Brothers & Sisters - Charlotte Wood [13]
‘Ant, I think you need to see someone,’ I said.
Charged with carbohydrates, the melee of eight-year-olds fled the debris of the party table. For several minutes Brian and I tried to exhaust them by organising a game of Red Rover under the peppermint trees, but the idea didn’t take hold.
Weary of manners and adult directions, first one boy then another broke away from the game and began running up the hill and rolling down again. Soon all of them were rolling and shrieking and somersaulting down the slope. Late-afternoon shadows were stretching across the park but the day’s clamminess seemed to have increased. In the heat, with the river so close, this fierce prickly game looked like madness. Over and over, hysterical, they rolled and climbed.
Behind the main clump of boys, Anthony, less quick and agile, dizzy and red-faced, grass sticking to his shirt, picked himself up and staggered up the incline once more. His legs were wobbly sticks. As he climbed he had to avoid the mob of boys tumbling down, and several times he was knocked over. He was no longer in charge of events and the rebellious horde ignored his angry protests and indignant arm-waving. That urgent noise he was making sounded somewhere between shouting and sobbing. Then he got to his feet halfway up the hill, beat his sides with his fists and started to scream.
Anthony drained his glass, leaned back in his chair, dropped his hands in his lap, breathed deeply—once, twice—as if willing the dangerous glimmer in his eyes to fade and a suitably serene expression to slide down his cheeks. ‘See someone? You mean a shrink?’
‘Well, a psychologist or counsellor or whatever.’ It sounded lame. He’d lost his father at the age of five. I tended to forget that. I’d been twelve when Mum died and eighteen when Dad did. Being five was probably worse. But at least he still had a mother. ‘You might find it very helpful, dealing with old emotional stuff.’
‘I have my own spiritual mentors,’ he declared. ‘And I’ve never been more emotionally stable in my life. In fact, I’m so calm that I don’t even resent your bloody gratuitous advice.’
‘Just because you’re calm doesn’t mean you’re not fucked up and don’t need help.’
‘And you’d be competent to judge that? With your background? A fucking painter who didn’t even go to university?’
‘Someone with more life experience and common sense than you, brother.’
He raised an eyebrow. The resemblance was extraordinary. It could have been our father, towards the end. When he was bitter and hitting the bottle late at night, and always giving Sally and me strange looks; when he realised he’d remarried too soon, the wrong woman; when he was still mourning my mother. ‘Brother? Are you sure?’
‘Jesus! Well, half-brother then.’
He was running a finger round the rim of his wineglass so it made an irritating thin scream. Another bloody circle. ‘You’re sure of that?’ he repeated.
I could have whacked his smug hippie-lawyer head. ‘What are you getting at?’
Anthony wore a prim smile, as if an old score was finally settled. ‘You never wondered why you’re short and olive-skinned? How incurious can you be? I hate to be the one to pass on family secrets, but you know your mother couldn’t have children?’
For a few seconds I couldn’t see. The glare off the harbour, snowy tablecloths, the swirling white ruckus of the seagulls, blinded me. The whole scene was leached of tint and shade. Strangely, I recalled the faint watercolours of Lloyd Rees when his sight was fading at the end of his life. If it were me, I’d have chosen brighter and brighter colours. But his were pale, soft yet urgent paintings that paralleled his life force. Paintings needing to be quickly