24. Briar Jones, Call Home #2
‘What’s all this about? Have you bumped into him at the school? How’s it been? Are you eating?’
‘Sorry,’ Briar says. ‘I’ve got to go.’
‘No, don’t, we’ve - look, Sean’s not even here, let me go and get him. He wants to know how you are too.’
‘I’m fine. Sorry. I haven’t had my phone, but I have it now. I’ll call you tomorrow. Go back to sleep. Love you.’
She sighs, clearly unsatisfied. ‘Okay. Love you too, you horrid creature.’
Briar hangs up, then leans against the lichen-furred brick and takes deep gulps of night air.
Could it be a trick of the brain? Self-defence?
Could something be so upsetting that the mind chooses to remove it entirely - highlight, select, delete?
And if so . . . what had happened that left Bastian bruised and bloody and Briar catatonic in their bed?
A horrible thought arises, and Briar can’t push it away.
Did I hurt him?
Back inside, they can’t pay attention to the rest of the boy cousins’ stories about investment portfolios or one of the girl cousins’ extensive saga of redecorating a Chelsea townhouse.
They pour a whisky, then another, and sink into a seasick fug of alcohol that cushions the sharp edges of their mind.
Eventually, Tate notices their unfocused gaze, and the fact that Westby hasn’t spoken for at least half an hour, and gathers them all up to go to bed.
In Westby’s palatial room, somebody’s set up a couple of camp beds with the air of wartime, crisp linens and fuzzed wool blankets arranged neatly on top. Tate crawls in next to West, and Hadley and Briar take the fold-outs, Briar’s head spinning as they struggle to arrange the bedclothes.
Half an hour after Tate has fumbled for the switch on the lamp and plunged them into true countryside darkness, Westby’s mother opens the door and switches on the main light, and everybody gasps like they’ve been doused with a bucket of ice water.
‘Crispin,’ she says, like he’s just hanging out in here fully awake rather than in bed mostly asleep, ‘your uncle wanted that recommendation for lunch in Padstow before he leaves, and I can’t remember where your father puts the business cards for that sort of thing.’
‘Google “nice fish restaurants in Padstow”,’ Westby says from the bed, muffled by his pillow.
‘I certainly will not. Come on, we have guests.’
Westby drags himself out from under the covers, luckily still dressed, and zombie-walks from the room after his mother.
‘She’s nuts,’ Hadley says, once they’ve gone. ‘Impressively deluded. I hope that if I have a husband who dies I’m trotting about with a fresh blow-dry chatting shit about seafood the same day.’
‘It’s horrible,’ Tate says, looking strange and squinty without his glasses. ‘Fuck. Can someone turn off the big light?’
Briar does it, even though they’re technically the farthest from the switch and too drunk to do it without stumbling.
They’re still lying there, thoughts of Bastian and Christmas and the letter cycling through their head like an unstoppable, nightmarish fairground ride, when Westby comes back into the room.
Tate turns on the bedside lamp again so that he can find his way, and Briar watches him attempt to undo a couple of his shirt buttons with fumbling hands before giving up and collapsing into bed face-down instead.
He stays there, and a minute later Briar hears Tate say, ‘West,’ very softly, and then, when Westby doesn’t move, ‘West, come here.’
Briar sits up. Westby is crying soundlessly, his heaving breaths shaking the mattress against the bedframe.
Tate moves over and puts an arm around him, and then Hadley gets up with her blanket and stomps flat-footed across the room so that she can get in on Westby’s other side.
Briar is planning on leaving them to it, the intricacies and deep lore of these friendships well beyond whatever tentative bond they might have forged in the past couple of weeks, when Hadley says, ‘Come on, Jones, don’t just watch us like a pervert. ’
Briar brings their blanket too, squeezes in at a sideways angle with their head next to Tate’s hip and their feet pressed against the tailboard.
The bed is just big enough for all four of them as long as everyone except Westby remains deeply uncomfortable.
His crying is audible now, low and primal.
Tate is stroking his back, and Hadley has taken hold of his upper arm and then closed her eyes and somehow immediately gone to sleep again.
Briar can’t sleep. Not with the mystery of Christmas hanging over their head, listening to Westby’s cracked-open heart and the little boyish gasps of air he has to take between sobs. It sounds like he says something, but Briar doesn’t catch it, and then he says it again.
‘Tate. Please.’
‘West, come on. It’s not a good idea.’
‘Please.’
Tate takes a deep breath and lets it out in a steady rush, like the opening of a sluice.
He doesn’t say anything else, but Briar is so close that they can hear the gentle stick and unstick of his mouth moving - and then Westby sighs, and all the tension goes out of him.
He stops crying instantly and tucks his head into the gap between Tate’s neck and shoulder, boneless and weary.
Tate turns off the light again. Briar feels the shift in his breathing when Westby falls into easy sleep, and hears it when Tate deems it safe to end his watch, stop focusing on the Work, and let himself drift off, too.