The End is Where We Begin by Maria Goodin (open ebook .txt) 📕

said to me the other day? He said, Why won’t Michael wake up? It’s daytime.”

“I was asleep!”

“You were passed out!”

“He doesn’t know the difference!”

“He knows something’s not right! Look, I just can’t have this around him! First Hellie, and now you. He needs people around him who are going to be stable, who don’t change from one minute to the next because they’re hung-over or stoned or drunk or—”

“Okay!” Michael snapped. He glared angrily at me, but his expression quickly changed to remorse. “You’re right, I don’t want Josh to see me like this,” he said, shaking his head sadly.

I could see I’d touched a nerve. Maybe this was my way in. God knows I’d tried everything else over the past few months. Shouting, swearing, begging, pleading, even shoving him hard into a wall out of sheer frustration. And fear. Fear that he was going down a path he might not come back from. But nothing worked. He apologised and promised to change and then went out and did it all over again.

But for Josh’s sake, maybe, just maybe, he might turn himself around. When my dad had been out at work, Michael had been the one who’d watched over Josh for hours on end while I’d poured over my A level textbooks and occasionally even managed to make it in to college for the odd tutorial. He’d walked him around and around the house, naming every object they’d come across, sung him songs, played him tunes on the guitar, made up lyrics with his name in. He’d been the fun one while I’d been desperately trying to knuckle down to study. I was pleased at that point that Michael didn’t have anywhere else to be, and I felt like I owed him big time. But what had started out as the occasional wild weekend had spiralled out of control, and I felt like I had no choice but to give him an ultimatum, even if it was just to shock him back to his senses.

“Josh is growing up, Michael,” I said, sitting down on the bed beside him, “and I want you to be a massive part of his life. Because he thinks you’re the best. He adores you. God, I think he’d like you to be his dad. But this…” I gestured to the mess around us.

“Yeah, I know,” he sighed, pinching the bridge of his nose. “It’s fucked up, isn’t it?”

“Look, you stop drinking and I’ll stop, too.”

“You can’t do that.”

“Yes, I can. It’s not like I’ve always made the best choices when I’ve been drinking,” I said, thinking of the night I slept with Hellie, and the night I scarred Libby’s face forever. “We’ll stop together, okay? Plus, you clean yourself up and I’ll get Josh one of those guitars you were talking about. And you can start to teach him, just like you said you wanted to.”

Michael shook his head. “Nah, you were right, he’s too little.”

“No, like you said, he’s smart and he’s got good concentration. He can just have a play around to start with, see what sounds he can make. But I want you to be the one to do it with him.”

Michael fingered a small rip in his jeans and nodded thoughtfully.

“Wouldn’t that be cool?” I asked, probing for some confirmation that I was hitting the spot.

“Yeah, that would be pretty cool.”

“And then he’d always have the memory that his Uncle Michael was the one who gave him his first guitar, the one who taught him his first strings or chords or whatever.”

Michael laughed at my musical ignorance. “Well, we’d better not leave it up to you.”

“Exactly,” I smiled, “he needs you.”

“Well, I do have a pretty mean version of ‘Froggy Went A-Courtin’’ I could teach him.”

“Yeah, not that version.”

“Really? Not that version?”

“No, not till he’s eighteen. Just the normal version, if that’s okay.”

Michael turned to me and smiled, his pink eyes regaining a little bit of life. “I’ll do it, okay? I promise. I’ll sort myself out. You get him that guitar and I’ll start teaching him. And I’ll be as clean as a whistle.”

I nodded and smiled, full of hope that I’d finally given him a reason to step off the path of self-destruction. Full of hope that this time he would change.

I remember Brenda saying: “He seems much more like his old self, doesn’t he?”

I nodded, squinting against the bright sunshine.

“Yeah, he does.”

“I think it was all the stress, you know. Ever since the takeover, the college has just gone bureaucracy-mad. I was up until eleven o’clock last night doing paperwork. I can’t wait to follow in your father’s footsteps and retire. One year to go and counting.”

I watched my dad dribbling a football slowly around the garden, Josh chasing him in fits of giggles, tripping over his own poorly coordinated feet every so often.

“Oh, he’s having a little lie-down again!” my dad would joke, making Josh giggle so hard he could barely get back up again.

“I guess he must have been more stressed than he seemed,” I said.

“Oh, he’s definitely been stressed,” confirmed Brenda, removing her sunglasses and examining them for smudges. “I know he always seems as cool as a cucumber, but how could he not be stressed? Thirty years teaching in the same place and then someone comes in and tells you to do it all differently? And then everything at home. Your mum and…well… you know… everything else.”

Brenda was a friend of my dad’s. In fact, it turned out they’d been friends for years. Apparently, they used to do the crossword together every lunchtime and share packets of Jaffa Cakes. I didn’t even know my dad liked crosswords. Or Jaffa Cakes. She was a small, neat woman with a gentle, motherly way about her, despite having never married or had children of her own. Whenever she came round, she brought comfort food – cakes, casseroles, lasagnes – and fussed over us “boys”, which is how she referred to myself, Josh and Michael