Choices

Ted walked, his brother beside him, through the hurriedly darkening world. Ted was in a bad mood. During a very recent holiday in France with his friend Marcus, he had spent far too much money on various indulgences (most of them alcohol-related) and this meant that he now found himself financially insecure, and with a fairly long road of thriftiness and restraint ahead of him. 

            Ted still lived at home; he worried that he had perhaps reached the age when this was something to be embarrassed about. He hated feeling embarrassed. The inescapable inner wilt of embarrassment, of mortifying shame, was something he feared above just about everything else. 

            His parents were staying overnight in London. They had theatre-tickets, had had them for  a while now. His brother required lots of supervision. Once inside, he could more or less be left to his own devices. His dinner would have to be cooked, his bath run, and various prompts provided throughout the evening (time for bath, time for pyjamas, time for bed). He would sleep in his parents’ big bed, when the time came. Ted’s brother always slept in the big bed when it was free. 

The twit-twoo of two calling owls began to sound, crossing the desolate tracts of deep blue sky. At first, the female gave a few long, solitary hoots. But then the male began answering, each time, with that more ornamental, bugling reply.  

            “What can you hear?” Ted asked his brother. He asked the question with a primary-school, dementia-nurse intonation. He wondered if it was patronising to do so. Such a tone always left an unpleasant taste in his mouth. And yet he continued to employ it, time after time.  

            Ted’s brother heard the question, and retreated into his own mind. There was a moment of interminable, inscrutable reflection. And then, the low, satisfied grunt:

            “Owls”. (About twenty minutes before, Ted had asked his brother the non-rhetorical question: What would you like for dinner? In identical fashion the answer had come: Burgers). 

            Beneath the new night-sky, tenderly haunted with owls, they walked on, homewards. Soon after, leaving behind the lurid light of the newsagent’s yellow façade, they disappeared into the darkness of the streets, into the uncertain bulks and queues of terraced houses.

When they got inside, Ted switched on the light and sought immediately the ten-pound note his mother had assured him she would provide. The ten pound note was to purchase the ingredients of a decent meal for himself and for his brother. (If the kitchen was sufficiently stocked, then Ted got to keep the note for himself- it all depended on what Ted’s brother fancied for his supper). Along with a laconic handwritten note, Ted found the ten-pound note on the piano stool. He discovered it with a miniature thrill of relief. 

It was a brand new note, bearing the printed likeness of King Charles in place of his more familiar mother. From its pool of light peach, the impassive paper face regarded him, eerily. Ted felt watched by the face as he considered what he would do with this ten-pound note. He pondered where King Charles would be sent next. Whose hands would he pass through?

Ted watched as his brother divested himself of his winter clothing, as he sought his usual perch and settled there, as he hid his ears inside his habitual earphones, and found what he wanted to watch on television. He did it all with a kind of ghostly fluency. The resounding iamb of the Netflix logo announced itself as it loaded. Faroff, muffled by the walls and windows that immured Ted and his brother, the owls could still be heard outside, haunting the night air. 

The two familiar but disparate sounds (owls and Netflix) were, for a brief time, connected in Ted’s mind. With great authority, they each occupied their place in the quiet soundscape of suburban life. Ted observed, with the usual pang of painful love, as his twenty-two-year-old brother opened the Kids Netflix account, as he selected the corresponding icon: a smiling cartoon sun.   

            Ted went to the kitchen and had a look around for what there was to eat. In the freezer, there was a big bag of gluten free chips, an unopened bag of peas. In the fridge there were some onions, some medium-sized tomatoes, and a bisected lettuce head. The meat drawer was bare except for a packet of bacon. Three rashers remained, about two days out of date. He left them there. Then he decided that this was incorrect. He went back into the meat drawer and binned the bacon in quiet disgust. Bacon aside, the salient point was that there were no burgers. 

            Ted’s heart sank. If he intended to serve burgers then he would have to purchase them from the shop. A packet of four quarter-pound beef burgers would make quite the dent in the ten-pounds he had to spend. Continuing to search, just a little frantically now, he found the cupboards stocked with ample gluten free pasta (fusilli, his brother’s favourite) and a few jars of acceptably bland tomato and basil sauce. Seeds of Change- the brother-sanctioned brand. 

            At first, he resisted the urge to bend the rules. But after a while he gave up resisting. He contented himself that there was nothing wrong, nothing really wrong, with fixing his brother a simple plate of pasta and sauce, and spending the ten-pound note on himself. He could buy a bottle of wine, or a six-pack of beer. (He could go out for it once his brother was in bed). He deserved such a treat, he assured himself. 

He believed that his mind was made up. But somewhere inside himself it still bothered him: the idea of that unmade meal, those burgers that were never bought, never served, though his brother had asked for them and his mother had provided the money to purchase them. From the kitchen, he heard his brother laugh: the laughter reached him and tugged at him from the living-room, loud and giddy and random, like a gust of pleasurable wind.                                                  

            And at that moment, just when he needed it, a zip file arrived from his friend Marcus. The abrupt cash-register sound notified him of the email’s arrival. On his smartphone, Ted opened the email and he opened the zip file, glad to receive what he understood immediately were digital photos of the trip to France. He and Marcus had spent time in Paris and in Lille and in the Loire valley. He began sifting through the cache of images with avid interest. He was always intrigued by the way he looked in photographs. They enabled him to discover a version of himself that was not easily knowable; they were capable of revealing things inaccessible through mirrors and selfies. He would normally take in these revelations with a mixture of fascination and horror. Sometimes amusement.

            On this occasion, he was cruelly amazed, (and embarrassed), at how awful he looked in the photographs. Photographs of him laughing and swaying and cavorting, his inebriated motions stilled and captured by the camera. He was long-haired in the photographs (quite how long-haired he hadn’t really been aware), he looked unclean and chaotic. Almost monstrous. And the people around him looked almost scared of him. Image after image, he repeatedly discovered the same sultry unhappiness. What he remembered as “great nights”, actually looked rather awful in the photographs. 

He put away his phone and returned to the living-room. The ten-pound note was still on the piano stool. 

            Ted sat, on the free sofa, watching his brother watch the TV. He recognised the very familiar character of their wordlessness, the quietness that was ever between them. He even felt comforted by it, by the way it taught him to be present and attentive without the need to participate too demonstratively. He pondered what he should do. 

He chose to go to the Co-op. (It was perfectly alright to leave his brother unattended for short periods of time). Using the ten-pound note that had been provided, he purchased a pound’s worth of good quality, ethically produced beef burgers, with no breadcrumbs in them. 

            Back home, in the rusty reliable skillet, as carefully and expertly as he was able, he fried three of the four burgers. He cooked the chips in the oven, only once it was fully preheated, and he lightly brushed them with oil and regularly rotated the tray so that they would cook evenly. He boiled the peas soft. With Tiptree ketchup, (which he had bought with the burgers), he served it all, very promptly, and got the plate to his brother while it was still hot. His brother received the meal with very little outward gratitude. That didn’t matter to Ted: in spite of all evidence, he believed in some kind of internal response he could not see. He was gracious and uncomplaining when his brother (a very slow and tentative eater) motioned for him to heat it all up again. He knew that he had done the right thing. But, all the same, his mood was not much improved.  

Hours later and Ted could not sleep. His brother was fast asleep in their parents’ big bed- he could even hear the faint, repeating growl of his brother’s snores. Through the small hours, Ted sat, downstairs, in the still calm of the house, listening to the same pairs of owls gently trouble the night with their age-old hoots and squeals. And at last, just as he felt himself finally falling asleep, his mood began to lighten.