and looks away from it.
“I don’t know why he even put it there.” Bastian shakes his head, whipping the photo off the fridge. I almost expect him to throw it in the bin but he just walks over from the kitchen and sits on the sofa beside me with a heavy sigh, holding the photo in his hand.
“They look happy,” I say tentatively. They both look joyful and adventurous and young, the epitome of classy witches in their twenties, with their large rings on their clasped hands.
Eric’s is chunky, with symbology carved into it that matches some of the symbols hidden in the art on the walls.
Bastian’s mum’s ring is more Celtic, with a knotted band, like Bastian’s ring.
“Yeah, they were then.” Bastian snorts derisively. “They’re witchlore researchers, or they were. They met traveling. Dad’s Canadian, his side of the family are all Jamaican-Canadian and Haitian-Canadian. He grew up in Quebec.”
“He speaks French?”
“Québécois,” Bastian corrects. “Pépé, my dad’s dad, he speaks Haitian Creole, but Dad didn’t learn it.
” I want to ask him if he speaks any of these languages, but he goes on.
“Mum is Cornish. She wanted to raise her family there, in her coven.” Very briefly, he touches a finger against his mum’s face.
His own expression has contorted into something very complicated.
“They were both so into ancient witchcraft. Then he changed.”
Bastian’s face darkens. I can tell something happened, something bad, but I absolutely cannot ask about it. I wait for Bastian to go on.
“Everything broke apart. He started working late, changed careers, went into one flashy business venture after another. He stopped coming to coven meetings, stopped practicing the craft. He started saying witchlore was just a quirk of his upbringing, that it had no bearing on our lives. Witchcraft is everything to Mum.” From the way his mouth twists with scorn I can tell this was one of the most painful ways his dad changed.
“So she left him. Asked for a divorce. Who could blame her, really?”
“Where is she now?”
“She’s still a researcher for the Boscastle Witchcraft Museum. I think she’s in Cuba or something.”
The way he says it tells me it’s still sore.
“And … do you see the rest of your family?”
“Not since the divorce.” His voice is very clipped.
“I call my nan down in Cornwall, but she’s very low tech.
She doesn’t always answer. I keep up with my cousins and Pépé and Grandma Olive in Quebec online, but we used to go over every year, sometimes twice a year, and now…
” He shakes his head and looks angrily around the flat.
“But why shouldn’t they be mad at him? It’s like he’s severed off half of himself!
I wouldn’t speak to him, either, but I have to live with him, so… ”
Bastian trails off. As I wait, unsure what to say, I realize something.
Bastian might have grandparents and cousins and a whole world I don’t know about, but right now, he’s just as isolated as I am.
My thoughts are interrupted by the sound of a door opening and something clicking toward me.
Then a furry face appears by my knee. It’s a gray French bulldog with the most plaintive amber eyes I’ve ever seen.
“Oh my god, you have a dog?” I instantly begin ruffling its adorable little ears and it pants happily. “Why didn’t you say?”
“This is René.”
“René?” I laugh, as René jumps up on the sofa next to me, putting his front paws on my thighs.
“My mum likes philosophy,” Bastian says. René trots along the long sofa and climbs up on Bastian’s lap, licking his face. Bastian smiles and it’s the most genuine smile I’ve seen on his face so far.
“So like … René Descartes?” René trots back down the sofa to me, as if he wishes we were sitting closer together so he could lick us both at the same time.
“Yeah.” Bastian smiles fondly. All the tension has gone from the room like air let out of a balloon. “Look, shall we … pretend that my dad isn’t an arse and just look at the book?”
I’m very relieved. I don’t want to sit with this uncomfortable feeling that I’ve misjudged him and made assumptions about what his life must be like.
After all, the flat might be gorgeous, but it must be lonely with only René for company and the people he loves halfway around the world.
It’s odd to have had him pinned in my mind as one kind of person and now be seeing him differently. I don’t know if I really want to.
“Yes,” I say. “Let’s do it.”