It felt good to have the space and freedom to consider what to do with my life, and to throw my lot in with my family (and now it didn’t feel so strange to say that word…).
I think I’d finally started to become a better person; of course, the new me was still a lot like the old me; these things take time, there was a lot of garbage still stirring around inside me that I had to unlearn, and there were still social graces and nuances of interacting with other people that I just didn’t get at all.
But now I had Shari, my new-found sister, to help me; for some unknown reason, she loved me; actually, she loved me more than it was proper for a sister to love her younger brother, but I didn’t care, because I loved her the same way. Shari was truly lovely, as well as warm, kind, patient, understanding, organised, fiercely protective of her younger sister, Yaz, and loved my younger brother (and hers, too) Rick, who was in love with Yaz, and vice-versa.
Shari had shown me what it could be like to care for another person. It wasn’t long after Rick brought Shari and Yaz to live at the house that I discovered he and Yaz were in love, stumbling on the two of them making love, brother and sister relationship be damned. Yaz was gorgeous; Rick was almost ridiculously good looking, so I suppose it was inevitable the two of them found each other, especially at a time when they so desperately needed someone. Shari had tried to engage me in a similar relationship, but I was too unsettled by what I’d seen, and what little I’d done with her had made me feel like it was somehow wrong and shameful.
Eventually I had seen what and who Shari really was, her vulnerability and her need, and finally understood it matched my own. To my amazement, I discovered what it was to actually love someone and need them, and to have that love and need reciprocated. She’d literally pulled me back from the lip of suicide, and showed me that life could have meaning, that finally I wasn’t alone.
So now Rick and Yaz lived in one part of the house and Shari and I lived in another part of the house, although we still spent most of our time together. We’d split the house into two dwellings, for all intents and purposes: the upper floor for Rick and Yaz, the middle floor for Shari and me, and the ground floor as a family space, with the dining room, sitting rooms, and the kitchen. I had begun to feel a puzzling, and surprisingly deep attachment to Rick and Yaz; perhaps some of Shari had finally rubbed-off on me. Splitting the house the way we did was my way of ensuring my kid brother and my little sister stayed close and connected to me.
I’d had an epiphany over Nicky, where I realised just how I’d wronged him; Rick had shown me just how wrong I’d been, how much we’d hurt and abandoned Nicky, how alone we’d left him. If it wasn’t for Barbara, he’d have had nothing in his life. He tried to be my big brother, and I slapped him away, we both did. We never knew that our father had abducted him from his mother when he was still a toddler and brought him to England; we always thought Nicky was Barbara’s son, they’d been so close, and then that fateful night when he disappeared, my father had beaten him half to death. Barbara, my mother, had I but known it, had helped him to leave, but she’d left no clue where he’d gone, and she was dead the next day, murdered by that bastard now rotting in an American prison. Nearly four years after her death, prompted by Shari, we’d finally gone to visit her grave, to apologise for everything, and ask her forgiveness.
When we arrived at the cemetery, we were shocked to find the huge, ornate memorial covered in lies and hypocrisy my lying, despicable, psychopath of a father had erected was gone, and in its place was a small, dignified headstone with a simple, heartfelt message of love. I knew straight away that Nicky had done this, and my heart leaped; he was alive, he’d survived, dear God, our big brother was alive, and he’d come back!
I was still reeling from that revelation when Shari noticed something; there was a flower-holder set into the base of the headstone, and there was a handful of what I’d at first thought were weeds, but Shari bent down and pulled a stalk out of the holder, and I saw it was a flower. A few blue petals still clung to the stem in among the brown, curled petals, and when she bent the stalk, it didn’t snap, it was still fresh and pliable. The implications hit us immediately; those flowers were only put there a little while ago, maybe only a week or so, and there was only one person in the world who’d come here to do that.
Nicky had been here just a short while ago, he’d been less than half a mile from our front door, but he’d not contacted us, and once again those feelings of guilt and shame, and loss, too, resurfaced. We’d made him hate us, for our constant rejection of him and our mother, for our steadfast refusal to do or say anything while our father beat the hell out of her, and for being the spoiled little pigs we’d been all our lives.
Shari saw all this going through my mind, and reached up to gently cup my face in her hands.
“It’s okay baby, it’s okay, he’ll come back one day, he’s not like how you were, you said that yourself; with all that happened to him here, he still came back to her, and he’ll come back again one day, when enough time has passed. Let’s go home, baby, it’s cold, and we have to talk.”
We trailed back to the car in silence, lost in our thoughts, Shari kept her arm through mine, her warm hand in my pocket holding mine, and when I looked down at her she smiled back at me, but there was a hint of sadness in her eyes. Initially it had felt peculiar to me, this connection she was trying to forge with Nicky, but then, when I thought about it, perhaps not so peculiar after all. She had every right to try and find some part of him for herself; he was her big brother too, and if she’d never known him, it wasn’t her fault.
Back at the house, Yaz and Shari set about making lunch while Rick and I sat huddled in our own thoughts, exchanging the occasional guilty look as we flicked through the pile of photo albums, looking, really looking, at our mother, seeing her features in ourselves. There was no doubt in my mind that Rick resembled dad, as did Nicky, but now I could see Barbara in him too, in his eyebrows, his jaw-line, his cheekbones, his ears, and especially his profile.
Rick was obviously thinking the same thing as he constantly flicked his gaze from the albums to my face and back again. Yaz finally broke the morose silence by calling us into the dining room, where the girls had made pork chops and baked potatoes, with green peas, carrots, and creamy baked onions, and a big apple pie for dessert.
Shari and Yaz tried to keep a flow of light conversation through the meal, but their efforts were falling on deaf ears as Rick and I stared unseeingly at the wall and chewed mechanically, our minds still at our mother’s graveside.
“… and so I said he could fuck me, but only if I got to wear a sheep costume and call him Bo Peep!”
I looked around as that last comment finally seeped into my head.
“Wha…?” I blurted, and Shari grinned at me.
“Finally, the Sleeper Awakens! We’ve been talking to you two space-cases for the last ten minutes, and both of you have just been sitting there staring blankly with your lips moving! Eat your lunch, it’s getting cold, we have things to discuss and a few things Yaz wants to run past all of us; that means you two have to be on the same planet as the rest of us earthlings, so call your mother-ship, tell them you’ll phone home later, and get cracking on your lunch Bobby, and you too, Ricky, we didn’t spend all that time slaving over it just to watch it get cold.”
Yaz smiled minxily at Ricky, who glanced guiltily at his full plate and started forking his food away , as did I, suddenly discovering just how delicious that meal was; my sisters are superb cooks, I have to say, and I’ll take serious issue with anyone who says otherwise. All too soon, our plates were empty, and Rick helped Yaz clear the table, finally bringing in a jug of coffee and a handful of mugs from the kitchen. Once everyone was seated again, Yaz started talking.
“Shari, boys, you know we agreed that we’d invest all the money we got from the sale of the business in a new, family venture. Well I think I know what we’re going to do. As we’re all aware, Shari knows the Property Development game as well as mummy ever did, she knows how to assess properties and negotiate on price, I’ve got a good handle on the renovation, contract, and end-user marketing side of the business, Ricky knows how to renovate and repair to a high standard, and I think you’re going to want to get your hand in as well, Bobby. I’ve been doing a little research on the property markets in this city, and there’s quite a lot that should interest any property developer. Did you know there’s a university right here in Carlisle?”
I did, but I’d never paid it much attention; none of the students ever spoke to me or paid any attention to me except to look disgusted and cross the road when I came trundling by with the road sweeper going full blast. Yaz grinned as she continued.