Page 17 of Maybe (Mis-shapes #1)

A smoky laugh floated across the air waves, and some of my anxiety drifted away. “He must have got that from his mother’s side. His good looks and charm he got from me.”

One hundred fucking percent. “The looks I’ll buy. I’m not sure about the charm.”

“I can turn it on,” he said in a low raspy tone, doing exactly that.

Edging on flirtatiousness? As my dick thickened hopefully, I mentally slapped it down.

He’s my brother, my brother, my brother.

That sexy voice and tone was simply the way he spoke.

I tried to picture Ezra washing up. Except then I had an image of his wiry, pale forearms plunging into warm soapy suds, the dark hairs at his wrists flattened, the little playing card tattoo dipping in and out of the water, and. ..

“Sorry if I woke you.”

Rustling noises accompanied his next words, like he was getting comfortable. In bed. Not washing up. Maybe naked. My brother, my brother. “No, I was up. I’m a night owl.”

“Oh, I know all about that. My sleep’s all over the place. Especially with nightshifts. Sometimes I wake at four a.m. and my stomach thinks it’s lunchtime. It’s to do with melatonin levels.”

“Cool.”

Nope, not cool at all. Dull, nerdy, intense, and pointless information.

Maybe I should have phoned Gerald instead.

Or sacked the whole thing off and climbed into bed for a hot threesome with two guys called Ben and Jerry.

Masturbated Ezra out of my system. I did plenty of that.

Masturbation was the private gift that never stopped giving: reliable, always readily available, and never an inconvenience to anyone else.

An awkward pause followed, during which Ezra was obviously trying to work out how to politely wind up the call. “I was putting a song together that’s been bugging me. Can’t get the hook right.” He sighed. “It will come, with patience.”

“I didn’t know you still wrote your own songs.”

“That’s because you haven’t seen me for ten years. You didn’t know I had a son either.”

“And you didn’t know I made weird late-night phone calls, so we’re both learning new things about each other.”

That smoky laugh again. Too attractive for its own good.

“Do you sing your own tunes when you’re busking?”

“Nah, that’s not what the punters want to hear. They want something bland and soulless they can hum along to, like Ed bloody Sheeran.”

I quite liked Ed Sheeran. “What do you do with your songs, then? Do they sit in a pile, gathering dust? You could have Taylor Swift’s next big hit right there.”

My attempt at hearing that laugh again paid off. He had no idea what he did to me. “I’m not holding my breath. A local rock band uses most of them. I write ‘em, they sing ‘em. The lead singer’s an old friend of Carly’s—that’s Jonty’s mum. We work on them together.”

“Oh, you mean like Elton John and that other chap? Bernie someone?” Really, Isaac? Was that the most contemporary musical reference you could come up with?

A fourth teasing laugh escaped him. “If Elton made less than ten quid off streaming downloads last year, then, yeah, exactly. You should come with me to one of their shows. They’ve just been signed to an indie label. They’re a decent live band.”

“Um… okay. Sure.” I scrolled back in my mind to the last time I saw a band play live. Did the London Philharmonic count?

Another silence, although less awkward. “Is Jonty asleep?” I asked him, to fill it.

“I fucking hope so. It’s gone midnight.”

“Yeah, well, sorry again for calling so late.”

“It’s fine, honestly.” A few seconds passed, then, “Was there something you needed to get off your chest, Isaac?”

I liked how he said my name, light and deliberate, as if he knew it made my heart skip a beat. I don’t care about other shift workers. Tears, hot and unexpected, pushed behind my eyes.

“Isaac?” he repeated, softly, “Are you still there?”

Before I hardly knew I was saying them, the words tumbled out of me.

“We had a cot death last week. I’ve never seen one before.

Me and Alaric—he’s my friend—we… we, like, we ran it until the paeds team arrived and took over.

It was… it was… well, it was shit, as you can imagine, and we had to pretend like we knew what we were doing because everyone was looking at us, and we did know what we were doing, except it didn’t feel like that. And after, it was… it was...”

I spilled the lot. Every blow-by-blow hideous second of it, even all the crap afterwards when I went back into the department and sorted out a complicated referral from a GP out-of-hours service regarding a haematology patient with a plummeting white count.

They needed to be admitted with belly ache asap, even though there weren’t any beds and the haematologist was a grumpy fucker who sensed within thirty seconds my knowledge of idiopathic thrombocytic purpura was next to fucking zero.

Nevertheless, he decided to fuck with me anyhow because he didn’t want to deal with it at five in the morning any more than I did.

And halfway through haranguing me, I had to invent an emergency to run to because my throat had choked, and my eyes were awash.

When I finally finished spewing, when my words dried and I flopped back on my pillows emptied of everything except a need to stay on the line, Ezra said my fucking name again, like he was humming the openings bars of a song. I burst into tears.

“Isaac.”

“What.”

“When did this happen?”

“Last Wednesday,” I answered miserably. “No, Thursday.” I wiped my eyes on the back of my hand.

“It’s now Monday. Actually, we’ve slipped into Tuesday.”

“Yes.”

“So what have you done? Between now and then?”

“Not much. Just…” Put on a front. Smiled a lot.

Eaten junk food from a vending machine. Fallen out with my mother.

Waded through tens of patients on autopilot.

Probably overlooked a couple of cases of early sepsis.

“I’ve been to work and tried to revise. I have part one of the surgical exams next Friday and, if I don’t pass, then I won’t get the clinical fellowship job in dad’s old research unit, and I’ll feel like a failure.

Dad never failed at anything, and a lot of people have put in a good word to secure me that job.

I’ll be letting everyone down. And I haven’t been able to concentrate.

Or sleep. I keep seeing this… this child and her mum and her sisters… and…”

“Have you talked about it with anyone?”

“Yes, we had a debrief, but I was leading it. And its… well, it’s the NHS, isn’t it?

The words no-blame culture are the biggest lies out there.

Everyone was too scared to say what they really think, how they really felt about it; we’d get hung out to dry if there was a sniff of anyone not doing something right. ”

There was a pause, before Ezra asked, “Were people doing the right thing?”

“God, yeah. We did everything. Alaric and I have learned by heart how to manage this sort of emergency. But the… the baby was never going to make it. That was obvious as soon as they came through the door, but we had to try.”

The steady sound of Ezra's breathing filled my ear for a few moments as if his head lay on a pillow next to mine. I snivelled as quietly as possible, wishing it did.

“I’m confused. Didn’t you say you enjoyed working in ED?”

“I do,” I protested, and followed it with a sob, all dignity gone. “Most of the time. That’s why I volunteer extra shifts.”

Ezra didn’t say anything else for a minute or so, giving me a chance to pull myself together.

“Go and get some tissues and dry your eyes,” he said eventually. I nearly smiled; he sounded exactly like a big brother should, and God knew I needed one of those right now.

“Only if you don’t tell me not to beat myself up or that I gave it my best shot and that’s all anyone can ask. Or any other bullshit. I know it, anyhow.”

“I wasn’t going to,” he said, sounding amused.

“I was going to take your mind off it and tell you about Jonty’s school play and how I’ve spent most of my evening making a Viking helmet out of a plastic mixing bowl, tin foil, and papier maché.

The Anglo-Saxons will be shitting bricks by the time I’ve glued the horns on. ”

I sob-laughed, not an especially charming noise and blew my nose. Dignity was overrated, anyhow.

“He’s obsessed with Vikings. Last week, it was moths and butterflies. Especially moths. Do you remember that big glass display case Dad had in his study, with loads of massive dead ones pinned inside that he used to bring back from Africa?”

Even in the pit of my misery he had me grinning. “Yes. He loved it; Ed and Saffy were scared to go in.”

“Probably because I told them the big fat black one in the middle came alive and crawled inside people’s ears when they were asleep.”

I laughed, properly this time. “That explains a hell of a lot.”

The air between us carried an entire conversation as he hesitated, on the cusp of saying something else. But when he did, all he said was, “It’s been good talking to you, Isaac.”

“Stay in touch,” I responded urgently. “Please?”

“Yeah, probably.” He sighed again. “Though… talking to you drags up a lot of stuff I’d like to forget.”

“Thanks.”

“Not all of it. Some of it’s okay. The parts with you in it aren’t too bad.”

“Maybe we should both just try and remember those bits, then.”

“Yeah.” After a second of silence, he added, “And from now on you should tell me when work is too much, okay? No one should bottle that sort of horrific experience up. You’ll make yourself ill.”

“Thank you. I… I will.”

“You’re welcome. Now, turn the light off, switch your phone off, and go the fuck to sleep.”

I snorted. I was still chuckling as I followed my big brother’s orders. And, for the first time in weeks, I slept like the dead.