Bitter Waters by Chaz Brenchley

Author:Chaz Brenchley
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: gay, short stories, literary, romance, spec fic, love, grief
Publisher: Lethe Press, Inc.
Published: 2014-10-22T04:00:00+00:00

I made space for myself by leaving. Leaving them all, leaving everything; crossing oceans, working away.

A promise is a promise, though. No escaping that. I’ll be back, I said: and here I was, coming back. Flying in on a warm front, while snowmelt flooded the ground below; the metro and my own feet carrying me to Gerard’s new front door. Slogging over damp and grimy pavements, thinking as I went about the persistence of ice. How time and change had cleared the way—by and large, give or take—but still there was ice beneath the puddles, still great stubborn slabs of filthy snow at random at the roadside.

It ought to be a metaphor for something, I remember thinking that. As though it mattered, as though it were foreknowledge, ominous.

Gerard’s door. My feet wanted to go the old way, to the old house; my mind had to keep remembering that wasn’t his any more and wasn’t ours, that we had no claim now, we’d sold up and walked away.

I had to check his e-mail more than once for directions how to walk this new way, where to turn. Which door.

And even so I found myself reaching for my own keys on his doorstep, and having to remember once again that I was a stranger here myself. And ringing the bell instead, and even that made the wrong sound. I knew the call of Gerard’s bell; this wasn’t it.

Still, it called him and he came. He opened the door and we were instant family again, awkward and uncertain with each other. Did we kiss, did we hug? We used to, but that was then. Should we shake hands, perhaps, like an acknowledgement of distance travelled? With strangers and with friends, these matters resolve themselves. It’s family that you have to think about. Even when that family is a tribe of choice, brothers by adoption. Someone else’s choice, but hey.

In the end I did kiss him, yes, dry and perhaps ironic. Then I handed him the dutiful litre of duty-free whisky and let him show me around.

Kitchen, bathroom, utility. His bedroom, the spare bedroom which was mine for the duration. Dining room, living room, hallway. That was it, neat and spare and functional; and all the way there was something missing. One more door, a false wall, something.

He knew. Of course he did, we were family. Even so, he waited; I had to say it myself. That’s what family does, leaves things lying until it’s almost too late, except when it is actually and absolutely that.

I said, “No piano?” and his face twisted into something that might almost be called a smile, if a smile is a measure of what’s bitter.

“No,” he said, no more than that. What he meant, what we both meant was that there was nothing of Quin’s, nothing visible, anywhere in the flat. All the years I’d known him Gerard lived with Quin, in Quin’s house, amongst his stuff. This, now: this was more than different, this was opposite, an exercise in absence.

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