AllFreeNovel
Share Us
She normally pretended not to be bothered about the way her family had cut her off, but I knew the truth. Up until her mid-twenties, she’d done everything they expected of her: attained excellent grades, attended the best conservatoire in the UK, then worked as a wedding singer in their events management company. Then she’d come out as gay, mortally offending their fundamentally Catholic beliefs, and they’d fired her. Cut her off and barricaded the door – literally. With no source of income, she’d lost her flat and had to move in with her then-girlfriend while she retrained as a primary school teacher, which had always been her real aspiration. Then at the end of the course, she and her girlfriend had split up, and she’d taken a job down here in Miltree.
“Shame on him, then,” I said, realising that neither of us had spoken for a solid minute and that it was on me to fill the silence.
It was the wrong thing to say.
“No, Jean.” She gritted her teeth. “Shame on them. The Andino clan. My parents passed on the vitriol to Adrienne, and then Georgio Jr and Theodore and Andrew. By the time I was born, and then Nicholas, the rot had set in. What hope did we have? If only one of the older ones had challenged them, and tried to set a more positive example for us younger ones, perhaps it all would have been different, and the family would have still been together. It’s not Nicholas’s fault. Don’t blame him for giving in to their maelstrom of uber-religious bullshit.”
This time I had nothing to say. My brain was just waking up, and no words were appearing in my head. I knew she had always been closest to her youngest brother, but right now I thought she was babying him. He was thirty-one years old, for Christ’s sake. Old enough to recognise the toxicity in which he had been raised, and the wrongness with which they had treated his sister.
“Because how dare I fall in love with a woman?” Petra’s face twisted in an uncharacteristic display of aggression and I leaned away involuntarily. She didn’t even seem to notice. “How dare I marry a woman? Those two extra letters between ‘man’ and ‘woman’ made all the difference. For all their pious talk of behaving as Christ would, and protecting the world from sin and all that crap, they’re full of it themselves. How fucking dare they tell me what I do is wrong? How I live is wrong? Just because you’re a woman, Jean. Tell me what’s wrong with that!”
“It’s okay, it’s okay,” I murmured soothingly, and ran a hand down her arm, but she popped out of her chair like a jack-in-the-box, turning to face me with her eyes flashing.
“No, it’s not okay.” Her voice trembled now. “I’ll fucking kill them. If they’ve turned my only sane sibling away from me, I will actually kill them. This is not what I need now.” Her voice rose on a sob, and I rose to my feet slowly, trying not to spook her.
“Just because you’re a woman, Jean.” Now she really was sobbing. “I married a woman, and as far as they’re concerned, my life ended.”
“Come here,” I whispered, and slowly put my arms around her. She froze, arms still by her sides with fists clenched, and the only movement were the little judders of her sobs. I held her for a moment, but it felt all wrong, so I let her go.
“I’m going back to bed,” she said between sobs.
“I’ll be up in a minute,” I said, and watched her go, before sinking back down on the sofa.
You’re a woman, you’re a woman. Her words fluttered around my head, in her normal tone at first but then rising to almost resemble taunts. My hands balled into fists at my sides, and then almost unconsciously I began to rake my nails up and down my wrists.
“You’re being ridiculous,” I muttered to myself, making a deliberate choice to put my head in my hands so they’d be still. “You’re too old for this. You’re too old to have an identity crisis. You’re fifty-chuffing-two, for crying out loud. And you look ten years older. Get a grip.”
It’s not what I’d have imagined Lyndsey or my mum saying in one of their famous pep-talks, but it worked. After another minute or two, my heart rate slowed to a more normal pace and I could feel my legs again. I’d promised Petra that I’d be upstairs, so with supreme effort I got to my feet and traipsed up. She was fast asleep, perhaps reassured by the thought of me being next to her as usual, but even so I stood looking at her for another minute after going to the toilet.
It was another supreme effort to draw back the covers and lay down next to her. Tension locked my joints as I lay on the edge of the bed, facing away, as far away from her as I could get without falling off. Every fibre of my being wanted to run downstairs back to the sanctity of the sofa: the first time I’d ever wanted to run away from her.
You don’t deserve to lay here next to her. She deserves someone who’s secure in themselves. The thoughts rattled around again.
They continued to rattle, until I at last fell into an uneasy slumber.
Chapter Fifteen
Having cancelled last week’s choir practice, we both knew we had to make significant progress with them this week. We still had to start our showstopper number, the Sea Shanty Medley I’d arranged over the winter, and with six shanties segueing into each other, changing time signatures and tempos at various points, it was quite a stretch. The choir members noticed this as we handed out the paper copies, with lots of eyebrow-raising as they leafed through.
“Okay, peeps!” I raised my voice to quell the chatter, and they all looked up at me. “This one’s acapella, and as you can see, it moves about quite a lot. So I’m going to need you to trust me on this one when I’m conducting. I’ve pre-recorded each individual part for you on the piano, and it’ll be uploaded on the group chat later this evening so those of you who can’t sight-read can start learning your part. For now, however, let’s start with the first shanty.”
“And we’ll need a soloist,” Petra put in. The whole choir looked at her incredulously, and I knew the expression on my face matched theirs.
“How come? Won’t you be doing it?” I said as neutrally as possible.
“I thought I’d give someone else a chance,” she said, smiling around at the group, although her eyes flickered towards me and I knew that wasn’t the only reason. But there would be time to press later.
“Okay then,” I said, turning back to the group. “Who’d like the solo? There’s a handful of lines across the whole thing, and a verse in The Wellerman… any takers?”
Silence from the group. As a rule, Petra normally took solos, so they were unused to having this opportunity. I saw various people exchange glances and shake their heads, and my heart sunk.
Then, from the back of the alto section… “Cass will!”
“Who said that?” I peered at the back row.
“Me – Felicia,” the voice replied. Now I spotted her, and her puce-coloured girlfriend, Petra’s former work colleague, Cassandra Mulligan. Felicia stood up, dragging Cass with her.
“Does Cass actually consent to this?” I chuckled. “This looks alarmingly like brute force going on here.”
