Chapter Thirty-Five #2
“Maybe if you hadn’t wasted an entire bottle on the kitchen table, you wouldn’t be,” Jonathan shouts from the kitchen.
“Does a man get no privacy in this house?” I ask, exasperated.
“Not when you have a shouting match in the stairwell,” Mason says.
I hate it when he’s reasonable.
“Stop being an arsehole and come back to the kitchen.” Ross waggles the bottle at me. “Let’s get shitfaced.”
“Fine! But if you get out-of-hand I’m calling Lucy.”
“You wouldn’t.”
“Got her on speed dial.”
“No wonder Rowan left you.”
“You little shit.” I launch myself down the stairs, but Ross ducks backwards, bee-lining towards the kitchen and cackling gleefully as he barrels into Jonathan, who’s propped himself against the door lintel. “Come back here!”
“See! I told you he liked her,” Ross shouts at Mason.
“Obviously he liked her!” Mason calls back. “They were making cow eyes at each other from the moment they got here.”
“Shame he drove her off. She was good craic.”
“I did not drive her off.” We’re both in the kitchen now, but Ross has put the table between us as a barrier. I feint left, and he runs right, veering at the last minute to avoid my reaching hands. “We mutually agreed to go our separate ways.”
“Who knew you were made of such utter bollocks?”
“I did,” Stuart says, entering the kitchen. “Could we please stop wrestling and sit down like adults?”
“No,” Ross and I say at the same time. I catch him in a headlock and bear him towards the ground.
“Five quid on Angus.”
“You traitor.” Ross glares at Mason. “What kind of a twin are you?”
“The kind who wants to win five quid.”
“You should go after her.” Ross has given up fighting, and is resting limp in my arms, both of us sprawled on the kitchen floor.
I’m out of breath from the tussle, and lean my head back on the cool, wooden counter door. My heart is beating too fast. My head is whirling.
I shut my eyes. “No.”
“Why not?”
“I know you’ve got Lucy, but… It’s not the same for the rest of us, Ross. Rowan and I. We were never going to work out.”
Ross gently disentangles himself. Somehow he’s still holding the bottle of wine, and he waves it at Mason, who takes it and pops the cork. “Maybe. But you don’t know that. Everyone isn’t Ma, Angus. They don’t always leave.”
I shoot him a look. “Since when did you start spouting that shit?”
“Surprisingly emotionally well-rounded, remember? Also, Lucy wouldn’t marry me until I sorted myself out. So I saw a counsellor for a while. It… helped.”
“Huh.”
I would never have expected it would be my nightmare little brother giving me this kind of advice. Stuart or Jonathan, yes. Even Mason. But Ross? Ross has always been the joker. The trickster. The smart-mouth. Never one for the emotions.
“Go after her, don’t go after her. It’s up to you. But don’t do it because you’ve already decided the outcome. Don’t do it because you’re scared.”
“I’m not scared,” I say automatically.
“Yeah, you are. And that’s okay.” Ross gives me one of his most mischievous grins. “You know what will help with that?”
“What?”
He throws a piece of cake into my face.
* * *
We buried him at the edge of the property, on a small rise far from the road.
Thick grass has grown over the mound in the last four years, and a sheet of bluebells wave their drooping heads at me as I approach.
This early, mist is still thick on the moorland, and the hills are barely visible: purple shrugging shapes, like the shoulders of fallen giants.
I rose before the sun, leaving the others to sleep off their hangovers in peace.
Today, of all days, I want to be alone.
“Hi, Da.” I kneel in front of the stone and lay the small bunch of daffodils I’ve cut from the garden beside me. His favourites. He always said they reminded him of Ma.
I was there when he passed. Shrunken in the hospital bed, surrounded by machines and tubes. Her name the last thing he said. Even twenty years after she left, she was the first thing on his mind. His final breath.
I miss him. I miss him every day, even if I can’t admit it to anyone, even if I can’t say it out loud, even if I hate him, even if I wish I could scream at him for being so bloody blindly in love with a woman who didn’t want him that he couldn’t see that the people who needed him were still right there.
I loathe him and I long for him and I left him, and no matter what Stuart says I can’t forgive myself for that.
Every year we walked the West Highland Way. Second week of May. Like clockwork. Until I left him. And when I came back, it was too late. He was too unwell. And the second week of May passed, and then two days later, so did he.
Four years ago today.
“I’m trying, Da. I promise I’m trying to keep it together, to keep it going, but you’re not here anymore and it’s hard.” I look at the farm buildings in the distance, softly lit by the dawn. “I don’t know what you’d make of it. What we’ve done. I like to think you’d be proud, but…”
I sigh. What am I doing? Talking to a dead man who can’t talk back?
“I met this woman, Da. And she was bright. Looking at her felt like a light in the dark. And I can’t help but wonder, is that how you felt about Ma? Like she put the colour back in your world?”
Rowan’s smile. Rowan’s laugh. Rowan’s face going lax in sleep. Rowan’s freckles. Her obnoxious clothes, and her stubborn grimace, and the way she closed her eyes when she swayed to the beat.
Nothing, I said. But she isn’t nothing to me.
She’s everything. It isn’t rational, and it isn’t reasonable, and it doesn’t make any sense, and I drove her away because I’m not scared, I’m terrified, of feeling that way, of loving someone and losing them and never being able to crawl out of that hole, and now I’m the one who has nothing.
Nothing at all.
I stare at the farm. The thought of going back there, of all the work we have to do, of the phone calls I have to make, of dismantling the wedding, piece by piece, of putting it back to rights exhausts me.
The farm exhausts me.
Every memory I’ve ever made is here. I grew up among these walls: I played hide and seek in the haystacks, and waddled after Ma in the garden; I called the cows in with Da, and, when I was old enough, sat by the fire with him nursing a beer.
My initials are carved in the Den’s door frame at various heights.
My blood stains the kitchen flagstones where I cut myself peeling carrots.
Every floorboard knows the weight and step of my tread.
The shadows of my past pass through me like ghosts, boy, teen, man, the loss and the anger and the guilt, the salt sweat and the tears, the echo of Da’s voice, the touch of Ma’s hand on my back, my brothers calling my name.
I know the exact brick where Da smashed his beer the day Ma left, can taste the promise I made, barely ten, that I would never be like her. That I would never do the same.
No matter how far I try to wander, that promise always calls me back.
I love this land with every fibre and inch of my being.
I hate it with equal venom.
I’ve worked so hard, for so long, to keep the farm alive. To keep us afloat.
I don’t know if I can do it anymore.
I look back at Da’s grave.
“What do I do, Da? Where do I go from here?”
He doesn’t answer.
Only the memory of my own voice floating back on the wind.
Nothing.