Page 14 of Maybe (Mis-shapes #1)

ISAAC

A fortnight passed by before I returned to the café in Covent Garden.

Partly because I swapped shifts to attend an exam revision course and was on a mammoth ten-day run of payback late shifts merging into night shifts.

But mostly because it took me that long to calm the fuck down after Ezra’s little strop in the play park, my stupid overreaction to it, and the nagging thought that, yes, I had sounded like a starchy, self-righteous twat.

Half of me expected Ezra's absence—a single, lone molecule of me even hoped he would have moved on to a different busking spot, making things easier for both of us. Except that idea extinguished quicker than a candle in a hurricane when he lifted his head from his guitar to gaze across at me. Denying was pointless. He could be as brattish as he liked: I still felt things about him I really wasn’t supposed to feel.

He played ballads today. Beautifully, too, persevering in the face of indifference from the harried shoppers, the office workers, and the tourists, paying more attention to their phones and their bumper caffeine hits than the intense, ethereal man strumming his songs and wrapping his fine-boned fingers around my heart.

I recognised one of the tunes, an old eighties hit about taking a fast car and escaping somewhere.

Leave tonight or live and die this way .

Ezra used to belt those lyrics out as if semaphoring a message to someone.

Maybe he was, to himself. Learn to fly. Fly away.

He played it over and over, perfecting the haunting melody, singing with as much passion as the artiste herself.

To my mind, anyhow. By the thousandth rendition, my father had been less than impressed, the ghosts of his twisted words fresh, even now. That bloody boy, Janice. Useless . He’ll never amount to anything.

By the time his set came to an end and my brother took the seat opposite, signalling for a beer, we were both on edge.

Our last conversation had been laden with tension, Ezra jumping on my slightest misstep and me too full of what could have been—what should have been—to bite my tongue.

Too blinkered to see Ezra for what he was: a young man playing brilliantly with the cards he’d been dealt.

I’d been a pious git. Too judgemental, too stiff.

Too angry as well, at him for disappearing, for having this child without telling me, for missing the first nine years of Jonty’s life.

So how did we navigate this shit? How did we pick up the pieces of a broken friendship, a fraternity, and string them back together?

Because the man directly accountable for every charged silence and every cross word was six feet under.

Always, always, it came back to him. But what would he have done?

Welcomed Jonty with open arms? Played grandad?

Taken the boy to the park? Unlikely, seeing as he never did that with any of us first time around. Was it too late to claw a family back?

To claw Ezra back?

The beer arrived, and Ezra gulped at it gratefully, stretching out his long pale throat.

“Hi,” I said. “That sounded great.”

“Thanks.” Ezra toyed with a beer mat. “No hot date this week?”

Gerald and hot didn’t belong in the same sentence. Though our last date had been curtailed, he continued texting me at all hours. He wanted to see a therapist, to help with his loneliness. He assumed I’d know a few, which said as much about me as it did him.

“Sadly not. Us sanctimonious, middle-class, imbecilic fucknuggets aren’t in high demand.”

The tiniest of smiles tugged at Ezra’s lips.

“I’m… I’m sorry,” I added. “I said some stupid things.”

Ezra took a further swig, and I looked away from his elegant throat before I blurted out another one. “It was uncalled for,” I tagged on instead. “I… I think… it was a shock. The last few months have been a shock, to be honest. But I want you to know that meeting Jonty was great.”

He accepted my apology with a wave of his hand, though none from him was forthcoming. Time ticked by, interrupted by a waiter with the payment machine.

“Are you seeing anyone?” I asked. I’d been itching to know.

“God, no.” He took a smaller sip of beer, wiping his mouth with the back of his hand. “I can’t be doing with that bollocks. Easy come, easy go is more my style; I’m one of those purple devil emojis in human form, that you fuck without consequence.”

I squirmed at his bluntness. And how his dangerous, dark eyes looked directly at me while he said it, as a challenge, like he could read my thoughts. “Don’t do yourself down like that,” I mumbled.

“Why not? It’s true.” He reached for a cigarette. “Call me cynical, but I’ve seen relationships. They’re not quite my cup of tea. Me and Jonty are hunky-dory just as we are.”

“Can I tell Ed and Saffron about him?”

He raised a shoulder in a half shrug. “Yeah, I guess. If you want. Will they be interested?”

“Of course,” I answered, with more conviction than I felt. They’d be a lot more interested if Jonty was a twenty-year-old juvenile frat boy. “I loved seeing him. I still can’t believe I didn’t know about him. Did… did Dad?” A horrid thought struck me. “Does my mum?”

His lips twitched properly, as if I’d asked something funny. Then he blew out a ribbon of smoke into the air above our heads. “Oh yes, he knew. And she does.”

“What? And no one told me? You’re joking.”

He smirked. “Why do you think I fucking walked out?”

“I don’t know. I’ve never known; they never told me. I always assumed you wanted to go to art college and Dad didn't approve. That was the usual row.”

You want an easy life, Ezra? Off you trot, then. I hear Tesco’s looking for shelf stackers.

He eyed me speculatively. “Jonty’s nearly ten.

Surely it can’t be that hard to join the dots; I thought you were the clever one.

When Carly got up the duff, I’d got a job at a pub, working in the kitchen and clearing glasses.

We would have been able to cover the rent—I just needed him to loan me the deposit, which I was going to pay back.

” He threw me a wry smile. “The cunt showed me the door.”

I’m glad you’re a fucking heart surgeon. One day you might work out how to fucking implant one in yourself .

I stared at my brother, letting his words sink in. Something painful twisted inside me. How could an unborn child’s own grandfather be so heartless?

“Why didn’t you come back and tell me? Shown me that you were okay?”

Ezra plucked a corner from the beermat. “I wasn’t okay.

Far from it. I was eighteen, homeless, and about to become a father.

I couldn’t stay at Carly’s, seeing as her dad and me didn’t see eye to eye—for obvious reasons—and Sir Henry Fitz-Henry decided he’d had enough of the awkward foundling messing up his perfect little family. To be fair, I’d had enough of him.”

“So where did you go?”

He gestured with his arm all around us. “Everywhere. A mate’s sofa, a night shelter, the pavement outside Hamleys on Oxford Street. You know, the usual.”

“Oh, God.”

My face must have shown everything. All hospital emergency departments received their fair share of homeless people.

Most were merely on a hunt for somewhere warm and safe for a few hours.

Depending on how busy we were, they’d get both, and a cup of sugary tea.

My own brother had been one of them, and I hadn’t known. The idea made me sick.

“You think living rough was bad?” Ezra grimaced. “At least on the street I could see trouble coming. It used to blindside me at home.”

I rested my head on my arms for a moment, briefly shutting my eyes.

To our left, two girls slated their boyfriends.

Behind, a party of Australian backpackers argued over the cheapest route to Camden market.

And in front of me Ezra sipped his cool beer, casually filling me in on how he’d survived the last few years.

My own warped version of the past imploded. “So why are you telling me this now?”

He shrugged. “You deserve to know. He was your hero, wasn’t he?”

My hero? After that horrific argument, my hero vanished, taking a chunk of my soul with him . “I deserve to know what? That being out on the streets was better than our home? That’s… Christ, Ez. Really?”

“Compared to living under his tyranny?” A raw note crept into his voice. “Yeah, I’d say so.”

My stomach clenched. I could scarcely believe I was asking the next question. “Did… did he hurt you? You know, physically?”

“Nah, not really. I used to bait Janice into giving me the odd slap; they never bothered me. But I’d rather have taken on a whole coach load of pissed Chelsea supporters than one of his tongue lashings.”

“You’re okay now, though. Aren’t you?” Even to my ears, I sounded desperate. “Apart from, you know, generally being a dick and not phoning or texting after showing me I had a bloody nephew and calling me names?”

He laughed at that, thank God. I wasn’t up for any more shocking revelations.

“Yeah, me and the kid get by.” He studied me with a lopsided smile. “Better than you, I reckon, from the look of you.”

I’d nodded off at midnight with the anatomy of the brachial plexus, my evening’s revision, scattered across the bed. It had jerked me awake at four a.m. Realising no more sleep was forthcoming, as dawn made its bleary way over the horizon, I hauled out of bed and got back to it.

“I’m all right. Busy week. I don’t always sleep that well after coming off nightshifts and switching on to days. An early night, and I’ll be right as rain by tomorrow.”

“I see.” He toyed with his bottle for a few moments before spearing me with those wicked eyes. “Come out with that bullshit a lot, do you?”

“It’s not bullshit. Ask any shift worker.”

“I don’t care about other shift workers.”

I didn’t expect sympathy from Ezra, neither did I deserve it.

One of us enjoyed a safe, secure home, the other hadn’t, and yet here he was, thriving.

Whereas most days I was seconds from drowning.

I didn’t want to talk about me, about exams I’d probably fail, for a career I felt pressurised to pursue, in a hospital I’d grown to despise.

Working for a system that had already broken my kind, decent friend, Luke, and left me and Alaric hanging on by our fingertips.

“Tell me about Jonty,” I said with a bright smile. I had plenty of colleagues with young kids; I’d learned how to steer a conversation away from myself. “He looked full of beans. What sort of things does he like? And are you teaching him the guitar?”

Was Ezra fooled? I doubted it. But at the sound of his boy’s name, his eyes lit up. For the next fifteen minutes, until he had to start his next set and I had to go back to revision, we talked Jonty and guitars.