defensive rather than a boiling pot of fury ready to explode. ‘Lucy hasn’t been going on about anything. She wouldn’t talk to me until now.’
‘Can you blame her?’
Daniel looked at the collection of vinyl again as a memory surfaced. ‘Do you remember when we were boys and had a fight outside the convenience store?’ Harvey’s look suggested he failed to understand what that had to do with anything, so Daniel ploughed on. ‘Barney came along and found us, then he handed me an orange from the bag in his hand. He told us that we clearly had things to say and suggested we try to listen to each other. We could only speak when holding the orange and so with him policing us we passed it back and forth until we got to the bottom of the issue.’
‘I remember the orange,’ Harvey admitted. ‘I don’t remember the argument.’
‘Me neither. But that wasn’t my point. I thought perhaps we need an orange now.’
‘We’re not kids anymore.’
‘We’re acting like it.’ He resisted the urge to say Harvey was acting like it, putting them both at fault instead.
Neither of them spoke and Daniel wondered whether he should just up and leave.
But then he looked around the room for an object to use in place of the orange in a last-ditch attempt. He was about to pick up a paperweight with a pair of field mice etched into the glass when Harvey headed for the record collection and took one of the albums out.
‘That’s mine,’ said Daniel, looking at the INXS cover with its familiar ink stain on the bottom right-hand corner. ‘I thought I’d lost it.’
Harvey nodded as a memory seemed to surface. ‘That’s what the fight was about. I remember now.’
‘I accused you of taking it.’ It was all coming back to him too. ‘You told me I must’ve loaned it to someone. Barney came along while we were fighting about it, gave us the orange, and eventually we agreed to both look for it together at home.’ Funny how something so simple had worked. ‘We decided that if it didn’t turn up then we’d let the issue go. Brotherhood was too important, Barney told us.’ And at the time they’d agreed wholeheartedly that it was.
Harvey grimaced. ‘I hid it. I’m sorry. It was after Dad went mental when you lit the fire behind the shed and he found me trying to put it out. He assumed it was me, he said I had no respect for other people’s property and he took one of my transformers and crushed it under his foot. Stamped on it, from what I recall.’
‘You should’ve told him it was me.’
‘I could’ve.’ A look passed between them. ‘But I wasn’t about to drop my brother in it.’
‘Might’ve saved your transformer’s life.’
‘Yeah, it probably would’ve done. Instead, I took the album. I was going to break it into pieces in front of you the same way Dad broke something that mattered to me, but I knew if I did then I’d get into trouble.’
‘And so the vicious circle continued,’ said Daniel.
‘Something like that.’
‘See, we can hold a civilised conversation. We just did.’
Harvey ran a hand across his jaw. ‘You’re right. But it’s getting late and I’m knackered, so maybe we should get everything else out in the open.’ But the open approach narrowed as his brow creased and he handed the record to Daniel to have his turn. ‘How’s the missus?’
Daniel wondered how much of Melissa’s love was behind his brother’s sudden willingness to hear him out or whether it was being here in their childhood home at long last, both ready for answers they’d never found up until now. He took the album, stirring memories of putting the music on downstairs and increasing the volume every time their dad was at work or away for a few days giving them the sort of freedom you shouldn’t have to crave from a member of your own family.
With the album in his hands he told his brother, ‘The missus is my ex-missus. Giselle’s announcement on opening night, that she was my wife, was more for her own dramatic effect than anything else. She didn’t really think through the repercussions it might have for me. We got married a long time ago, divorced very soon after. I never even told Mum about it until recently. Giselle was back in town to talk to me about her son, Peter, who was born shortly after we met and who’s a part of