Llanfaes

[queeniegalore]

 

Aidan sat alone in his father's room and ran his hand over the soft quilt that covered the neatly made up bed. He remembered this quilt from when he was young and used to crawl in bed with his dad after a nightmare, and he concentrated fiercely on its muted blues and greens, and on the sound of the waves smashing themselves against the cliffs outside, and on the cries of the gulls as they wheeled through the clouds overhead.

Two days ago he'd been drinking ouzo on a Greek fishing boat while the captain slept off a hangover below decks. The Greek sailors loved him, his blond hair and blue eyes, loved his hesitant attempts to join in the conversation with his abysmal grasp of the language. He'd been happy in the Mediterranean, catching work on fishing boats, living on octopus and olives and letting the sun tan his skin a deep brown. He'd been happy, far away from the rain and misery of Wales, from the smell of wet wool, of his father's thick socks drying in front of the Aga.

The room was different, the house was different. And the differences - a cheerful garden gnome watching over the front yard, a new painting of a lighthouse at sunset in the sitting room - kept butting up against his memories, warping them. There was a new rug in the front hall and Aidan had stopped on his way in, backpack hanging loosely from one hand, and stared at it for what felt like a full minute before he could bring himself to move. He hadn't been home in ten years. He wasn't sure, exactly, what he'd been expecting.

"Aidan? Would you like a cup of tea?"

Aidan looked up, blinking rapidly as he brought himself back to the present. A young man peeked into the room, one slender brown hand resting on the door jamb as he gazed in with calm brown eyes. Bryn, Aidan thought. Bryn, who was his father's live-in carer.

Had been his father's live-in carer.

"Please," Aidan said softly, and looked back down at the bed. There was an organised mess of medical equipment set to one side, a neat mass of pill bottles laid out on one bedside table and a dog-eared copy of Ulysses on the other. His father had been dead for two days and the house he'd grown up in, had escaped from, had longed for and hated, was now his.

"Thank you, yes, that would be great."

 

-

 

Aidan had been relieved a year ago when his father told him that 'a young lad' was moving in. Aidan had been worried he’d be expected to go home, when the diagnosis came, had resented the very idea. He hadn’t ever intended to come back, and knowing his dad was getting a carer eased some of his guilt.

 He'd imagined some kind of cheerful, no-nonsense Swedish masseuse type, someone who'd smile through his father's moods and set him out in the sunshine and help him with the morning crossword.

Bryn, slight, dark, quiet Bryn, had been a surprise.

Aidan was sitting at Cardiff airport waiting for his transfer to Anglesey when his father died, with Bryn at his side. And when Aidan had finally made it back to Llanfaes, the tiny, coastal village of his childhood, he found Bryn wandering that dark, cold house like a ghost, lost in a grief that Aidan couldn't quite understand. The house was now Aidan's, but Bryn had called it home for the past year. He'd added his books to the bookcases, his boots were by the front door, and now he moved around the kitchen like he owned it, while Aidan hunched awkwardly at the table, feeling like a guest.

"I'm so terribly sorry for your loss," Bryn said in his cool Irish lilt, like he was reading from a script. "Your father was a wonderful man."

Aidan winced.

"Bryn, Christ. Please sit down. I should be doing this for you."

Bryn looked over his shoulder at him. He was smaller than Aidan, seemed younger, with his shock of long, dark curls caught back in a messy bun, slim jeans and an over-sized wool sweater that hung down to mid-thigh, sleeves loose around the tips of his fingers.

"It's really no trouble," he said quietly, and they looked at each other as they waited for the kettle to boil, at a loss.

"It’s good to keep busy," Bryn continued after a moment, turning away and getting the tea things together automatically, spooning sugar into both cups and then pausing uncertainly, teaspoon hovering over the rim.

"Yeah, I take sugar," Aidan put in helpfully, and smiled to himself. His dad had given him his sweet tooth, sugar in the tea and biscuits before bed. He'd been a young father and seemed even younger after they'd lost Aidan's ma - he compensated by periods of intense strictness interspersed with a naughty-schoolboy sense of mischief. Aidan remembered being sent to bed early for some small infraction, and then being woken up at one in the morning to be bundled up in his dad's jumper and taken out to the cliffs to watch a meteor shower, sipping sweet tea out of a thermos and watching as the sky fell down around them.

The grief came in and out like the tides, receding for hours at a time and then sweeping in until he felt like he could drown in it. He realised that he didn't want Bryn to see him cry, but he was about to cry. The house expanded around him, twenty years of memories piling up in the corners and spilling out of the cupboards.

He wanted to go back to Greece. Leave the house and the mess of it to Bryn, bequeath the memories to Bryn, the role of being Rhys Edris's son. This quiet, fey young man who knew how Aidan's dad drank his tea, who organised his medication and made his bed and held his hand while he died, and who seemed to so neatly inhabit the pain that was supposed to be Aidan's.

Bryn sat down, and gently pushed a steaming mug towards him.

"Here," he said, and gracefully turned his face to the window, allowing Aidan the illusion of privacy as he dabbed at his eyes with the hem of his shirt. By the time he turned back, Aidan had wrapped his fingers around the hot mug, breathing the steam deep into his lungs.

"Okay," he said at last, and rubbed tea-warm fingers over his face, trying to scrub away the fog. "Okay. Where do we start?"

 

-

 

It wasn't until they were in the car on the way back, after several gruelling hours at the hospital and then the funeral home, that Bryn mentioned almost casually that he hadn't yet found alternative accommodation. With how quickly everything had happened, would Aidan mind terribly if Bryn stayed on the couch for a few days?

Aidan stared at him incredulously.

Bryn had quietly taken over at the hospital, on first name basis with most of the nurses and doctors, calmly navigating through the mazes of bullshit that seemed to spring up after a death. He deferred to Aidan in a way that left Aidan feeling like everything would have been done exactly the same even if Aidan hadn't bothered to show up. He wondered if that was how Bryn had handled Rhys - confidently sliding in under Rhys's stubborn streak, calmly steering him where he needed to go.

Would Aidan mind? The thought of trying to do all this alone made him feel sick.

"I'm not kicking you out of the house," he said. "Christ, it's more yours than mine these days. You're bloody welcome to it."

Bryn nodded, opened his mouth, nodded again. Aidan wondered if he was about to cry and focused on the road, giving Bryn the same courtesy he'd received in the kitchen. It wasn't raining, but as always in Llanfaes, the threat of rain hung low and heavy over them, the clouds close enough to reach up and touch. Bryn didn't make a sound as Aidan navigated through the old village and back out to the house on the cliffs, past St Catherine's, past the old castle ruins. Had there always been so many tourists about the place? He watched the desultory ebb and flow of them, rugged up against the weather, wandering around town. Llanfaes could be beautiful in its own way, but old and crumbling, and so, so cold.

"I'm not quite sure," Bryn started eventually and had to pause to clear his throat as Aidan snuck glances at him out of the corner of his eye. "It’s an odd position to be in, you see. The position I'm in."

"I've no doubt," Aidan murmured, and turned onto the coastal drive that would take them back. "I know this is difficult for you."

Bryn frowned slightly, biting his lip.

"Your father...Rhys was..." he sighed. "Rhys was...wonderful to me. He was a very good man. You don't need me to tell you that, he was your father." He looked over ruefully. "It’s odd, because I feel like I'm intruding on your grief and yet..."

"I feel like I'm intruding on yours."

They shared a grim smile, and Aidan pulled his little rental car into the drive. The rain was finally starting, fat drops splattering on the windscreen, blurring the landscape around them.

"I'll probably go back to Ireland," Bryn said. "I'm suddenly very aware that though I've been here for a year, this isn't really my home."

Aidan shifted uncomfortably. "Bryn, I've said...Look, I left when I was twenty. I've spent the last decade jumping from one fishing boat to the next, doing anything I could to avoid coming back. The fact that you found a home here in my absence isn't your fault."

"Well that's very sweet, Aidan." Bryn's cool, soft voice had a way, Aidan was realising, of being absolutely devastating. "But you own the place now. I should know, I was the one who witnessed Rhys's Will." He raised his eyebrows at Aidan, waited a moment for a reply, and then opened the door to the rain, letting in a great, sweeping gust of wind before he slammed it closed again and rushed towards the house.

He did, of course, have the keys.

_

 

Late that night - after a quiet, awkward dinner, after Bryn had piled the couch with blankets for him and then disappeared into his room - the rain stopped and the clouds cleared away.

Aidan found an over-sized wool jumper in his dad's closet, smelling of camphor and Brut, and pressed his face into it, breathing deeply of the lost scents of his past. When he slipped it over his head though, he found that his shoulders were too broad now, his arms stretching out the cosy cable-knit design. As a child he'd used these jumpers like blankets. Something warm and comforting to snuggle into, reaching down past his knobby knees and hanging from his bony wrists, trailing around the house after him. He was never supposed to be bigger than his dad, his funny, sad, larger-than-life dad. And his dad was never supposed to grow old.

Aidan supposed he never had, not really.

He was leaning against the rickety fence that lined the cliff's edge, gazing up at the jewel-strewn sky, when he felt Bryn's slight, dark presence beside him, similarly wrapped up in one of those old cable-knit jumpers. His, Aidan thought wryly, fit the way it was supposed to.

"Can't sleep either?

Bryn shrugged, hugging his arms with his face turned out to the ocean. The wind gently tossed his loose curls this way and that.

"Your dad used to take me out here," he said. "Showed me the constellations. I never really had the head for it, but he tried." He chuckled. "He very optimistically got me a star map for Christmas."

And it was then, like a final puzzle piece fitting snugly into place, that Aidan knew.

"You're not a nurse, are you?" he said softly, and watched as Bryn smiled, just a small quirk of his lips.

"No."

"My dad would have shot himself before he willingly read Ulysses."

Bryn laughed, tears sparkling in his eyes, caught by the starlight.

"Oh, aye. He thought James Joyce was a pretentious Irish twat."

Aidan nodded, rubbing a hand over his face. Ten years, he'd been gone. Maybe, for his dad, it had been ten years of a kind of freedom.

"You loved him?"

Bryn sobbed, gaze fixed on the ocean.  Aidan reached for his hand, gripping his freezing fingers tight.

"Very much," Bryn managed, through his tears. "Yes, I loved him very much."

The wind was picking up, clouds rushing back and forth overhead. Aidan pulled Bryn in and wrapped him in the hug he'd never been able to give his father, felt his bony shoulder blades and trembling, heaving sobs.

"I'm glad," he whispered and found he meant it, fiercely. "Bryn, I'm so glad."

They stayed there, holding each other against the wind, until the rain came again and forced them back home.

 

END