“I don’t know how to stop being angry about it, Jase. I hear you. And I know it should make me feel better about things, but I’m still mad.”
“I know. It’s like shedding skin. It’s impossible to do it overnight.”
“And Iz?”
“It wasn’t love. Perhaps I was in love with the idea of being in love with her. Maybe I just wanted to be loved by someone. Maybe I just wanted something of yours.”
“What changed?”
Jase looked down the hallway in the direction of Cerys’s office. “Finding out what falling in love with someone really feels like.” He thought back to the way they’d held on to each other that morning. After breakfast and conversation and laughter that had turned to making love with a croissant stuck to his arse, which had brought about even more laughter. Holding her in his arms, their bodies still damp and trembling.
Jase turned back to Matt. “I got a lot of shit I’m still mad about too.”
“You do?”
“Of course. You’ve always thought this was all me. But you let me down. You didn’t want me in the band from the beginning.”
“That’s not fair, I was happy for you—”
“No,” Jase said softly. “Nan bribed you. We all know it. A guitar for letting me tag along. And whether you admit it to me now or not, we both know it pissed you off that I was a better singer than you. And I’ve always believed that’s why you excluded me. Why you and Luke wrote the songs without me. Why you never gave me any input or say in anything to do with the business. You didn’t want me to have the chance to be better than you at anything else. You turned this, our life, into a silent competition I could never win.”
Matt clenched his jaw and looked away. The silence was ugly, tempestuous.
Jase refused to take a single step to calm it. Cerys had been right. They never argued about the right things.
“Fuck,” Matt muttered, tugging a hand through his hair. “I want to say you’re wrong, but there is some truth to that. Certainly in the beginning.”
“It’s not just the beginning, Matt. In this duet of yours, you were going to be the lead singer. And suddenly, you weren’t. And if we go back to those moments you stood outside Upper Street, the day of the big meeting, to see if they were going to offer us a deal. I watched you. You debated with yourself before you texted me, telling me to come. Tell me that you didn’t think for a millisecond about what it would mean for you if I didn’t show up. You would have taken the deal without me, so you must have thought about what it would feel like to be the lead singer.”
“You had so much talent and didn’t seem interested in doing anything with it,” Matt said.
“Would you want to do anything with someone who had subtext for not wanting you there? I felt it, even when you didn’t mean it.”
Hurt etched Matt’s features, and for once, instead of wanting to capitalise on it, to hurt him more, Jase felt a need to reassure, to make it right. He just didn’t know how.
“We’re a mess. I’m sorry, Jase. There have been times when I’ve let envy cloud my judgement. You have a fucking incredible voice. Can we make it through all this?”
Jase shrugged. “I don’t know if you’ll ever forgive me. If you slept with Cerys, I’d want to kill you too. But it’s like the thing with the band. I can’t undo what’s already been done, and neither can you. All I can do is wake up every morning and try to be the best human being I can be. To pause, just for a minute, before I react. And I’m going to fuck it up. I still don’t know how to channel the anger sometimes. And sometimes I’m going to crash with a wave. Like the next time an interviewer treats me like dog shit because I’m from Manchester or stupid sometimes. But I need to know you see me trying and making progress.”
Matt grabbed his coffee and took a sip. “I already see that, Jase. And the same goes for me. I don’t want to shut you out of the band beyond singing. The album would be shit without you. My vocals would be so different to yours. Good, but not unique. And the songs that you’ve written? They are so powerful. But more than that. I guess I don’t want to do this without my brother.”
Jase let Matt’s words settle deep in his soul, warming him better than any winter coat.
“Maybe we should channel this into something,” Matt continued. “You know, there’s all that bullshit about forgiveness easing anger. But that’s kind of like saying a Band-Aid solves a bullet wound. Anger is fucking deep. We both know about it. The journey out of that is what follows.”
Ideas began to formulate in Jase’s mind. Like the way Cerys had shown him . . . just bubbling up and appearing but without any form. “Anger is also comforting, in a way.”
“What do you mean?”
“It’s protection, right? It’s better than the alternative. I mean, what’s the opposite of anger? It’s not happiness, because that’s sadness. If anger and hatred are the same, it could be love. But for me, it’s fear and hurt, and those two are way more painful than anything that could ever result from anger.”
Matt rubbed a hand across his face and let out a sigh. “Watching someone else work through their pain is almost worse than going through your own. Especially if you love them.”
“Yeah?” Jase asked. “How so?”
Matt shook his head and took a deep breath. “Standing here. Listening to you talk about this. I see it. I feel it. And I’d give anything to carry it all for you, Jase.”
“That song’s already been written.”
Confusion lined the corners of Matt’s eyes. “What do you mean?”
“The Hollies. ‘He Ain’t Heavy, He’s My Brother.’ Winding roads and being strong enough to carry someone and all that.”
The two of them stood silently for a moment.
“We should write our version of that song,” Matt said finally. “The hard reality of trying to be that person with all the anger weighing us down. You talked about waves. Anger is an anchor that stops us moving with the tide. It keeps us in place while waves recede, leaving us beached on the shore. And when the tide comes in, it holds us beneath the water, so we suffocate. It goes before ‘The Next Time I Fall’, it’s the second to last song on the album.”
A quickening started in Jase’s gut. Ideas glittered on the edge of his brain, and it hurt his head to focus on them. “It’s surveying the wreckage of a life. Of realising the ship you were sailing in can’t be put back together, and that’s probably a good thing because it was a fucking shit boat. But taking accountability that you were the one who wrecked it. Or worse, that you wrecked someone else.”
Matt grabbed a white napkin and pulled a pen from the back pocket of his jeans. “That being brothers isn’t always easy, especially when there are layers and layers of hurt underneath it all. But that life, really, is about connection, and leaving no one behind.”
“Don’t write that last bit down,” Jase said, grabbing Matt’s arm. “The whole bit about connection and leaving no man behind. It’s schmaltzy. And sounds a bit too much like a motivational poster. Like, if we all got in the same boat and rowed together things would go more smoothly.”