Page 67 of The Trouble With Love

I could think of other words to describe that kind of behaviour, but none of them mattered now.

‘I worked in Pickering, in a care home for the elderly. It was . . . nice. I used to sit and chat to the residents about the old days, they used to tell me their life stories, it was, yes, nice and a job that dad approved of. Not much chance of meeting any eligible men, you see, not when you spend the day with the over-eighties.’ She smiled at her joke but Kai was looking at the end of the world and couldn’t muster so much as a deathly stretch of the lips.

‘But you did.’ I felt I had to keep everything on track. My job to be the responsible one. ‘Obviously.’

‘I . . . He came on a delivery, laundry, I think. Gorgeous boy, dark hair and those eyes . . .’ She bit her lip. ‘Da — Kai, you look so much like him’ A wobbly half-smile. ‘Do you always look like this, by the way? The leather and the earring and things? Or is it for my benefit?’

Kai’s head came up. He’d drawn blood on his fingers and I felt my heart triple-time. ‘No,’ he said. ‘No. I ask the questions.’

‘Kai,’ I touched his face. He took hold of my hand, and gripped like a child afraid of falling.

‘It’s okay,’ he said, either to me or himself. ‘It’s okay. I can do this. Holly . . .’

‘It was only the once. In the potting shed in the gardens, while I was supposed to be putting up the Christmas decorations. And then, of course . . .’ Eve gave a tiny shrug that encompassed a world of terrible decisions. ‘I didn’t dare say anything at home. Dad would have . . .’ another little shrug. ‘And I didn’t have any money, or anywhere to go, no friends to take me in . . . please, David, please try to understand.’ She reached out and tentatively touched his shoulder, a touch he either couldn’t feel or ignored.

Instead he looked up at me, as though this were my story.

‘Holly, I need to . . . can you give us some time?’

He needed to fall, I could see that. To drop into this whole new relationship without a safety net. ‘Yeah. I’m going to pop out and get some milk,’ I replied to his unspoken plea. ‘Back in a sec.’

I walked up and down the main street a few times, popped into the little Co-Op and bought milk, eggs and some bacon to replenish Eve’s sparse stores. Watched the Christmas lights swinging in the chill wind, saw some children racing down towards the river, gloved and booted against the rain, hand in hand and laughing. To occupy some more time I watched them, obviously a family group, making paper boats and setting them afloat on the meltwater-swollen beck at the bottom of town, then following their progress by running down to the bridge to stand and watch to see whose boat came underneath first. Two brothers and a tolerated little sister, annoying and adorable in equal measures, hero-worshipping her older siblings, accepting their taunts when her boat floundered, and cheering when she beat them.

This was how it was supposed to be. For the first time in the twenty years since Nicholas’s illness had manifested, I allowed myself to feel the loneliness, the wrongness of growing up with my brother the way he was. In that sleetwashed medieval street I stood watching a group of children play, and I cried. The cold rain mimicked my tears sufficiently for my unhappiness to be invisible and, as the children yelled and laughed and splashed one another I remembered my childhood and the way it had ended.

Kai was right. We were alike, he and I, and that was what drew us together. We’d both been cheated out of a proper childhood; he by the double loss of parents and me by having to become responsible for my brother. It was why Kai saw through my capable, coping exterior to the damage that lay underneath. The pragmatic, realistic outer shell that I’d had to adopt to deal with Nicholas, because my parents couldn’t. Because he’d had to develop his own outer shell, to cope with abuse and with the lack of love. We were the same . . .

Kai. Back in that little house, discovering his mother — Eve, wow, turn up for the books — confronting his own origins. I shook the tears away from my eyes. He needed me, and he needed me capable, managing, able to deal. The last thing on earth he needed was for me to break. I sniffed hard and did a couple more turns of the streets to let the redness subside from my eyes and until I could put the puffiness down to the ferocious wind. When I judged that I looked sufficiently brimming with self-control, I went back.

Kai was alone, pacing up and down the little room like a wild animal that’s just recovered from the tranquilising dart. He was running his hands through his hair and shaking his head as though trying to escape from something that kept following him. ‘Are you all right?’

‘I don’t know. I . . . it wasn’t what I thought, Holly. I’ve been so bitter, for so long, and now I don’t know how to feel, what to think.’

We heard Eve’s slow descent of the stairs long before she came back into the room. ‘Oh, Holly,’ her eyes were full again. ‘It happened. It was all real. I was beginning to doubt, and then I got the phone call and, I knew. It was all real.’

‘I’m sorry?’

‘The spell.’ Eve’s eyes were alive, she’d lost the stooped posture, the frail look. ‘Look at him, Holly. He is what I wished for. My David. Here.’ She held something out to Kai. ‘I kept it beside my bed. All these years.’

It was a photograph, a blurry colour shot which slowly resolved into a picture of a tiny, smeared face. The eyes were open, mere slits in the clearly yelling face, but even so the pale colour was unmistakable. ‘Me.’

‘Yes. I carried that camera around for the whole of the last three months, just to be sure . . . I took a couple, but my hands were shaky and this is the only one that came out.’

‘But I thought you wished to meet the man of your dreams?’

Eve’s eyes were red, not my brief moment-of-self-pity red, the kind of red you get from crying forever. ‘I used to dream of a little boy running to me with flowers in his hands. Then I dreamed of a man coming up to me and saying “I’m David”.’ She put her soft hand on mine. ‘I can stop dreaming now.’

Kai was studying the photo, under the window where there was more light. I drew Eve into the kitchen and began unpacking the shopping. ‘Eve, he’s going to need time, you understand that.’

‘Of course.’ Eve lowered her voice. ‘Tell him it doesn’t matter if he never wants to come again. Just knowing — knowing he’s out there, with you, that’s all I ever wanted.’

‘I’ll come back.’ Kai’s voice from the other room made us both jump. ‘How can I not? I need to know who I am. You are the only one who can tell me.’ His voice dropped. ‘The only one.’

‘Do you have more family?’ I looked around as we went into the hallway. There were no photos there either, only a small oil painting of a constipated-looking cat.

‘No.’ Eve said sadly. ‘I never married. I trained as a nurse once Dad died, took early retirement and bought this little place. I’ve always lived around here and this is where my friends are.’

I nearly dragged Kai out into the rain, which had turned to hail in our absence. He was rigid and had that frozen kind of expression you usually see on trauma victims. ‘That was my mother,’ he whispered. Then he turned to me and wrapped me in his arms. ‘Fucking, fucking crazy.’ For a while we hugged, his body warm against mine, a defence against the weather.

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