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

I stand up and start to walk away.

“Where are you going?” my mum asks.

“Home,” I say, numbly.

But then I stop, turn around.

There’s something that Laura’s always suspected, and I’ve denied, but now, finally, I want to ask her. Because what is there to lose now? Why don’t we just say it all?

“Did you know that dad was getting sick?” I ask. “Is that why you left when you did?”

She shakes her head but doesn’t look shocked. “No. I didn’t know. And that’s not why I left when I did. I just couldn’t do it anymore. It was just time.”

I study her lined face, her watery brown eyes behind her glasses. I desperately want to believe her, but I feel like I don’t even know who she is anymore.

Over the years, I’ve tried to see things from her point of view. I know now that parents are flawed and imperfect. I know now what it’s like to fall for someone despite your better judgement. And I know how hard it is feeling trapped by responsibility. I understand that at sixteen I was no longer a baby, that it wasn’t her job to deal with the fallout of my mistakes, and that I had to own up to the consequences of my actions.

But I also know that’s all bullshit. It’s just what I tell myself to reason away the hurt and the anger.

Because if Josh ever found himself in the situation I was in – scared, overwhelmed, life careering off track – it wouldn’t matter if he was sixteen or sixty.

I will always, always, be there for my son when he needs me.

“Christ, what’s up with you?” asks Laura when she opens her front door, searching my face with a look of mild horror.

She’s wearing a little black dress and a lot of make-up, clearly heading out for the evening.

“I need to talk to you,” I say, pushing past her.

“Err… firstly, bit rude. And, secondly, I have a date.”

“With who?”

“Mark. The guy who owns the garage.”

“You said he was a dick.”

“Yeah, but he’s a hot dick with tickets to this club I want to go to.”

“Well, cancel.”

“I’m not gonna cancel just ’cause you’re obviously in the midst of another crisis,” she says indignantly.

But clearly she sees something desperate in my face. Her expression changes from annoyed to wary to concerned.

“Okay, I’ll call him,” she says, nervously, “just go and sit down.”

After the shock comes the understanding.

“You know, for all those years I wondered why you were the favourite one,” Laura muses, staring at the whisky in the bottom of her glass. “You, Mum, Dad – you all used to tell me that it was in my head, that I was imagining it. But I wasn’t, was I? I was right. She favoured you because you were his.”

We’re sitting on her lounge floor, slumped against the front of her sofa, the lights down low. Josh is staying at Sam’s house. It’s gone two in the morning and we just can’t stop talking about it.

“I always felt guilty,” I tell her, “for the way she treated me. Like I was somewhere to pin all the hopes and aspirations, while you… I dunno, I think you did always get the raw deal.”

Laura shrugs. “Yeah, but then I could see she put you under a lot of pressure. It must have been hard for you, having her pushing you all the time. And I didn’t exactly make things easier for you.”

I lean my head back against the edge of the sofa cushion and close my eyes, growing drowsy.

“Nope. You could be a prize bitch at times.”

I can feel myself slipping into sleep, but a change in Laura’s breathing besides me makes me open my eyes. She sits forward and hugs her knees. Is she crying? Laura?

“What the hell’s the matter with you?” I mumble.

“I really was such a bitch to you.”

“It doesn’t matter,” I sigh, exhausted.

“Of course it fucking matters! I mean, I told you so many times I wished you weren’t my brother and now…”

“Now what?” I ask, suddenly wide awake and sitting up. “Now what? I’m not your brother anymore? ’Cause you’ll always be my same pain-in-the-arse sister. As far as I’m concerned, this changes nothing.”

Laura wipes at her eyes, smudging her mascara across her cheeks. Her sparkly earrings were long ago discarded on the carpet and she’s picked so much at a thread in her tights that she now has a ladder running from thigh to ankle.

“I wouldn’t even blame you if you didn’t want to be my brother after the things I’ve said to you in the past,” she says, shaking her head sadly.

“Shut up,” I say, putting my arm around her. “What the hell would I have done without you over the last fifteen years? How would I have managed?”

She rests her head against my shoulder.

“I do love you really,” she tells me, her voice cracking.

“Christ, now I know you’re pissed. You’re gonna regret telling me that in the morning.”

She laughs through her tears. “You won’t even remember I said it. You’ve got a memory like a sieve these days.”

I butt my foot against hers.

“Least I haven’t got weird chimp feet,” I say, referencing the fact that her second toes are longer than her big ones.

She slaps me hard on the stomach.

I swear and then give her a squeeze, before resting my head back on the sofa and closing my tired eyes.

“I love you too, you crazy moo,” I mutter.

As he slumbers in his armchair, I hold my dad’s hand, feeling the grey hairs of his knuckles, the dry, calloused pads of his long fingers. These capable hands that have spent decades fixing and tinkering.

Brenda places a mug of tea beside my chair.

“You can wake him, if you like,” she says. “Silly man keeps falling asleep in the afternoons and then doesn’t sleep at night.”

“No, I don’t want to wake him,” I say quietly. “Let him rest.”

I take