lead is light as a feather
((Obligatory notes: For Casey, for being jealous of the Laura stories. Same idea, except with more Rudy.
Casey is the best romantic friend ever.))
With the door propped open, the boys could hear the cicadas singing their serenades. The salty smell of sweat and sweet scent of blood drifted out slowly, but most would be trapped in the ancient wood, heaving and porous now from the humidity. The game had been a rough one, and had ended abruptly when Korbin viciously slammed the quaffle into Hackett’s nose; shattering it and fracturing his right zygomatic bone they would learn as they each joined the rest of their house for dinner. It was a completely random, malignant move that was not out of step with how they would play when the girls refused to join them in the evenings. If any of the girls had chosen to fly with them, the brutality would markedly disappear. Different still was the game they played when the girls sat watching in the stands; that was one of showy, underhanded subversiveness, and the violence was sure to escalate by the second.
It was for this reason (amongst, of course, a whole host of others) that they never invited any genial Gryffindors or pussyfooted Puffs along to their games. They were sure to get indignant and demand to play by some standard rule system, and the game would cease to be a game at all. This would be shouted in the locker room as they discarded layers of hindering garments, generally followed by a boisterous ‘Hear, hear!’-even by Edric, who hardly remembered that his youngest friend, stolidly by his side, was not a Slytherin at all by this sweltering day at the end of his last year.
Flattened out on the bench then, smelling the wood and tasting his own sweat, Edric was suddenly starkly reminded of their first meeting. When the last of the other boys had left, he voiced this revelation to Rudy, who came to sit at his feet, straddling the bench. “I think it was hotter then,” Rudy said, and Edric grinned.
“There’s no way it could ever be hotter than it is now. And you were wearing a sweater that day.”
The muscles in Edric’s calf twitched and his toes curled, and when Rudy pressed his fingers against his friend’s hot skin Edric flinched and almost jerked his leg away. “Ya, and you made fun of me for it,” Rudy reminded him, holding Ed’s ankle and curiously probing the offending muscle again.
“I make fun of you for having a head,” Edric replied.
“That’s because you’re a-“
“Hey, do you think Gaby’s going to keep going with Hackett when she finds out he got his face smashed by that wiry motherfucker?” Edric pushed himself up on an elbow, eyes glittering, grin lopsided. Rudy stopped massaging his tortured leg but did not release his ankle.
“Why wouldn’t she?” he asked, a nervous flutter touching his stomach, though then he could not place it. The mischief left Edric’s eyes then, replaced with frustration. He flopped back onto the bench, waving the issue away.
“You have to grow up so we can talk about girls,” he said to the ceiling.
Rudy wrinkled his nose, pushing Edric’s leg away and off the bench. “No,” he said definitively, and at that moment Edric laughed, for he thought that Rudy was refusing the idea of girls. It was only later that he would realize that Rudy was refusing the idea of growing up.
The cicadas sang and the wood sighed, and out on the pitch the dust settled until the next night the boys came out to play their sadistic games. Before the summer begins, Edric will suffer his third broken rib and the skin on his left arm will have to be regrown. In the next year, there would be no smirking Slytherins with snapped tendons or bloody noses cluttering up the infirmary every night. They were to graduate and grow up.
Rudy’s bedroom was yellow. Duck-yellow, Easter-yellow, new-bud-yellow. The floor creaked if they laughed too hard and the bed creaked if they breathed too deep. They learned quickly to ignore it, and soon it had become part of the silence they shared as they lounged amongst the pale sheets, watching the sun slowly cross the sky and begin its descent once again. Rudy lay across Edric’s long legs, eyes occasionally wandering from the pages of his book to the fabric of Edric’s rumpled pants, wondering vaguely if he would ever be so tall and graceful. At fourteen, like the rest of the boys in his year, Rudy’s height only amounted to awkwardness. Unlike the rest of the boys, it would be some time before Rudy filled out and overcame this stage.
Edric had not moved in quite some time, and while the rustling of Rudy’s pages joined the silence as the creaking had, Edric had nothing to contribute. He leaned against the headboard, head tilted back, eyes either closed or opened to mere slits to watch the sun and patiently wait for the ground to cool.
The determined yellowness of the room could not keep Rudy calm for very long. The pages rustled, more pointedly than they had been, and Edric’s eyes rolled to meet Rudy’s. They remained mostly closed, to watch his friend as he had watched the sun. “How old are you now?” Rudy asked, and for a long time thought that Edric’s bared canine would be the only response.
“Twenty-one.” Rudy nodded slowly and turned back to his book. Edric closed his eyes.
The calming yellow stopped working.
“Does that mean you’ve kissed a girl yet?”
Edric’s eyes opened to slits again, and he only raised an eyebrow, jaw tightening. The bed creaked, and the book fell to the floor. “What’s it like?”
Edric closed his eyes. The bed creaked again. The calming yellow never really worked in the first place. Rudy repeated, “What’s it like to kiss a girl?”
It took a deep breath, the air sucking between his teeth, to prepare Edric’s response; “Not like kissing your mother and less like kissing your grandmother.” When he finally opened his eyes, Edric knew just how frustrated his inadequate reply had made Rudy: the boy was on his knees, hands planted firmly on either side of Edric’s hips, giving Edric his most offended pout. The canine returned. “Do you have a particular girl in mind?”
It was Rudy’s turn to have no words, only a tint for his cheeks and shifting eyes. Edric couldn’t determine if this meant an embarrassed ‘yes’ or a discouraged ‘no’. Finally Edric moved, swinging those long legs over the edge of the bed and hunching his shoulders. With his back to Rudy, he said, “It’s not really the kissing that’s the hard part. Girls are complicated, and you’re never quite certain what they want. They’re never quite certain what they want. You have to be patient. When you finally get to the kissing, it’s like…you’re out of yourself. It’s like, ‘Why was this so hard?’”
The bed creaked, and Rudy was beside him, mimicking his pose. That wasn’t what Rudy wanted to hear. Ed’s eyes wandered to the ceiling, not yellow, and he tried to blow a damp lock off of his forehead. “Okay, listen: Don’t be a bunny about this, all right?” he conceded, but Rudy immediately began to giggle. It died off quickly, clasped behind his hands when Edric glared at him.
“I’m not. I won’t,” Rudy said, muffled by his palms. Despite the promise, it took a bit of soul-searching to be able to tear his hands from his face without revealing a giddy grin. Properly sobered, he gave Ed a sharp nod. Still, Rudy’s small hand instinctively pressed against Ed’s chest, into the folds of a wrinkled dress shirt, a little unsettled by the abruptness of it, but soon he was still: learning as he knew he was meant to.
First they were just touching, and Rudy’s eyes remained open, looking about him but unable to see anything but Edric’s blurry face, so he closed his eyes like Edric had and let himself feel the warmth of the… girl, that he was kissing. Not much was happening, though, and Rudy couldn’t see what all the hype was about. But it was harder than he expected: to keep up with his companion in crime, trying hard to let his mouth work easily the way Ed’s seemed to be, though it was stiffer than he meant, and so he let Edric lead-- surely that wasn’t what it was like to kiss a girl. Their lips were parted a little, Rudy’s soft and pliant under Edric’s certain touch: feeling only a little frightened at the swipe of Edric’s tongue over his upper lip. It was silent but for the sound of their breath. The house listened as Rudy learned. It was then that the creak of the floor under their tipping weight had them wrenching away from each other: one older set of eyes glancing towards the closed bedroom door for any signs of movement while the younger pair squeezed in pain as his head smacked against the iron bedpost with a resounding gong.
He hadn’t changed. He still dressed as if Armani himself had helped him into his jacket. He still smoked as if the air was not thick enough for him. He still reclined casually, legs sprawled and shoulders hunched. And when he finally caught sight of Rudy and stood to greet him, it was obvious that his body was still hard and lean, graceful and controlled as if he rehearsed every minute of his day. He still said, “Dolly,” and took his hand then grabbed his neck and did not let go until they were alone.
Rudy didn’t know why this surprised him. But he was still very much Edric, and when the other guests had finally trickled away and the doors had closed for the night, Rudy could still run his fingers along Edric’s sinewy arm and breathe his stale, citrus-laced cologne and hug him until he remembered he was mad at him.
“Where have you been?” Rudy asked, sounding less angry than hurt. Because that’s what he was, really. It was quite a hurtful thing to do, disappear and not even so much as send a letter to your best friend.
Edric shrugged and sat heavily in the same chair Rudy had first found him in that evening, pushing his last cigarette into the ashtray and watching it gasp. “Spain.”
“For three months?” Rudy was incredulous, but Edric only shrugged again and gave him a roguish smile. “For what?”
“For love,” Edric said, and was looking at the ashtray again. The smile remained. When Rudy didn’t say anything, Edric reached forward to grab his wrist and pull him closer until his knees hit the chair. “I missed your birthday,” he said, but it wasn’t an apology or even congratulations, only a simple statement of fact. Rudy wrinkled his nose and tugged his hand away to fold his arms across his chest. On his shoulder, Syrup did the same-even went as far as to turn around and put his back to Edric.
“Ya. For love.” The taunting tone washed over Edric; over his tanned skin and golden hair, and over his casual grin.
“You’ll have more birthdays,” Edric said, reaching up to try to untangle Rudy’s protective arms, tugging on his hand again.
“You’ll have more loves,” Rudy replied. He let Edric take his hand and hold it, but only because Edric was looking away again and looking softer than he had all night. Rudy would have believed him then if he had said, ‘No, I won’t’, and perhaps Edric knew this because he never did.
Instead, he said, “Happy belated birthday, Doll,” and squeezed his fingers.
After the first few days, Edric knew that the encounter would be brief, and when he knocked it was with an impatient hand on his hip and the cigarette between his lips was unlit. He would ask, superficially, “How are you doing?” or “Have you eaten anything?” and Rudy would lean against the doorframe, as if exhausted by the question. Edric would not mention that Rudy hadn’t changed his clothes in days, or that his eyes bulged with angry red veins, or that his cheeks were hollow and pale. Rudy didn’t even have to answer, so Edric would leave and stand on the stoop and smoke his cigarette.
A month later Edric didn’t even ask. He glared at his miserable friend, unkempt and watery-eyed in the doorway, then pushed passed him into the apartment, ignoring the weak protests.
Neither could say now who threw the first punch. But Edric shoved Rudy angrily, and Rudy was not in the proper state to deal with it. If the fight had occurred under less hampering circumstances, both of them knew, there was no way Edric would have the upper hand, but Rudy did not have any force of self-preservation behind him that day. So he was easily pinned, Edric’s knee on his stomach and hands on his shoulders, and he didn’t know what Edric was shouting but he didn’t much care either. Finally Edric stopped, face red, lip curled, knowing that Rudy didn’t care. He slumped forward, forehead touching the carpet, ear against Rudy’s, and when he thought Rudy started caring again he said, “I don’t care if you never go back to Canada again and you never see your family again. I don’t care. I want you to spend all that time with me, looking at me like I’m the best thing in the world, because without that I don’t know what to do with myself.”
“I can’t breath,” Rudy replied. Edric slid back until he was sitting on his knees between Rudy’s legs, but Rudy just panted. Finally, he said, “That was really vain.”
“I know,” Edric said.
Rudy sat up then, propping himself up with one hand. “Really self-centered.”
Edric dropped his head, tonguing his split lip and watching Rudy through his eyelashes. “Yes. What else does the rest of the continent already know?”
“Can you please say something less self-centered?” Rudy asked, earnestly desperate for his friend to show he cared, just a little bit. Edric’s eyes rolled, then he craned his neck until he spotted his cigarette, smoldering on the carpet.
“Your mum’s an asshole,” he said after a long pause. Rudy wanted to cry. Edric left the cigarette and scooted forward to hug his friend. It was a long time before Rudy hugged back, but Edric was patient.
“He loves you, you know,” Margo said softly. Everything she did was soft and slow and calculated. Sitting with her like this by the fire in the manor was like sipping a hot, aromatic tea at the end of a hectic day. Rudy said nothing, but his eyes wandered to the floor. He wasn’t sure whether to smile or protest. Or both.
“He won’t show it. He’s like his father that way.” The fire cracked and the logs shifted, sending up sparks. She picked up her book.
Rudy wanted to ask how she knew, but she was staring into the flames, fingers just to her mouth, breath coming in equal, meditative measures-to the count of ten, then out again, to the count of ten. Instead, he asked, “Did you love him?”
At first she just glanced to him out of the corner of her eye, and Rudy worried that his question had been too forward or improper. Edric had not quite taught him yet how to speak to the older generation-his own parents had always been somewhat removed from this circle. But soon Margo turned to face him again and said, “No. We were married for money and blood, that is all.” She breathed, to ten, and Rudy tried to think of a condolence. She continued without it; “I tried to love him, but he never stopped being so cold. I never hated him for it.”
There were more questions, but the last to occur to Rudy was if that meant it was hard for her to love Edric. He didn’t ask it, but she smiled and turned back to the fire. “Edric is much sadder than he ever was. It makes him easier to love.” To ten, to twenty. “Not in his words. In his physicality.”
“Like he’s apologizing all the time.”
Her eyes glittered and the smile returned. You love him, too.
She didn’t say it, but still Rudy replied, “Yes.”
The blood mingled with his sweat to slide easily down his nose and drop to the concrete. The wind howled through the tunnel, making robes flutter and the men shiver. There: Rosier, Macnair, Wilkes. There: Dolohov, Goyle and behind them, touching his face, coming away sticky every time, Rudolph. Here: Lord Voldemort.
Edric tried not to shiver, keeping his head down, fingers tangled in his sleeves, already beginning to stink of rot.
“How many saw?” Macnair finally said, but Edric didn’t hear him. He was watching Rudy; touching his face, touching his robes. “How many saw?” Macnair said again.
“Nobody. Nobody saw,” Rudy replied. Edric took a deep breath and licked his lips. Copper and salt.
“Nott,” Macnair continued and said again, “How many?”
“They’re dead,” Edric said flatly, and Voldemort hissed and touched his cheek. Edric finally met his eyes. “They’re dead,” Edric repeated, insistent this time, and echoed, “Nobody saw.”
“Not so much of a show next time, hm?” Voldemort said coolly, fingers dropping from Edric’s cheek to tighten around his jaw. Edric could only swallow and taste his lips again, taste the blood.
When they were gone, Edric began to laugh. It was blown away by the howling wind and Rudy just touched his face again.
In the muggle papers the next day, it was announced that the Brighton Belle had been pulled off the tracks after its last run off the day for immediately compulsive repairs. The hills outside of Clayton Tunnel grew wild and greener than they had been in years.
Gregory and Robert’s combined weight was three hundred and four pounds. Theodore, at five years old and three-foot-six, only weighed fifty two pounds.
Gregory and Robert only stared at him while he gestured wildly and shouted “Sit!” at them. His voice was high and frantic, unlike his father’s which was calm and deep as he swept by and, without breaking stride, said, “Sit.” Gregory and Robert did.
In the kitchen, Edric leaned on the counter, tasting the sauce that Rudy was stirring and frowned. “What did you put in that?”
“Brown sugar,” Rudy replied, peppy, grinning. Edric wrinkled his nose and pushed off the counter to sit at the island. “Are you hungry?”
“Not any more,” Edric said. Whatever offense Rudy might have taken at this was cut short, for there was the familiar clatter of nails across the floorboards and the dogs thundered through the kitchen, in one door and out the other. Above the thundering was a high-pitched, manic giggling, and then it was gone.
“Was that my son?” Edric asked, unmoved, sucking on the finger he had tasted the sauce with again.
“That was Greg and Rob,” Rudy pointed out.
“No, riding Gregory. Was that Theodore?”
“I don’t know, was it?”
Edric sat up then, staring out the door the dogs had left by, then snapped, “Did you teach him to ride the dogs?”
“No.”
“You asshole.”
The rain had turned the dressage ring to mud, and it splattered up the horses’ legs and caked on the boots of the riders. At the fence, Edric watched quietly, fingers pressed to his lips, eyes narrowed. Rudy, more excitable, stood on the wood, leaning into the ring and reaching out to touch the horses’ hot flanks as they trotted by.
“Why don’t you ride it?” Rudy asked, straightening, swinging away and off the fence to smile at Edric. The response was a glare for the interruption and a shrug. “I don’t see how any of these guys are any better than you,” Rudy tried again, tugging at Edric’s sleeve, trying to bring his hand away from his face.
“That’s why you’re not a judge,” Edric sighed, but he consented to the tugging and hooked his arm through Rudy’s. Mostly to keep him still, and to keep him from bothering the horses any more.
“Laura was better, huh?” Rudy continued. Again, Edric said nothing, staring Rudy down out of the corner of his eye until Rudy’s smile faded. Rudy didn’t get the chance to apologize; Edric was signaling to the riders and was away from him, heading through the damp grass towards the house. He didn’t follow until the horses were away, cleaned and resting in the stables.
The house was quiet when he entered; just the methodical ticking of a heavy clock at the back of the hall and a creak of old wood somewhere above him. Rudy was careful to remove his muddy shoes and leave them where Edric wouldn’t get exasperated, but he never got to investigate the creak from upstairs. Theo appeared at his side, clutching a book to his chest, looking pleading. Rudy smiled brightly and followed him to the sitting room. It was there, the book barely glanced at, that Theo asked if Rudy thought his mum was happy.
It was a voice at the door that interrupted Rudy’s quiet affirmations. It was low and calm, but it made both of them flinch. “Rudolph,” Edric said, “come with me.” He didn’t have to tell Theo to stay; he just shot the boy an oppressive glance and was gone, Rudy following meekly.
Rudy couldn’t stand the silence he was met with in the library, so he tried to smile and say, “We were just reading…“ He stopped when he met Edric’s eyes.
The elder man scratched his beard, turning away to grimace and gather his thoughts before saying, “That’s my son.”
“Ed…” Rudy started, but didn’t want to say ‘I know’.
“That’s my son,” Edric said again. Rudy had never heard Edric yell, but he was sure he would then. So he braced himself, but was only met with a hiss. “You have no right to fill his head with shit about becoming butterflies.”
“That’s not what I-“
“Do you think whatever mad bullshit you believe is better for him than what I’ve tried to tell him? Do you think it’s good for him now to experience different perspectives? Do you think this isn’t hard enough for him to deal with already? Do you think?”
“Ed, don’t-“
“That’s my son,” Edric said a third time, and this time Rudy said, “I know!”
The library was silent again. The sun finally shook away the lingering rain clouds as it set, filling the room with a warm orange light. Without looking up, thumbnail pressed against his lip, Edric asked, “Why are you still here?”
It had been a long time since Edric had questioned Rudy’s presence in his home. It was silently accepted that Rudy was welcome to come and go as he pleased. Rudy could only say, “I don’t know.”
In Morocco, they stopped drinking wine. The mint tea they were offered everywhere they paused suited Rudy well enough-it was served with enough sugar to overwhelm even him, and completely horrify Edric. Sitting on the balconies of hotels in shorts and open shirts Edric would mutter his distaste and offense at an entire culture’s abuse of a perfectly fine tea leaf. In aromatic markets, Rudy would accept the tea from men selling strawberries the size of a fist, sugar cube between his teeth, and only hum his acknowledgement when Edric hissed in his ear about his immature taste buds and the vileness of sugar. Upon reaching Italy, Edric would revel in his bitter espresso, but for Rudy it took several days to readjust.
Even the beer in Morocco did not suit Edric, so their inland trip to Casablanca was spent in remarkable clarity (aside from an unexpected interruption of a bus trip one Sunday where all three of the men were invited to chew qat while the bus sat and sweltered on the side of the barren road). So it was on this trip, sweating under hats and sunglasses, learning to accommodate the smell of the diesel, that they each found it in themselves to be completely open with each other. For Theo it was the most difficult, and to feel comfortable speaking about his fears and regrets they needed to be off the buses and alone on the clay tiles of their various touristy accommodations. But as they rumbled through the desert, smiling politely as women handed them ten-pound sacks of beans to protect so they might grab a sobbing child’s ear, Theo was more than happy to encourage blushing, grumbled accounts of Edric and Rudy’s adventures and misadventures. By the end of these stories, Edric’s fingers would have left the back of Theo’s neck to grip Rudy’s shoulder or arm or twist in his hand as they trailed off and chuckled together at detached words and stilted gestures.
They all started the same way: ‘this was before I met your mother or ‘this was before you were born’, but there was one that Theo continued to turn over in his mind long after those thickly hot, chokingly piquant journeys along the dusty roads of Morocco. At first Theo had begun to wonder if some force in his mother had destroyed some reckless, adventurous, heroic part of his father-he wondered why none of these stories started with ‘you were away at school’ or ‘I took your mother out one night’. It took a moment on a beach in Rabat to bring these ponderings to an abrupt end. They stood quietly, shoes in hand, water lapping their toes and just as the sun was peeking its last sliver of the day over the twilight-still waters Theo began to say, “Do you remember that time you told me…” He stopped, for in that moment he realized he knew all the stories that began ‘you were away at school’, and he found he only did not know the stories that began another way because he had never asked.
“This was before you were born,” his father said from behind him, and Theo knew that it was time to get comfortable, turning to face the front of the bus again, settling deeply into his seat. His father’s voice was deep, rich and warm-brown velvet, black forest cake-not booming or demanding but inviting, keeping Theo riveted even as a goat bleated at the back of the bus or the brakes squealed across the ground. He might have even been lulled, but Edric kept his hand hooked over the back of Theo’s seat, just at his neck, prodding Theo back to attention as if he knew precisely when Theo’s mind would begin to wander. This story in particular, it was very measured, and Rudy did not interrupt as much as he usually would.
“I was thirty-six when your grandfather died. Thirty-six and I hadn’t grown up yet. Thirty-six and I still thought he was just my dad. Almost forty and I believed he was a king. Almost forty and I was still a child.
“It was in London that spring that Jimi Hendrix first set fire to his guitar. Mick Jagger and Keith Richards were charged for possession of drugs. Abortion and homosexuality were decriminalized, and all of this…it was long coming, but all of this was like the pivot for this reckless, sexual, rock and roll frenzy that froze wars, liberated peoples, rewrote constitutions. In the fifties, we watched our mothers go to lunch in gloves and skirts that touched the knee, and in the sixties we watched our sisters suck dick on stage. You can’t understand what that was like. We were all children still, still up to our knees in bombed out buildings from a war we saw end more than twenty years before. And the most fucked up part, the part we didn’t realize, was that it wasn’t us that were tearing down all of these rigid beliefs. It wasn’t us that stripped our mothers of their white gloves, and it wasn’t the new kids, the twenty-year-olds that were shouting the loudest. It was our parents. In the newspapers they lamented about the end of civility, but on their pop-art laminate breakfast tables they cut out more lines than they could afford. They hated those fucking white gloves.
“My father had been doing it for years. To be able to function at his own thirtieth wedding anniversary, he needed almost a gram of cocaine in his system. I was blind to it. When he had a heart attack in 1965, that’s all my mother told me it was; a heart attack. Of course that’s all it fucking was. It was other people, other people’s dads that stuck needles between their toes. When it happened the second time, she told me the truth. She told me that about a third of our estate was a direct result of him storing, shifting, selling drugs to the kids hunger striking for the liberation of zoo animals and to the rock stars we all wanted to be. She told me how he was better at glamour charms than an aging cabaret star.
“We were all children in 1967, we were drowning in righteousness and judgment and anger and we were starving for honesty.
“I wasn’t sad at his funeral. I wasn’t angry or even numb. I didn’t know that man. He was my father, and his role in my life was limited to paying the bills, giving me a whack when I said the wrong thing, and teaching me how to shave. That was it. I guess one of those things made me love him, but none of them made me like him, and that was all right. I stopped wanting to be him.
“I didn’t tell Dolly the first time he went to the hospital, and I didn’t tell him when the funeral was. Still in my Sunday suit, I sent him an owl asking him where he was. He was in South Africa, Johannesburg. I spent two weeks in Africa, and when I told him my father had died, he just said, ‘I learned how to make wine.’”
On the bus, Theo felt the African heat and smelled his father’s spiced cigarettes, and behind him heard Rudy shifting, fidgeting at the mention of his name. Rudy didn’t interject, but Theo could hear him lean over and rest against Edric and Theo knew that the story had ended for Edric’s fingers were no longer at his neck. He never found out how those two weeks in Johannesburg were spent.
As the journey went on, their days got shorter and their nights longer. It was not uncommon to find sheets still rumpled by ten o’clock, eleven, noon-long after the sun had come up and the fishermen had sailed by. When the sun was at its highest and the day was at its hottest, they would drag themselves onto the gleaming deck of the ship to eat iced fruits and wake their bodies with the sea air. If it rained, they stayed in bed until the words began to swim across the pages of their books or their sides ached from laughing.
On the morning of April 1st, 1999, it didn’t rain but the sky rumbled and the sun was shy. So Rudy rolled over and clutched his pillow and mumbled ‘Happy Birthday to me’ with a smile before drifting off again. He didn’t know how long he had slept before he was woken again by the taptaptap of rain all around him, and a warm hand on his arm. Edric didn’t say ‘Happy Birthday’ or even ‘Good morning’, just smiled and crawled under the blankets with him, pressed to his back, hand against his chest. Rudy was almost dozing again by the time Edric said, “I made you something.” Rudy didn’t reply, but by the feeling of Edric’s grin against his back he knew Edric had felt him tense with excitement. “Don’t move,” Edric said, and Rudy didn’t even think he could. He was buoyed between still dozing and shivering with anticipation, so he clutched his pillow tight to his chest and wiggled impatiently. Edric’s heat didn’t leave him for long, and when it returned it was the same as before; curved along his back, breath across his neck. The hand didn’t return to his chest, though; instead, a sticky finger touched his lips and Rudy didn’t think twice in his excitement before tasting it. Something spicy, something sweet, something bitter; cinnamon, maple, apples. Edric was alone in the bed with only Syrup tugging at his hair for almost ten seconds before he even realized it.
Rudy swayed in the kitchen for a full minute, staring at the perfect cake. It stared back, and only the rain spoke. Finally he advanced on it, holding both his hands out and over it, but only carefully dipping one finger into the sterilely smoothed whipped topping. The mark it left on the otherwise expertly unmarred surface made Rudy grin giddily; like his own brash imprint on the sterile smooth surface of Edric’s life. Only, the imprint there went deeper, and it was visible from all sides. He couldn’t help but touch each of his fingers to the flawless icing then; marking every side, getting his hands deliciously sticky.
Back in his bedroom, Edric was sprawled across his bed and had let the sea rock and the rain sing him back to sleep. Rudy gingerly sat beside him, not wanting to wake him, but holding two plates-- each with a generous portion of the cake. Slowly, he leaned over to leave one on the bedside table, but the movement was enough to entice a grin and crack open Edric’s eyes. He whispered, “There were candles to go on that.”
“It’s delicious,” Rudy mumbled with his mouth full.
By the time Theo knocked on the door, drawn in by their laughter, the plates were mostly empty. “Happy Birthday,” Theo said brightly, climbing onto the bed to carefully crawl between them under the blankets. He ignored his father trying to smooth his hair and asked, “How old are you now?”
Both men replied at the same time, Edric saying, “Fourteen,” Rudy tsk’ing, “A lady never tells.”
So they stayed together, dozing and laughing and listening to the rain around them until the fishermen sailed back into the harbour and the clouds were blown across the water. The beds never got made that day, and the cake was gone by the next morning.
Casey is the best romantic friend ever.))
With the door propped open, the boys could hear the cicadas singing their serenades. The salty smell of sweat and sweet scent of blood drifted out slowly, but most would be trapped in the ancient wood, heaving and porous now from the humidity. The game had been a rough one, and had ended abruptly when Korbin viciously slammed the quaffle into Hackett’s nose; shattering it and fracturing his right zygomatic bone they would learn as they each joined the rest of their house for dinner. It was a completely random, malignant move that was not out of step with how they would play when the girls refused to join them in the evenings. If any of the girls had chosen to fly with them, the brutality would markedly disappear. Different still was the game they played when the girls sat watching in the stands; that was one of showy, underhanded subversiveness, and the violence was sure to escalate by the second.
It was for this reason (amongst, of course, a whole host of others) that they never invited any genial Gryffindors or pussyfooted Puffs along to their games. They were sure to get indignant and demand to play by some standard rule system, and the game would cease to be a game at all. This would be shouted in the locker room as they discarded layers of hindering garments, generally followed by a boisterous ‘Hear, hear!’-even by Edric, who hardly remembered that his youngest friend, stolidly by his side, was not a Slytherin at all by this sweltering day at the end of his last year.
Flattened out on the bench then, smelling the wood and tasting his own sweat, Edric was suddenly starkly reminded of their first meeting. When the last of the other boys had left, he voiced this revelation to Rudy, who came to sit at his feet, straddling the bench. “I think it was hotter then,” Rudy said, and Edric grinned.
“There’s no way it could ever be hotter than it is now. And you were wearing a sweater that day.”
The muscles in Edric’s calf twitched and his toes curled, and when Rudy pressed his fingers against his friend’s hot skin Edric flinched and almost jerked his leg away. “Ya, and you made fun of me for it,” Rudy reminded him, holding Ed’s ankle and curiously probing the offending muscle again.
“I make fun of you for having a head,” Edric replied.
“That’s because you’re a-“
“Hey, do you think Gaby’s going to keep going with Hackett when she finds out he got his face smashed by that wiry motherfucker?” Edric pushed himself up on an elbow, eyes glittering, grin lopsided. Rudy stopped massaging his tortured leg but did not release his ankle.
“Why wouldn’t she?” he asked, a nervous flutter touching his stomach, though then he could not place it. The mischief left Edric’s eyes then, replaced with frustration. He flopped back onto the bench, waving the issue away.
“You have to grow up so we can talk about girls,” he said to the ceiling.
Rudy wrinkled his nose, pushing Edric’s leg away and off the bench. “No,” he said definitively, and at that moment Edric laughed, for he thought that Rudy was refusing the idea of girls. It was only later that he would realize that Rudy was refusing the idea of growing up.
The cicadas sang and the wood sighed, and out on the pitch the dust settled until the next night the boys came out to play their sadistic games. Before the summer begins, Edric will suffer his third broken rib and the skin on his left arm will have to be regrown. In the next year, there would be no smirking Slytherins with snapped tendons or bloody noses cluttering up the infirmary every night. They were to graduate and grow up.
Rudy’s bedroom was yellow. Duck-yellow, Easter-yellow, new-bud-yellow. The floor creaked if they laughed too hard and the bed creaked if they breathed too deep. They learned quickly to ignore it, and soon it had become part of the silence they shared as they lounged amongst the pale sheets, watching the sun slowly cross the sky and begin its descent once again. Rudy lay across Edric’s long legs, eyes occasionally wandering from the pages of his book to the fabric of Edric’s rumpled pants, wondering vaguely if he would ever be so tall and graceful. At fourteen, like the rest of the boys in his year, Rudy’s height only amounted to awkwardness. Unlike the rest of the boys, it would be some time before Rudy filled out and overcame this stage.
Edric had not moved in quite some time, and while the rustling of Rudy’s pages joined the silence as the creaking had, Edric had nothing to contribute. He leaned against the headboard, head tilted back, eyes either closed or opened to mere slits to watch the sun and patiently wait for the ground to cool.
The determined yellowness of the room could not keep Rudy calm for very long. The pages rustled, more pointedly than they had been, and Edric’s eyes rolled to meet Rudy’s. They remained mostly closed, to watch his friend as he had watched the sun. “How old are you now?” Rudy asked, and for a long time thought that Edric’s bared canine would be the only response.
“Twenty-one.” Rudy nodded slowly and turned back to his book. Edric closed his eyes.
The calming yellow stopped working.
“Does that mean you’ve kissed a girl yet?”
Edric’s eyes opened to slits again, and he only raised an eyebrow, jaw tightening. The bed creaked, and the book fell to the floor. “What’s it like?”
Edric closed his eyes. The bed creaked again. The calming yellow never really worked in the first place. Rudy repeated, “What’s it like to kiss a girl?”
It took a deep breath, the air sucking between his teeth, to prepare Edric’s response; “Not like kissing your mother and less like kissing your grandmother.” When he finally opened his eyes, Edric knew just how frustrated his inadequate reply had made Rudy: the boy was on his knees, hands planted firmly on either side of Edric’s hips, giving Edric his most offended pout. The canine returned. “Do you have a particular girl in mind?”
It was Rudy’s turn to have no words, only a tint for his cheeks and shifting eyes. Edric couldn’t determine if this meant an embarrassed ‘yes’ or a discouraged ‘no’. Finally Edric moved, swinging those long legs over the edge of the bed and hunching his shoulders. With his back to Rudy, he said, “It’s not really the kissing that’s the hard part. Girls are complicated, and you’re never quite certain what they want. They’re never quite certain what they want. You have to be patient. When you finally get to the kissing, it’s like…you’re out of yourself. It’s like, ‘Why was this so hard?’”
The bed creaked, and Rudy was beside him, mimicking his pose. That wasn’t what Rudy wanted to hear. Ed’s eyes wandered to the ceiling, not yellow, and he tried to blow a damp lock off of his forehead. “Okay, listen: Don’t be a bunny about this, all right?” he conceded, but Rudy immediately began to giggle. It died off quickly, clasped behind his hands when Edric glared at him.
“I’m not. I won’t,” Rudy said, muffled by his palms. Despite the promise, it took a bit of soul-searching to be able to tear his hands from his face without revealing a giddy grin. Properly sobered, he gave Ed a sharp nod. Still, Rudy’s small hand instinctively pressed against Ed’s chest, into the folds of a wrinkled dress shirt, a little unsettled by the abruptness of it, but soon he was still: learning as he knew he was meant to.
First they were just touching, and Rudy’s eyes remained open, looking about him but unable to see anything but Edric’s blurry face, so he closed his eyes like Edric had and let himself feel the warmth of the… girl, that he was kissing. Not much was happening, though, and Rudy couldn’t see what all the hype was about. But it was harder than he expected: to keep up with his companion in crime, trying hard to let his mouth work easily the way Ed’s seemed to be, though it was stiffer than he meant, and so he let Edric lead-- surely that wasn’t what it was like to kiss a girl. Their lips were parted a little, Rudy’s soft and pliant under Edric’s certain touch: feeling only a little frightened at the swipe of Edric’s tongue over his upper lip. It was silent but for the sound of their breath. The house listened as Rudy learned. It was then that the creak of the floor under their tipping weight had them wrenching away from each other: one older set of eyes glancing towards the closed bedroom door for any signs of movement while the younger pair squeezed in pain as his head smacked against the iron bedpost with a resounding gong.
He hadn’t changed. He still dressed as if Armani himself had helped him into his jacket. He still smoked as if the air was not thick enough for him. He still reclined casually, legs sprawled and shoulders hunched. And when he finally caught sight of Rudy and stood to greet him, it was obvious that his body was still hard and lean, graceful and controlled as if he rehearsed every minute of his day. He still said, “Dolly,” and took his hand then grabbed his neck and did not let go until they were alone.
Rudy didn’t know why this surprised him. But he was still very much Edric, and when the other guests had finally trickled away and the doors had closed for the night, Rudy could still run his fingers along Edric’s sinewy arm and breathe his stale, citrus-laced cologne and hug him until he remembered he was mad at him.
“Where have you been?” Rudy asked, sounding less angry than hurt. Because that’s what he was, really. It was quite a hurtful thing to do, disappear and not even so much as send a letter to your best friend.
Edric shrugged and sat heavily in the same chair Rudy had first found him in that evening, pushing his last cigarette into the ashtray and watching it gasp. “Spain.”
“For three months?” Rudy was incredulous, but Edric only shrugged again and gave him a roguish smile. “For what?”
“For love,” Edric said, and was looking at the ashtray again. The smile remained. When Rudy didn’t say anything, Edric reached forward to grab his wrist and pull him closer until his knees hit the chair. “I missed your birthday,” he said, but it wasn’t an apology or even congratulations, only a simple statement of fact. Rudy wrinkled his nose and tugged his hand away to fold his arms across his chest. On his shoulder, Syrup did the same-even went as far as to turn around and put his back to Edric.
“Ya. For love.” The taunting tone washed over Edric; over his tanned skin and golden hair, and over his casual grin.
“You’ll have more birthdays,” Edric said, reaching up to try to untangle Rudy’s protective arms, tugging on his hand again.
“You’ll have more loves,” Rudy replied. He let Edric take his hand and hold it, but only because Edric was looking away again and looking softer than he had all night. Rudy would have believed him then if he had said, ‘No, I won’t’, and perhaps Edric knew this because he never did.
Instead, he said, “Happy belated birthday, Doll,” and squeezed his fingers.
After the first few days, Edric knew that the encounter would be brief, and when he knocked it was with an impatient hand on his hip and the cigarette between his lips was unlit. He would ask, superficially, “How are you doing?” or “Have you eaten anything?” and Rudy would lean against the doorframe, as if exhausted by the question. Edric would not mention that Rudy hadn’t changed his clothes in days, or that his eyes bulged with angry red veins, or that his cheeks were hollow and pale. Rudy didn’t even have to answer, so Edric would leave and stand on the stoop and smoke his cigarette.
A month later Edric didn’t even ask. He glared at his miserable friend, unkempt and watery-eyed in the doorway, then pushed passed him into the apartment, ignoring the weak protests.
Neither could say now who threw the first punch. But Edric shoved Rudy angrily, and Rudy was not in the proper state to deal with it. If the fight had occurred under less hampering circumstances, both of them knew, there was no way Edric would have the upper hand, but Rudy did not have any force of self-preservation behind him that day. So he was easily pinned, Edric’s knee on his stomach and hands on his shoulders, and he didn’t know what Edric was shouting but he didn’t much care either. Finally Edric stopped, face red, lip curled, knowing that Rudy didn’t care. He slumped forward, forehead touching the carpet, ear against Rudy’s, and when he thought Rudy started caring again he said, “I don’t care if you never go back to Canada again and you never see your family again. I don’t care. I want you to spend all that time with me, looking at me like I’m the best thing in the world, because without that I don’t know what to do with myself.”
“I can’t breath,” Rudy replied. Edric slid back until he was sitting on his knees between Rudy’s legs, but Rudy just panted. Finally, he said, “That was really vain.”
“I know,” Edric said.
Rudy sat up then, propping himself up with one hand. “Really self-centered.”
Edric dropped his head, tonguing his split lip and watching Rudy through his eyelashes. “Yes. What else does the rest of the continent already know?”
“Can you please say something less self-centered?” Rudy asked, earnestly desperate for his friend to show he cared, just a little bit. Edric’s eyes rolled, then he craned his neck until he spotted his cigarette, smoldering on the carpet.
“Your mum’s an asshole,” he said after a long pause. Rudy wanted to cry. Edric left the cigarette and scooted forward to hug his friend. It was a long time before Rudy hugged back, but Edric was patient.
“He loves you, you know,” Margo said softly. Everything she did was soft and slow and calculated. Sitting with her like this by the fire in the manor was like sipping a hot, aromatic tea at the end of a hectic day. Rudy said nothing, but his eyes wandered to the floor. He wasn’t sure whether to smile or protest. Or both.
“He won’t show it. He’s like his father that way.” The fire cracked and the logs shifted, sending up sparks. She picked up her book.
Rudy wanted to ask how she knew, but she was staring into the flames, fingers just to her mouth, breath coming in equal, meditative measures-to the count of ten, then out again, to the count of ten. Instead, he asked, “Did you love him?”
At first she just glanced to him out of the corner of her eye, and Rudy worried that his question had been too forward or improper. Edric had not quite taught him yet how to speak to the older generation-his own parents had always been somewhat removed from this circle. But soon Margo turned to face him again and said, “No. We were married for money and blood, that is all.” She breathed, to ten, and Rudy tried to think of a condolence. She continued without it; “I tried to love him, but he never stopped being so cold. I never hated him for it.”
There were more questions, but the last to occur to Rudy was if that meant it was hard for her to love Edric. He didn’t ask it, but she smiled and turned back to the fire. “Edric is much sadder than he ever was. It makes him easier to love.” To ten, to twenty. “Not in his words. In his physicality.”
“Like he’s apologizing all the time.”
Her eyes glittered and the smile returned. You love him, too.
She didn’t say it, but still Rudy replied, “Yes.”
The blood mingled with his sweat to slide easily down his nose and drop to the concrete. The wind howled through the tunnel, making robes flutter and the men shiver. There: Rosier, Macnair, Wilkes. There: Dolohov, Goyle and behind them, touching his face, coming away sticky every time, Rudolph. Here: Lord Voldemort.
Edric tried not to shiver, keeping his head down, fingers tangled in his sleeves, already beginning to stink of rot.
“How many saw?” Macnair finally said, but Edric didn’t hear him. He was watching Rudy; touching his face, touching his robes. “How many saw?” Macnair said again.
“Nobody. Nobody saw,” Rudy replied. Edric took a deep breath and licked his lips. Copper and salt.
“Nott,” Macnair continued and said again, “How many?”
“They’re dead,” Edric said flatly, and Voldemort hissed and touched his cheek. Edric finally met his eyes. “They’re dead,” Edric repeated, insistent this time, and echoed, “Nobody saw.”
“Not so much of a show next time, hm?” Voldemort said coolly, fingers dropping from Edric’s cheek to tighten around his jaw. Edric could only swallow and taste his lips again, taste the blood.
When they were gone, Edric began to laugh. It was blown away by the howling wind and Rudy just touched his face again.
In the muggle papers the next day, it was announced that the Brighton Belle had been pulled off the tracks after its last run off the day for immediately compulsive repairs. The hills outside of Clayton Tunnel grew wild and greener than they had been in years.
Gregory and Robert’s combined weight was three hundred and four pounds. Theodore, at five years old and three-foot-six, only weighed fifty two pounds.
Gregory and Robert only stared at him while he gestured wildly and shouted “Sit!” at them. His voice was high and frantic, unlike his father’s which was calm and deep as he swept by and, without breaking stride, said, “Sit.” Gregory and Robert did.
In the kitchen, Edric leaned on the counter, tasting the sauce that Rudy was stirring and frowned. “What did you put in that?”
“Brown sugar,” Rudy replied, peppy, grinning. Edric wrinkled his nose and pushed off the counter to sit at the island. “Are you hungry?”
“Not any more,” Edric said. Whatever offense Rudy might have taken at this was cut short, for there was the familiar clatter of nails across the floorboards and the dogs thundered through the kitchen, in one door and out the other. Above the thundering was a high-pitched, manic giggling, and then it was gone.
“Was that my son?” Edric asked, unmoved, sucking on the finger he had tasted the sauce with again.
“That was Greg and Rob,” Rudy pointed out.
“No, riding Gregory. Was that Theodore?”
“I don’t know, was it?”
Edric sat up then, staring out the door the dogs had left by, then snapped, “Did you teach him to ride the dogs?”
“No.”
“You asshole.”
The rain had turned the dressage ring to mud, and it splattered up the horses’ legs and caked on the boots of the riders. At the fence, Edric watched quietly, fingers pressed to his lips, eyes narrowed. Rudy, more excitable, stood on the wood, leaning into the ring and reaching out to touch the horses’ hot flanks as they trotted by.
“Why don’t you ride it?” Rudy asked, straightening, swinging away and off the fence to smile at Edric. The response was a glare for the interruption and a shrug. “I don’t see how any of these guys are any better than you,” Rudy tried again, tugging at Edric’s sleeve, trying to bring his hand away from his face.
“That’s why you’re not a judge,” Edric sighed, but he consented to the tugging and hooked his arm through Rudy’s. Mostly to keep him still, and to keep him from bothering the horses any more.
“Laura was better, huh?” Rudy continued. Again, Edric said nothing, staring Rudy down out of the corner of his eye until Rudy’s smile faded. Rudy didn’t get the chance to apologize; Edric was signaling to the riders and was away from him, heading through the damp grass towards the house. He didn’t follow until the horses were away, cleaned and resting in the stables.
The house was quiet when he entered; just the methodical ticking of a heavy clock at the back of the hall and a creak of old wood somewhere above him. Rudy was careful to remove his muddy shoes and leave them where Edric wouldn’t get exasperated, but he never got to investigate the creak from upstairs. Theo appeared at his side, clutching a book to his chest, looking pleading. Rudy smiled brightly and followed him to the sitting room. It was there, the book barely glanced at, that Theo asked if Rudy thought his mum was happy.
It was a voice at the door that interrupted Rudy’s quiet affirmations. It was low and calm, but it made both of them flinch. “Rudolph,” Edric said, “come with me.” He didn’t have to tell Theo to stay; he just shot the boy an oppressive glance and was gone, Rudy following meekly.
Rudy couldn’t stand the silence he was met with in the library, so he tried to smile and say, “We were just reading…“ He stopped when he met Edric’s eyes.
The elder man scratched his beard, turning away to grimace and gather his thoughts before saying, “That’s my son.”
“Ed…” Rudy started, but didn’t want to say ‘I know’.
“That’s my son,” Edric said again. Rudy had never heard Edric yell, but he was sure he would then. So he braced himself, but was only met with a hiss. “You have no right to fill his head with shit about becoming butterflies.”
“That’s not what I-“
“Do you think whatever mad bullshit you believe is better for him than what I’ve tried to tell him? Do you think it’s good for him now to experience different perspectives? Do you think this isn’t hard enough for him to deal with already? Do you think?”
“Ed, don’t-“
“That’s my son,” Edric said a third time, and this time Rudy said, “I know!”
The library was silent again. The sun finally shook away the lingering rain clouds as it set, filling the room with a warm orange light. Without looking up, thumbnail pressed against his lip, Edric asked, “Why are you still here?”
It had been a long time since Edric had questioned Rudy’s presence in his home. It was silently accepted that Rudy was welcome to come and go as he pleased. Rudy could only say, “I don’t know.”
In Morocco, they stopped drinking wine. The mint tea they were offered everywhere they paused suited Rudy well enough-it was served with enough sugar to overwhelm even him, and completely horrify Edric. Sitting on the balconies of hotels in shorts and open shirts Edric would mutter his distaste and offense at an entire culture’s abuse of a perfectly fine tea leaf. In aromatic markets, Rudy would accept the tea from men selling strawberries the size of a fist, sugar cube between his teeth, and only hum his acknowledgement when Edric hissed in his ear about his immature taste buds and the vileness of sugar. Upon reaching Italy, Edric would revel in his bitter espresso, but for Rudy it took several days to readjust.
Even the beer in Morocco did not suit Edric, so their inland trip to Casablanca was spent in remarkable clarity (aside from an unexpected interruption of a bus trip one Sunday where all three of the men were invited to chew qat while the bus sat and sweltered on the side of the barren road). So it was on this trip, sweating under hats and sunglasses, learning to accommodate the smell of the diesel, that they each found it in themselves to be completely open with each other. For Theo it was the most difficult, and to feel comfortable speaking about his fears and regrets they needed to be off the buses and alone on the clay tiles of their various touristy accommodations. But as they rumbled through the desert, smiling politely as women handed them ten-pound sacks of beans to protect so they might grab a sobbing child’s ear, Theo was more than happy to encourage blushing, grumbled accounts of Edric and Rudy’s adventures and misadventures. By the end of these stories, Edric’s fingers would have left the back of Theo’s neck to grip Rudy’s shoulder or arm or twist in his hand as they trailed off and chuckled together at detached words and stilted gestures.
They all started the same way: ‘this was before I met your mother or ‘this was before you were born’, but there was one that Theo continued to turn over in his mind long after those thickly hot, chokingly piquant journeys along the dusty roads of Morocco. At first Theo had begun to wonder if some force in his mother had destroyed some reckless, adventurous, heroic part of his father-he wondered why none of these stories started with ‘you were away at school’ or ‘I took your mother out one night’. It took a moment on a beach in Rabat to bring these ponderings to an abrupt end. They stood quietly, shoes in hand, water lapping their toes and just as the sun was peeking its last sliver of the day over the twilight-still waters Theo began to say, “Do you remember that time you told me…” He stopped, for in that moment he realized he knew all the stories that began ‘you were away at school’, and he found he only did not know the stories that began another way because he had never asked.
“This was before you were born,” his father said from behind him, and Theo knew that it was time to get comfortable, turning to face the front of the bus again, settling deeply into his seat. His father’s voice was deep, rich and warm-brown velvet, black forest cake-not booming or demanding but inviting, keeping Theo riveted even as a goat bleated at the back of the bus or the brakes squealed across the ground. He might have even been lulled, but Edric kept his hand hooked over the back of Theo’s seat, just at his neck, prodding Theo back to attention as if he knew precisely when Theo’s mind would begin to wander. This story in particular, it was very measured, and Rudy did not interrupt as much as he usually would.
“I was thirty-six when your grandfather died. Thirty-six and I hadn’t grown up yet. Thirty-six and I still thought he was just my dad. Almost forty and I believed he was a king. Almost forty and I was still a child.
“It was in London that spring that Jimi Hendrix first set fire to his guitar. Mick Jagger and Keith Richards were charged for possession of drugs. Abortion and homosexuality were decriminalized, and all of this…it was long coming, but all of this was like the pivot for this reckless, sexual, rock and roll frenzy that froze wars, liberated peoples, rewrote constitutions. In the fifties, we watched our mothers go to lunch in gloves and skirts that touched the knee, and in the sixties we watched our sisters suck dick on stage. You can’t understand what that was like. We were all children still, still up to our knees in bombed out buildings from a war we saw end more than twenty years before. And the most fucked up part, the part we didn’t realize, was that it wasn’t us that were tearing down all of these rigid beliefs. It wasn’t us that stripped our mothers of their white gloves, and it wasn’t the new kids, the twenty-year-olds that were shouting the loudest. It was our parents. In the newspapers they lamented about the end of civility, but on their pop-art laminate breakfast tables they cut out more lines than they could afford. They hated those fucking white gloves.
“My father had been doing it for years. To be able to function at his own thirtieth wedding anniversary, he needed almost a gram of cocaine in his system. I was blind to it. When he had a heart attack in 1965, that’s all my mother told me it was; a heart attack. Of course that’s all it fucking was. It was other people, other people’s dads that stuck needles between their toes. When it happened the second time, she told me the truth. She told me that about a third of our estate was a direct result of him storing, shifting, selling drugs to the kids hunger striking for the liberation of zoo animals and to the rock stars we all wanted to be. She told me how he was better at glamour charms than an aging cabaret star.
“We were all children in 1967, we were drowning in righteousness and judgment and anger and we were starving for honesty.
“I wasn’t sad at his funeral. I wasn’t angry or even numb. I didn’t know that man. He was my father, and his role in my life was limited to paying the bills, giving me a whack when I said the wrong thing, and teaching me how to shave. That was it. I guess one of those things made me love him, but none of them made me like him, and that was all right. I stopped wanting to be him.
“I didn’t tell Dolly the first time he went to the hospital, and I didn’t tell him when the funeral was. Still in my Sunday suit, I sent him an owl asking him where he was. He was in South Africa, Johannesburg. I spent two weeks in Africa, and when I told him my father had died, he just said, ‘I learned how to make wine.’”
On the bus, Theo felt the African heat and smelled his father’s spiced cigarettes, and behind him heard Rudy shifting, fidgeting at the mention of his name. Rudy didn’t interject, but Theo could hear him lean over and rest against Edric and Theo knew that the story had ended for Edric’s fingers were no longer at his neck. He never found out how those two weeks in Johannesburg were spent.
As the journey went on, their days got shorter and their nights longer. It was not uncommon to find sheets still rumpled by ten o’clock, eleven, noon-long after the sun had come up and the fishermen had sailed by. When the sun was at its highest and the day was at its hottest, they would drag themselves onto the gleaming deck of the ship to eat iced fruits and wake their bodies with the sea air. If it rained, they stayed in bed until the words began to swim across the pages of their books or their sides ached from laughing.
On the morning of April 1st, 1999, it didn’t rain but the sky rumbled and the sun was shy. So Rudy rolled over and clutched his pillow and mumbled ‘Happy Birthday to me’ with a smile before drifting off again. He didn’t know how long he had slept before he was woken again by the taptaptap of rain all around him, and a warm hand on his arm. Edric didn’t say ‘Happy Birthday’ or even ‘Good morning’, just smiled and crawled under the blankets with him, pressed to his back, hand against his chest. Rudy was almost dozing again by the time Edric said, “I made you something.” Rudy didn’t reply, but by the feeling of Edric’s grin against his back he knew Edric had felt him tense with excitement. “Don’t move,” Edric said, and Rudy didn’t even think he could. He was buoyed between still dozing and shivering with anticipation, so he clutched his pillow tight to his chest and wiggled impatiently. Edric’s heat didn’t leave him for long, and when it returned it was the same as before; curved along his back, breath across his neck. The hand didn’t return to his chest, though; instead, a sticky finger touched his lips and Rudy didn’t think twice in his excitement before tasting it. Something spicy, something sweet, something bitter; cinnamon, maple, apples. Edric was alone in the bed with only Syrup tugging at his hair for almost ten seconds before he even realized it.
Rudy swayed in the kitchen for a full minute, staring at the perfect cake. It stared back, and only the rain spoke. Finally he advanced on it, holding both his hands out and over it, but only carefully dipping one finger into the sterilely smoothed whipped topping. The mark it left on the otherwise expertly unmarred surface made Rudy grin giddily; like his own brash imprint on the sterile smooth surface of Edric’s life. Only, the imprint there went deeper, and it was visible from all sides. He couldn’t help but touch each of his fingers to the flawless icing then; marking every side, getting his hands deliciously sticky.
Back in his bedroom, Edric was sprawled across his bed and had let the sea rock and the rain sing him back to sleep. Rudy gingerly sat beside him, not wanting to wake him, but holding two plates-- each with a generous portion of the cake. Slowly, he leaned over to leave one on the bedside table, but the movement was enough to entice a grin and crack open Edric’s eyes. He whispered, “There were candles to go on that.”
“It’s delicious,” Rudy mumbled with his mouth full.
By the time Theo knocked on the door, drawn in by their laughter, the plates were mostly empty. “Happy Birthday,” Theo said brightly, climbing onto the bed to carefully crawl between them under the blankets. He ignored his father trying to smooth his hair and asked, “How old are you now?”
Both men replied at the same time, Edric saying, “Fourteen,” Rudy tsk’ing, “A lady never tells.”
So they stayed together, dozing and laughing and listening to the rain around them until the fishermen sailed back into the harbour and the clouds were blown across the water. The beds never got made that day, and the cake was gone by the next morning.