Author's note.
I guess there's different ways of writing. For me, it starts with an idea and then the storyline develops as I write, so I don't know which way it will go until I've finished. This was intended to be a short story but it's turned out to be one of my longest – but it's dialogue rich, so you'll find it reads quite quickly.
For our American readers, the word "Mum" might seem a little odd, but it's just the British equivalent of your "Mom". The sentiment is just the same!
Everyone in this story is over the age of 18.
H_S March 2019
*****
A BROTHER'S DILEMMA
We've all had those moments, haven't we...in a place you've never been before where you don't know another soul – and then, suddenly, you see a familiar face. Your next door neighbour, perhaps; or the bank manager, or the check-out chick who serves you at the local take-away; and you smile and greet them, and reflect the world is, after all, a pretty small place.
Not long ago this happened to me in London. I live in Abingdon in Oxfordshire, and seldom go to the big smoke. On paper it's only a couple of hours from the city – if you pick a good day to travel – but frankly none of us have much reason to go there. My Dad, Brett Channing, works for a local IT company and Eleanor, my Mum, works for the Council.
But anyway, there I was in London on a fine Spring morning in March, walking down Edgware Road towards the Underground station. The streets were busy with crowds of people: thousands of them, each locked up in their own world, looking stressed as they hurried to get wherever they were going. I wasn't in a rush so I was walking slowly, thinking of the new camera I'd just bought, imaging the girls around me were front of my lens – tall and short, slim and tubby, blonde and brunette. Most of them were beautiful, and every one a stranger.
And then a face swam into my focus that I knew: a little oval face as sweet as a baby rabbit's, with a button nose and full pink lips, framed by a glossy mane of hair that would do credit to any model. She was wearing a simple dress with a touch of gold at the collar complementing the thin necklace around her neck, and her eyes were fixed on the other side of the street. She didn't see me but there she was, larger than life. It was Ashley, my sister.
I guess I should have stopped and said hello. I should have asked her what she was doing, shared a laugh and a few words and then gone on my way; but there was something about the expression on her face that stopped me. And so I followed as she crossed the road, watching her read the street signs until she turned into the doorway of a little boutique hotel not far from the station. I waited for a few seconds, my mind full of questions before I followed her into the foyer. She was at the far end with her back to me, and I saw what happened next.
I didn't know it then, but it was to change my life forever.
*
My Dad came from a farming family but even from an early age it was obvious he wasn't cut from the same cloth. By five he was fiddling with computers, and by ten he was building them.
He met Eleanor May Brown when they were both sixteen and they were married in the local church two years later. They wasted no time in making a family – in fact Ashley Jane Channing was born in the cottage hospital just seven months after the wedding – an event which would have delighted the town gossips, but times were more enlightened by then.
I followed a year later – Tom Channing, a strapping nine-pounder born in the same hospital as my sister and with a pair of lungs that could apparently be heard in Southend – or so my Mum told me. I guess I gave her a hard time because that was the end of the Channing breeding cycle: just me and my sister.
We were a close-knit family: my parents were great at giving us values and direction, but canny enough to let us have the freedom we needed to grow and develop. They were also blessed with good looks, helped by the fact they'd had their family young. I remember looking at my Mum on my 18th birthday and thinking how beautiful she was, with a peaches-and-cream complexion marked only with a few lines that added wisdom and maturity to her face. My Dad was a looker too – or so the girls in my classes told me from time to time.
But it was Ashely that stole the show. She transitioned from a beautiful child to a stunning young woman with disgraceful ease. There was none of the trauma of adolescent acne, no spoiled-brat mood swings or anxiety attacks about her weight or the way she looked. She simply sailed through those difficult years, delighting everyone with her sunny personality and an uncanny ability to be friends with just about everyone, including me. It's fair to say that we got on well, and that we were all just about as happy as any family could be. There were, I thought, no skeletons in any of our closets – well, not big ones anyway.
But as I stumbled back from that hotel in total shock, I realised that wasn't true any more. When I'd left the house that morning the family seemed rock solid. If you'd taken me to court I'd have sworn it on the Bible – after all, my parents were happily married with good jobs, enough money and two kids who were doing OK. Sure, Ash had been a bit moody over the last month or two, but she was staring her final exams in the face and that was stressful for sure. And me? Well, I was happy enough too, with my job as a rookie freelance journalist going great guns.
But suddenly the bedrock of our lives had changed to quicksand, and a seismic shift had moved it to a place undreamed of before. Nothing in the world could have prepared me for the utter shock I'd had. Nothing.
As I waited for my train home I played the tape back in my head, desperately searching for a logical explanation. The details were as crisp as if I was still standing there: the hotel foyer small but beautifully appointed, bathed in light from the tall windows with its wood paneling glowing in the pale spring sunshine. There were two people to one side waiting with their luggage, and the reception desk lay at the far end of the room. Ashley was there, standing with her back to me, bending forward to ask the concierge something. I saw him nod and smile, as most men did when confronted by a pretty girl; he gestured and I saw Ash turn, and I saw the man approaching her. He was stocky with a swarthy complexion and a full head of dark hair, and his face was as familiar as hers: it was my father.
And as I watched I saw her face light up in the most unimaginable joy and she ran three short steps to his arms. He enveloped her in a hug, his arms wrapped around her slender body, and she buried her face in his neck and clung to him. It was not a fatherly hug. My mind was racing – what the hell were they doing here? Yesterday Ash had told us she was going to stay with a friend in Guildford for two nights, and my Dad to a conference at Head Office in Cheltenham. Two different stories, both believable because they had reason to be going there – and yet, here they were, wrapped around each other in the lobby of a hotel where they had no reason to be at all.
But it was to get worse, for I saw them disengage and gaze into each other's eyes for a moment or two; and then he bent forward and kissed her on the lips. And it was not a fatherly peck, as I might have expected, but the long lingering kiss of a lover. Her back arched and she pressed her breasts against him, and her slender fingers reached up to caress his face. A kiss that seemed to last forever until they finally disengaged, and he took her hand and led her to the stairs.
*
It wasn't the best train journey home. All the way I was trying to rationalise what I'd seen – perhaps they were together planning a surprise, or he was sponsoring her for a job we didn't know about. Perhaps he had a medical condition and she was supporting him, or maybe they were there together to buy something – a flat or a car. But even if one of those unlikely scenarios was true, why would they choose a hotel to meet, and why would he be staying there?
And then there was the smooch. The passionate kiss of lovers, the molding of their bodies as they clung to each other in that dappled, sunlit place. The desperate clutch of their arms around each other, and the long, lingering look as they gazed into each other's eyes. There was no innocent explanation for that.
No innocent explanation.
Those three words kept bringing me back to one inescapable conclusion. It was unimaginable, I know, but try as I might I couldn't think of any other answer, and it haunted me all the way home.
I got off the train in a daze and walked through the quiet streets to where I lived. On every other night I'd have been happy to come home – but not tonight. Not knowing what I knew.
*
Mum was there to greet me with a peck on the cheek, and she looped her arm though mine and led me to the kitchen.
'So how was your trip, Tom?'
'Uh – yeah...good. I bought the camera I wanted.'
'That's wonderful! Perhaps you can show it to me after supper?' She smiled up at my face. 'You are hungry, aren't you? There's just you and me tonight so I've made us something special.' She gestured at the table, laid for two with candles and crisp white napkins and a little vase of flowers she'd picked from the garden that day. 'It's not often I get to have a date with my favourite son.'
