Page 28 of Just Say Christmas
Their mum hadn’t cried on the day Luke left for En Zed, on the first day of the three years Kane would spend without his brother, just like she hadn’t cried when she and Kane had dropped him at school for the first time, then driven away. Kane had only been six then, but he remembered twisting in his seat to look out the rear window for as long as he could still see the receding figure of his brother, dressed in his new uniform.
Their mother was too tough to cry, her emotions, like their dad’s, bottled up tight, then buried down deep. It wasn’t hard to see what had attracted their parents to each other. Toughness, fairness, and courage ranked first, last, and only in their catalog of virtues. Not that those were bad qualities, but you wouldn’t call them the softer feelings. They weren’t always easy virtues to live with, or live up to, either. Not at six, not at nine, and not at twelve, when Luke had got on the plane alone.
Luke hadn’t cried that day, either, just as he hadn’t cried when he’d been left at school. He’d walked, tall and straight, his face as blank as it always was when things got hard, through the gate that would lead him to the jet and back to New Zealand. Coming home, their dad said. Leaving home, Kane thought. Going from one place to another, Luke said.
Kane had been the only one to cry, again. He’d tried to hide it, but it hadn’t worked. His mum had handed him a handkerchief without looking at him and said, “Nobody likes a baby. Crying’s what you do in bed, alone. It’s not what you do when anybody can see.” Kane had stifled the sobs and known he was alone, and that Luke, as always, was right. You didn’t have a choice until you were grown, until you were a man, but you took care, every day until the day when you could choose, that you built the strength it would take to make your choice, to stand by it, and not to give anybody else the chance to tell you no.
At least Luke had been there for Kane’s first term boarding at his public school that year, another preordained step on the road to rugby. It hadn’t been too bad for Kane, even though he was a new boy, because his brother had been there three years already, and was possessed of that most valuable currency of the English boarding school, success at sport.
That last Christmas before Luke left for New Zealand, Kane had spent hours running in the cold with his brother, watching his breath puff out in clouds, feeling his thighs and calves burn as he tried his best to keep up, and thinking up schemes by which they’d both be able to stay here, and stay together. Christmas had never come so fast or passed so quickly, and when the New Year had rolled by, too, as days did, and the two of them had been out on yet another run, passing house after house where smoke curled from chimneys, and families . . . did whatever those families did, Luke had cut him off as Kane said, “If we said we wouldn’t go. If we stood our ground. Dad’s always saying to stand your ground. That might work.”
Luke didn’t slow down, and he didn’t look at the cozy windows, light glowing against the harsh day outside. He said, “It’s not happening. We have to face it. It’s not. In three years, you’ll be in Dunedin with me. We’ll be in school together again, and when we’re done with it, we’ll be able to choose for ourselves. One thing I can tell you for sure, though. When I’m grown, I’m not playing for Dad.”
When they were grown, neither of them had. Luke had gone to the Crusaders, and then Kane had. Every time the Highlanders had met their South Island foes after that, no quarter had been asked and none given, and that was fine with all of them. They all understood the rules.
Their dad married again after Luke left home. That had been a surprise. A very pretty, absolutely tiny Maori woman named Miriama, as soft as their mum wasn’t, who’d somehow wrapped their dad round her finger—within the confines of their home, at least—even as he pretended it wasn’t happening. She’d brought a daughter with her, Nyree, who was softer than that, because she didn’t have the armor of all that femininity.
Nyree had been, in fact, absolutely defenseless. You couldn’t possibly cite your parents’ list of important virtues and leave Nyree to fend for herself. It would be like leaving a baby robin who didn’t have her feathers yet peeping helplessly on the ground, when anybody with half a heart would pick her up and put her carefully back into the nest. Soon enough, Miriama had had another daughter, Kiri, who came into the world sure that she had a place in it, unlike Nyree. A year or so later, Kane had left home in his turn, and eventually, Luke had gone to France, where, he said, he could be himself.
You could say that Kane had had his own chance to be a big brother, although it was a bit different than Luke’s version, because nobody, in this or any other lifetime, would ever teach Nyree to harden up. Nyree didn’t like sport, she didn’t like maths, and she didn’t like competition, and she’d proved as impossible to budge, in her way, as Luke had always been. You wouldn’t think so to look at her, but as Kane had already observed, size wasn’t everything. Marko thought he was tough, too, and so did everybody else, and look what had happened tohim.He’d got a kitten, and then he’d got Nyree, and it had pretty much been Game Over.
Kane had about three families, really, so why should it feel so weirdly lonely to sit here opposite Victoria, listen to her play, and think about all of that? He had his siblings, the ones who were his by blood and the one who wasn’t, and he had his team. And, of course, his mum and dad, who’d taught him to survive.
Victoria finished the song, and he thought about what to do next. Ask her to play another one, maybe. Yeh, that would be good.
“Hello?” The voice came from out of the darkness. “Nyree? Kane? Marko? Anybody out here?” And he jumped to his feet.
His brother had made it for the weekend after all.
16
Asking Nicely
MARKO
It wasn’t hard to figure out how to give Nyree a massage, Marko found, with a bit of coaching from Chrysalis and feedback from the recipient herself. Itwashard to figure out how to do it in this . . . context. It was darker where he was standing, at least, at the outer edge of the circle of massage tables, which was fortunate, and he very carefullywasn’tlooking at anybody else, just as he hoped they weren’t looking at him. He was pretending, fairly desperately, that he and Nyree were alone.
They’d moved on to firmer pressure now, at least, which was ground where he was more comfortable. He had the muscles at the backs and outsides of Nyree’s thighs gripped in his hands, as per instructions, and was working them “like kneading a ball of dough,” as Chrysalis had put it. Not that he knew how to knead a ball of dough. Nyree sighed, though, and said, “So good. More of that, please,” so he seemed to know well enough. Down to her calves, then, which were even farther from the goal area. Which was good, although she was humming, or possibly moaning, which didn’t help anything and which everybody else could probably hear.
“Quiet,” he said, and she said, “Hmm?” like she hadn’t heard, or she didn’t care, and like she’d never heard, “Do what I tell you” in her life. None of which was helping at all. Also, there was her perfectly round bum, which was practically in his face, and that bikini wasn’t as big as it might have been. It was also riding up. Why was it nearly as hot to see a girl’s bikini bottoms riding up as it was to see her bare bottom? Because you couldthinkabout seeing her bare bottom, that was why. And plan what you’d do when you saw it.
The music had changed again, too. It was practically a pulse now. “Now that she’s relaxing,” Chrysalis said, sounding perhaps a little less like a kindy teacher, “now that you can feel her going all warm, ask her to turn over. Ask her nicely.”
Nyree said, from somewhere down where her face was buried in her upper arm, “Maybe I don’t want to be asked nicely.”
He said, “What?”
“All right,” she said with a sigh. “Ask me nicely.”
“Want to turn over for me now?” he asked, feeling stupid. She was right. Normally, he’d have said, “Turn over,” and she’d have done it. She liked it that way. He wanted to do it that way.
He liked patience fine. On his terms.
Then she turned over, and he forgot about that. There was that hard little belly, the navel that had already started to pop out and was going to stay that way for months, and the swell of her full breasts under the scrap of red fabric. He’d rather be doing this naked, and with less of an audience, but this way wasn’t exactly horrible.
Chrysalis said, “We’ll start at her feet this time, and let you work your slow way up her legs. Massage oil again, and then you stand at the end of the table, hold her foot in your hands, and press the thumbs into the base of the ball of her foot. Massage upward, into the muscle, and feel her foot nearly curving around your hand. That’s her wanting to get closer, feeling your touch.”
“Mmm,” Nyree said. “Yeh. That’s it. Do more of that.” Her other foot, though, was flexing, and then she was pressing it into the muscle of his shoulder like he was her prop, and he could see her quadriceps muscles tightening in her thighs. There was only one time that happened.
