Thomas

 

I’d never cooked for other people before. It was a surreal realisation as I fired one of the Foster’s big griddle pans up in their kitchen and prepared to slap on three steaks.

It’d been a long fucking time since I’d done something with the genuine desire to please people rather than tear them down. It felt strangely good. Alien in its attraction.

So did the pride at Brett’s slap on my back and the knowledge that for once in this sorry lifetime we’d worked together instead of at odds.

I tried to keep a hold of my thoughts, reminding myself with that same bitter chill as always that we were still enemies for all intents and purposes, but I didn’t believe it. Not with the same gut-wrenching spite I’d been carrying on my shoulders through living memory.

There was an easiness at the prospect of an evening in the bar with a whisky in my hand. An appeal to flowing conversation that I’d never experienced.

The steaks were cooking nicely when I heard the creak of a door to my right, my smile brighter than I’d have imagined when the bulk of him stepped into view.

It disappeared in a pulse of shock, shrivelling up the moment I saw the expression of dread on his face.

I fought it anyway, gesturing to the griddle pan with my spatula as he stepped on into the room. Grace was at his rear, her face wracked with the same gaunt horror as they stopped a few paces from my side.

“I hope you’re hungry,” I bleated regardless.

“I’ll never be fucking hungry again,” Brett said, and I cursed the fucking world for my ridiculous sliver of optimism.

It was instinct that saw me turn the hob flame to nothing and brace myself for the carnage. I didn’t fully appreciate what was coming until his words knocked me sideways.

“Browning,” he said. “Why didn’t you fucking tell us?”

My teeth were gritted long before I met his eyes with mine. “Because it’s not my fucking name anymore.” My pause was long enough for the spite to choke back up. “And because it’s none of your fucking business.”

I wasn’t expecting the way he shunted me, knocked off balance by his sheer bulk as he charged me back through their kitchen and slammed me into the wall. “My fucking dad’s every bit of my fucking business,” he snarled.

My hands rose up between us in a breath, shunting him back with as much strength as I could summon from the weaker position. It was enough to push him off me, and there we stood, stare burning stare.

“He wasn’t your fucking dad,” I spat, hating myself for the way his shoulders sagged at my words. “He was my fucking father, you were just his chosen fucking son. I bet that fills you with fucking pride, doesn’t it? Knowing you were the better boy. The better son. The better fucking man.”

“He was my dad,” he spat back. “I didn’t know you fucking existed. There’s no fucking pride here. None. Not one fucking bit.”

Grace was at his arm before he spoke another word, her touch solid as reached for his hand and clenched it in hers.

“What the fuck are you doing here?” he said, and there was a desperate twinge to his voice.

It made me feel like fucking death.

“I didn’t manage to prove to the old man that I was worth a shit jot more than being his substandard cast off. Proving it to you was the next best thing.”

His fist slammed the wall at the side of my head. I didn’t flinch, my eyes firm on his as he choked on his disgust.

“This is bullshit,” he hissed. “You thought it would make you a big man to come down here and rip me and Grace apart? You thought that would make you feel so much fucking better, did you? Like that makes you a fucking man?”

I despised how ridiculous my logic sounded from his mouth. Not least because it was fucking ridiculous. The whole concept of proving one-upmanship after a lifetime of inferiority by fucking someone’s wife in front of them seemed a pitiful initiative when it was under such a vile spotlight, my insides shrivelling all over again to realise I was still the sad, bitter little cunt who’d festered his way through high school.

“I should leave,” I muttered, heading for the door without a care for how pathetic a weasel the retreat would make me.

It was Grace who reached out for me and wrapped her arm in mine. “No,” she said, surprisingly firm for such a delicate little creature. “Not now. Not this time. Nobody’s going anywhere.”

I couldn’t watch as Brett Foster lost his shit and threw the griddle pan from the hob. It crashed into the sink with a clatter, the meat still spitting as it landed.

I had no words as he bellowed aimlessly, his hands in his hair as he stumbled along the worktop.

“Go through to the bar,” Grace whispered. “Please.”

I should’ve made a run for it, straight out to my waiting car before they’d got the chance to come after me, but I didn’t.

I pressed my back to the wall in the dining room, breathing deep as the world caved down around me. Their voices were loud in the other room, but I couldn’t keep a track of them. There was only my own crazy train of thoughts, hate and spite, regret, fear. The curled up wreck of the boy deep inside.

My move to the bar was slow and laboured, the world spinning all around me as I dropped myself down on a stool and waited for whatever was coming my way.

I didn’t even look behind me as the minutes ticked by, praying to a God I didn’t believe in that the bar would stay empty long enough for the Fosters to take whatever action they deemed necessary.

I heard Brett’s footsteps loud when they came, bracing myself for a blow that didn’t land on me. He threw himself through the hatch to the other side, grabbing hold of a whisky bottle and taking a swig right from the neck before reaching for a pair of shot glasses and shunting one in my direction. The amber nectar splashed all over the bar top as he poured us full glasses.

My fingers were shaking as I raised mine to my lips, knocking it back in one as he did, only to have him refill it straight after with another.

I held back on downing this one, but he didn’t.

“My mum said yours was a slut,” he barked, and if he expected argument he wasn’t getting any.

“Yes, she was.”

“Dad didn’t think you were his.”

My smirk was bitter as fuck at that. “I’m sure the truth would have occurred to him as the years passed by. I look very little like my mother.”

“You look very little like my fucking dad, either,” he snapped, but he was lying on that front. It wasn’t blatant, but it was there. Our narrow shoulders, our high cheekbones, colouring. I’d seen enough of it, even growing up, to know the truth.

“I thought he’d acknowledge my existence if I could only be good enough,” I admitted, even though it twisted in my gut. “You didn’t exactly make it easy for me. Every corner I turned you were always ahead, always winning, always loud and brash and proud as a pig in shit.”

“Because he pushed me to be,” he snarled, flashing Grace a desperate glare as she dropped herself onto a stool at my side. “Because he believed in me. Because he was always there, always asking for my best, always demanding.” It hurt as he said it, me as well as him. “I’d be nothing without him. I’m everything I am because he made me this way.”

“And so am I,” I spat. “I’m everything I am because he made me this way.”

The truth was an irony that rocked me to my core. Both of us sitting here, ruined by a dead man, both in such different ways it was laughable.

“He can’t have known,” Brett hissed, still fighting the obvious. “There’s no fucking way he could have known.”

“I was always right there,” I told him. “We were in the same fucking town. I saw you every fucking day. Saw him at every fucking school sports game, hoping that would be the one he met my eyes.”

He tossed another whisky back and I managed a sip of mine.

“You wanted to destroy me,” he said, and I didn’t deny it.

“I wanted to destroy everything.”

“That would have made you feel better, would it? Taking everything away from me?”

I shrugged. “I don’t know anymore. I don’t think I ever really did.”

My honesty seemed to do something to him, his eyes widened just a fraction, his jaw giving an almost imperceptible nod. “I don’t think either of us knew shit.”

I didn’t argue with that.

There was no fire in me spitting to compound his pain to match my own. No fight left inside to prove some ridiculous point that I was worth something.

I felt worthless sitting there, not because I was a kid who struggled to amount to anything back before it meant anything, but because I’d lived a life meaning nothing through all the years following.

The money meant nothing. The businesses meant nothing. The marriages I’d ruined meant nothing.

I’d learned it here, in the place I’d come to claim my ultimate crown. I’d learned it in Grace Foster’s warm arms and in the slap on the back her husband had finally blessed me with. In this quiet cove and the quiet love of the two people building their dreams.

I wasn’t prepared for the pain of his next statement. It hit so hard my shoulders buckled over the bar top, my fingers white around the whisky glass as I fought the undulations.

“We could’ve been brothers.”

“Brett,” Grace started with a voice dripping with pain.

I dragged my eyes to the man across the counter, reeling with every cell in my fucking body to find him as ruined as I felt. He was barely standing, doubled over with his arms braced on his thighs.

“You could’ve fucking told me,” he continued. “Am I really such a cunt that you’d rather ruin my fucking life than tell me the fucking truth?”

I shrugged at that. “You weren’t exactly approachable when I knew you first time around.”

His spite was fully justified. “I was just a fucking kid when you knew me first time around.”

“And so was I.”

I was barely aware of Grace’s fingers coming to rest on my arm. “You’re really Thomas Browning,” she whispered. “I remember you. I remember you in the school corridors with Polly Piper.”

I wouldn’t have believed the despair could have reached a higher level, but the mention of Polly’s name took it there.

“I’m surprised you remember anything of me, Grace. You barely had a glance for me back then, much less a cognisant memory.”

“When were you going to tell me?” Brett grunted, and I opted for the truth for once.

“I wasn’t. I was going to take your wife and leave you on your knees, trusting that would prove for once and for all that I was the better man.”

His laugh was empty. “You think stealing someone’s wife makes you a better man?”

“I did.”

“That’s an asshole move,” Grace said, her fingers still resting on my sleeve. “And I’d never have left Brett. Not in a million years. No matter how many times you made me come with your fancy finger work.”

My smile was all real as I looked at her. “That’s what I’ve grown to realise, yes.”

“So why did you come back this time around? Why did you stay?” Brett questioned, and I shrugged all over again.

“I wish I knew.”

“That’s bullshit,” he snapped. “You’re the kind of guy who knows what shape his shit’s gonna be before he squeezes it out. Don’t fucking tell me you don’t know what the fuck you’re doing here.”

And it was bullshit.

The whole fucking thing was bullshit, and I was done.

“Because I found something,” I admitted. “Here. I found something here. Something real. Something that made me believe in something.” I waved my stupid words away with my hand, but Grace reached out and took it in hers.

“Don’t do that,” she whispered. “Don’t toss it away like it’s nothing. It’s not nothing.”

I closed my eyes but still I could feel his burning into me as he spoke. “We could’ve been fucking brothers.”

“Please,” I hissed. “Please don’t say that.”

“But it’s true,” he said. “We could’ve been fucking brothers. We could’ve been drinking here as two men who gave a shit about each other. Two men from the same fucking stock, even if it was fucked up in the first fucking place.”

“We’re not from the same stock,” I told him, but it was his turn to shrug.

“Not genetically, no. We’re nothing alike. Not one fucking bit. But I’m my dad’s boy, raised by a man who pushed me to be the best. And you’re his actual blood, born with the urge to be the best, just like he fucking was. You’re from blood, I’m from the man. Makes no fucking odds, we could still be fucking brothers.”

I didn’t have a response for that, so I knocked back my whisky.

“This is crazy,” Grace sighed, and she wasn’t lying.

“I should go,” I said, despite having no urge to go anywhere, no matter what the shit storm.

That was the cold, hard reality outside of this one. I had nowhere to go. Nowhere worth anything.

Brett’s finger jabbed through the air in my direction. “You’re not fucking going anywhere.”

“Please don’t,” Grace added, and I could have died right there in front of them.

“I don’t understand,” I managed, my words coming out like bursts of pain. “Why don’t you want me gone?”

Brett was pouring me another shot before he answered, and his voice was bursting with pain when he responded, just like mine.

“Because you may be a cunt,” he said. “But you’re still my fucking brother.”

I heard Grace suck in breath as I swallowed the burning lump in my throat.

“I mean it,” he added. “I lost my fucking dad, I’m not losing his fucking son, too. Not when I’m just growing to like the sonofabitch.”

I’d never cried in front of another soul. Not since Polly Piper all those years ago when she glimpsed me at my worst.

But I cried now.