Page 4 of Maybe (Mis-shapes #1)

“Always here to help.” He poked his head back into the room. “Honestly, though, I’m sure you have loads of things to sort out. And I’m including your own head in that. Especially as you didn’t have the best of relationships.”

“Mmm.” I sighed. “You’re probably right.”

I’d never had a gay friend before. Most likely because I didn’t hang around gay spaces. Alaric’s brashness took some getting used to. He wasn’t scared to spout pastoral shit like that. Or maybe it had nothing to do with his sexuality; maybe it was just him. At any rate, I liked him and envied him.

“I’m better off at work.” I scooped up the last of the porridge with my finger. “Gives me something else to concentrate on. And it’s not just that we’re so thin on the ground. I can’t afford to miss the clinical experience.”

“I thought you were dead set on going into cardiac? Grooming the family empire?”

“I am. Of course I am.”

Frowning, Alaric poked his head back in. “How’s pulling dislocated shoulders and lancing whitlows in the ED going to help?”

He had a point. But at least being seen to be busy at work looked like career progression.

And Alaric probably wouldn’t understand, but I got a kick out of building a rapport with lonely old guys like my diverticulitis man.

Once my cardiac career took off, I’d miss working in ED.

I enjoyed patients’ stories, and I loathed lacking both the time and the space to treat elderly patients like him with the dignity they deserved.

Frail old folk walked a physiological knife edge.

Diverticulitis Man shouldn’t have been lying on a hard trolley in a soulless cubicle with only a flimsy paper curtain separating him from an idiot swearing like a sailor.

He should be up on a ward, receiving prompt and targeted treatment before he deteriorated.

Alaric flicked the cigarette butt out onto the tarmac below, then wafted the window back and forth, before closing it and perching on a cheap plastic chair. Neatly crossing his legs, he eyed me shrewdly. “Why was that TV programme a bunch of lies?”

“Oh, I don’t know.” I sighed again. “Not the entire thing. I suppose he was a great surgeon, but there are plenty of those around who never get half the plaudits he did. He was better at self-promotion. Shame he was such a shit dad, really. Hardly ever home, and when he was, he nagged me to work harder.” When I was your age, I’d be writing out flashcards, not sat in front of the TV watching American rubbish.

“Can’t have been that bad,” Alaric observed, with a lopsided smile. “You’ve turned out fine.”

When we first met, he used to flirt a lot with me.

Some gays had a sixth sense for sniffing out another, and Alaric had sniffed plenty.

He flirted much less now, probably because I never flirted back.

I preferred it this way—not only was he was out of my league on so many levels, but I needed an ally and friend at work. And I had one.

As I relayed the scene in the solicitor’s office, relieved to have someone prepared to listen, his jaw dropped. “Are you sure you’re not parroting a daytime talk show? Night shifts can do funny things to your head, hon.”

“Sadly not. I’m going to visit my mother this weekend, to persuade her to intervene. Assuming we can find Ezra again.”

“Poor kid.”

“He’s not a kid anymore. He’s twenty-nine.”

“Had he changed much?”

“Personality-wise, I have no idea; he didn’t hang around long enough for me to find out. Physically, he’s still in his Goth-lite era. You know, tall and lanky, undernourished? A bit scruffy, with a long overcoat and eyeliner? And moody. He’s always had that dark academia, dramatic vibe going.”

“Not that you’ve been, like, dwelling on him much.” Alaric threw me an amused glance at the same moment his pager bleeped. “Are you sure you’re not lamenting a lost boyfriend? He sounds hot.”

I passed him the phone. “Hi,” he said into the receiver. “You paged the incontinence hotline? Please hold on a little longer.”

I sniggered as Alaric made faces at whoever on the other end was trying to refer him a patient.

“You’re phoning to put the patient on my radar?

” Tucking the phone under his chin, he made a wanking gesture with one hand whilst jotting the referral down with his other. “Do I look like air traffic control?”

Picking up my empty bowl, I carried it over to the kitchen area, adding it to the festering pile already stacked up in the sink.

Alaric wound up his call. “Better return to the coalface,” he declared. “A fourteen-year-old with a torsion might be coming in later if the GP can coax him to show someone his sore bollock.” He shoved his fags into the back pocket of his scrubs. “Are you on tomorrow night?”

“Yep.”

“Me too.” He grinned through his tiredness. “See you then.”

“Yep. No worries.”

I said ‘no worries’ a hell of a lot for someone who was a pile of worries in stale surgical scrubs.

What with revising for my surgical exams and sixty hours a week at the hospital, I had as much shit on my agenda as a six-year-old avoiding bedtime.

But if I couldn’t get it off my chest with Saffy and Ed, the only other folks alive, except for Ezra, who knew the real Henry Fitz-Henry, then chances of concentrating on work or exams were precisely zero.

“ Excluded from the will? What the blessed fuck?” Saffy had done all the talking so far. Ed was listening in.

I adored my younger twin siblings—Ezra’s half siblings. Everything they said, everything they did, possessed a carefreeness, stemming from knowing someone else had their back. Whatever shit had been going down at home—Ez, my dad, my mum—they somehow always floated above it.

Joined not only at the hip, but the shoulder, knee, and brain cells too, Edward and Saffron were in the States, studying at Stanford.

Neither of them wanted to go into medicine.

Politics for Edward and journalism for Saffron.

Living their best lives, the lucky sods.

Dad having already earmarked me as his heir apparent, when they’d presented him with their futures, haphazardly mapped out on the back of a cigarette packet, he hadn’t given a fuck.

When they’d gone a step further and plumped for expensive courses on the other side of the world, he’d said fine, just send me the cheque .

Whereas I’d never had any doubt as to my career path.

And as for Ezra… fuck. Despite his passion for music, his brilliant drawings, and his floaty shirts and cool friends, he never stood a chance of funding for art college.

Study a proper subject, Ezra. The arts are for thickies and weirdos; I’m not wasting my money on that rubbish.

“Good luck with that,” was Ed's first comment after I suggested appealing to our mother’s better nature regarding Ezra’s portion of the inheritance. “You’ll have to find it first. I might have been young when he left, but making her life difficult was Ezra’s daily workout.”

“And how,” I agreed.

Some people used silence to express their pain.

They suffered quietly, they brooded, they internalised.

Like their bodies were hollow shells gradually filling with bitterness layered onto loss layered onto sorrow.

Not our Ezra—not back then, anyhow. He’d been an obnoxious, hurt, teenage boy, his grief at his mother’s death anchored in anger and strengthened by rage, desperate to hang it on something tangible, or someone tangible.

With his father frequently absent, my mother became the focus.

Sure, she might have bagged herself a rich husband, a fancy house, and three kids, but bloody hell, did Ezra make her pay handsomely for them.

“Do you remember that time he graffitied his bedroom walls?” Saffy chuckled. “What was it he wrote? Dad had been nagging him about all the crap he hadn’t done, like tidying his room and bringing the dirty mugs down.”

Christ, I’d forgotten the graffiti saga. Ezra had been grounded for the first week of the school holidays.

To-do list he’d sprayed in matte black comic sans. The short message covered the entirety of one wall. 1. Learn to fly. 2. Fly away.

As if that wasn’t a big clue as to what the future held.

“Even after four coats of magnolia, you could still see the outline of that eagle. He was a bloody good artist, wasn’t he?”

“Yeah,” I agreed. “He was.”

“What on earth made you try to cover for him, with that bullshit story about a burglar climbing in?”

All the times he covered for me.

“We let him down,” I said. “Or rather, I let him down. You were just kids.”

“So were you, Isaac! You were only… what, fourteen when he left? You were still at school!”

Saffy was correct, of course, but it didn’t help much.

“Have you spoken to Mum at all about the will?”

“Not yet. I haven’t found the right moment. The solicitor, Mr Trethowan, said he’d do it. I'll call her tonight before I go into work.” If I could squeeze it in, between a mock exam paper, the laundry, and a quick scoot around the supermarket. Some days felt as if I was jumping from rock to rock.

“You’ve been at work the last three nights, haven’t you?”

“Yep. Two more to go.”

“All work and no play make Jack a dull boy, Isaac,” warned Saffy.

“If only nightshifts were optional,” I answered sarcastically.

“Yes, but you’ll turn into Dad if you’re not careful.”

Wasn’t that the truth.

Her voice gentled. “Cardiac surgery is an enormous slog, though, Isaac. You’ve really got to want it, you know?”

“Why wouldn’t I want it?”

“I don’t know.” Saffy made a huffing sound. “Sometimes you sound like you’re a bit… daunted by it, that’s all.”

“I’m not daunted.” Even if sweat gathered under my armpits every time I contemplated it. “I’ll admit I’m enjoying other stuff, like working in the ED, but I’m only doing it to gain the experience. I love cardiac. It’s cool. So cool.”

“Okay, I was just checking. He’ll be digging his way out of the grave with a scalpel if you jack it all in for ED.” Saffy laughed. “He was always so proud of you. Far more than he ever was of us.”

“He didn’t always show it,” I felt obliged to point out.

“Nah,” Ed butted in. “But we will. We’re eternally grateful to you for stepping up as the Chosen One. Otherwise, me and Saff would have had to pull our fingers out. Instead, thanks to you, we can partayyy!”

He said the last bit in a screeching approximation of an American accent, followed by some truly atrocious beatboxing.

I held the phone away from my ear until he finished.

Another thing I admired about my siblings.

Their persistent joyfulness, rooted in an inherent belief the world was their oyster.

When anyone with an iota of experience knew it was nothing more than a poorly choreographed shitshow.