Page 72 of The Trouble With Love

A slow nod. ‘Yeah. Took him at adolescence?’

‘Nicky was twelve, almost to the day. I remember . . .’ A wet weight pressed the back of my eyes. ‘I came in from school and he was upstairs, I went up to see him and he . . .’ The hand on my shoulder squeezed. ‘He was standing by the window talking to someone who wasn’t there.’ My voice tailed off into a cough. There it all was again, the pain, the uncertainty, the fear . . . ‘And my parents wouldn’t believe . . . they thought it was just a phase, attention-seeking . . . even when he . . . and I had to be the good one, the steady one, I had to keep him safe and look after him and keep him calm and never lose my temper or be difficult or unpredictable or . . .’ I stopped and sucked in some much-needed air.

‘Or have a life.’ Kai bent and looked me in the eye. ‘It wasn’t his fault, Holly.’

‘I know!’ I let myself shout now. ‘I know all this! And my rational brain says it’s fine to go out and have a life and fall in love and not always have to be there for him but . . .’ The rock in my throat let a few tears escape past it. ‘But my heart couldn’t do it. Couldn’t do the double act, sensible, together Holly for Nicholas, no emotional overload, no recriminations, and yet be able to feel . . . really feel and react and throw itself into something. I’ve spent so long looking at the dark from this side, Kai’ — the tears bubbled through and stroked a line down my cheeks — ‘from his side. I don’t know if I know how to feel from the other side.’

He caught my hand. ‘That’s perfectly understandable, Holly. Drifting along, taking care of Nick, turning a blind eye to all the rest of life because you cast yourself in the position of carer.’

‘But maybe it’s more than that. Maybe it’s not Nick, maybe it never was. What about if it’s just me? If I can’t ever feel anything real for someone?’ His hold on my hand tightened for a second then released as I moved away. ‘I’m sorry, Kai. This wasn’t a good idea.’

‘What wasn’t?’

‘This. You and me.’

Suddenly his hand was back, gripping at my wrist so tightly that little electric shocks fired up to my elbow. ‘No. No, Holly. I won’t let this happen. I will not let you turn your back on this, on us, on a relationship just because you feel guilty.’

‘I do not feel guilty.’ I twitched my arm in his grasp once or twice, but he didn’t let go.

‘Oh, I think you do. Guilty that you resent your brother for who he is, and guilty that you hate him for what he’s made you into — someone who can’t show emotion for fear of what will happen.’

‘I . . .’ Then everything stopped. A huge barrier rolled away from a part of my heart that I’d been ignoring, the part that I’d hidden behind sibling duty and responsibility; concealed so carefully that I’d been able to fool myself into believing that it didn’t exist. I remembered those children playing by the river, the teasing, arguing relationship between them. The normality. ‘I didn’t mean to,’ my voice was a whisper. ‘I never wanted to hate him. I love Nick. But sometimes . . .’ The horrible secret corner of myself curled inwards as the light of realisation shone upon it and I began to cry. ‘Sometimes it’s too much.’

‘Holly.’ Kai folded himself around me. ‘No more protection, strip it all away and look at what’s happened. It’s the only way to let yourself get over it, I should know. Look at who did what and why . . .’

‘He should have been my big brother!’ The words came from my ten-year-old self. ‘He should have been there for me! But I had to always be there for him, protecting and standing up for him and not losing my temper or being irrational or any of the other things that ordinary real people do . . .’ Hot hard sobs welded my ribs together. ‘It’s not fair,’ wailed that ten year old girl, who’d had to take the responsibility for her brother when she should have been playing with dolls and riding ponies. ‘It’s not!’

Kai held me so tightly that my reluctant tears rocked both of us, resting his chin on the top of my head and using that long body to absorb the power of my resentment against my brother, a resentment I’d never allowed myself to be aware of until now.

Chapter Twenty-Five

I don’t need to do this any more. Weird that, huh? After all these years, these letters are now redundant. I can say this to your face, if I want to, but old habits won’t die unless you shoot them in the head and . . . yeah, I guess these serve a function. Stuff that maybe I wouldn’t say, couldn’t say to you. Jury’s out as to whether I’m even going to show you this pile of writing . . . maybe I’ll get a book out of it, hey, there’s a thought. ‘Writing to my Mother’ . . . but then there’s the pat little ending to get over, ‘and we met and we liked one another and the previous thirty-six years of misery and wanting and lonely nights and sabotaged relationships were all forgotten’.

Won’t happen. I’m preaching forgiveness and opening up and catharsis and all to Holly but it’s harder than you’d think to let go of all those years. They stain you so deep that it’s part of your soul, part of who you are, me and her. I’ve been made into this social outsider, this guy who stands beyond the crowd and watches and I don’t know that I’m ever going to be allowed to come into the firelight, while she . . . Holly . . . she’s spent so long protecting herself from that pain of having someone she loved turn underneath her from fun brother to this guy she’s had to protect from the world . . .

But together — ah, together we are something more. She takes the pain away. Somehow, being with Holly makes me feel that, hey yeah, I deserve a life. Spent so many . . . so many years believing that I was this lowlife piece of shit, something even a mother couldn’t love. So, QED, anyone who loved me must be fucking deranged, need a lesson in never trusting, never loving, and, oh yeah, I gave them that lesson.

And now I see what I did, how I humiliated those women to try to bring them down to my level. To show them how it feels to be less than human, to be this discarded, worthless thing not worth loving, not worth even so much as casual pity, and I’m sorry. I thought I was doing it to get myself away, give them a lesson in objective reality — don’t get attached to this guy, he’s no good — but what I really did was try to make them feel just one tiny atom of what I felt.

Okay, so I’m shit on a stick. But Holly doesn’t care. She knows what I did, she knows why. I’m not saying she understands, but she tries to. From the first she’s seen through the image and she’s not scared, even when I peel back the layers to show her what’s underneath it all. And I love her for it. Love her for her struggle to come to terms with the fact that she’s stifled her life for twenty years to care for her brother. Love her for the way she’s letting her inner craziness come up from where it’s been weighed down with the pragmatism and the logic. You know something, I even think she’s starting to believe in all this ‘magic’ stuff? Mind you, even I am beginning to wonder . . .

Chapter Twenty-Six

It was absolutely dark. The kind of complete darkness you never get in a town, where even during a power cut there’s people with lanterns and candles and generators. This was the dark of the deep countryside or, as Megan put it ‘like being inside a water buffalo’. I’ve no idea why it would be darker inside a water buffalo than any other ruminant, but that’s Megan for you.

Somewhere below us an owl boo-hooed, and an unconvinced blackbird twittered, a pheasant clattered skywards to my left and I grinned to myself. Underfoot the ground was still boggy, and every step felt like walking through undigested dinners, but the air had lost that shrapnel-feel of snow and settled down into a rain-tinged mildness. My right hand was loosely clasped in Megan’s, she in turn held Vivienne’s. Eve and Isobel were likewise joined to us, as we stood in a row on the hilltop and waited for the dawn. We must have looked like a set of paper cut outs, silhouetted as we were on the crest of the rising ground, joined hands outstretched, braced to meet the coming dawn.

‘So, you performed sex magic as a charm?’ Vivienne tugged at Megan’s hand until she turned and Vivienne and I were drawn face-to-face. ‘That was very enterprising of you, Holly.’

‘What exactly did you do?’ Megan’s grin was visible even in the dark. ‘I mean, was it complicated or did you go for the easy stuff?’

‘We . . . look, it was a charm, all right? We . . . said words and stuff.’

‘I bet you did.’

I gave Megan a shove and whispered, ‘It’s only for Vivienne’s benefit.’

‘So you didn’t do “sex magic” with your man?’

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