Five(58)

Or a different truth: His brother just never listens.

Danny scans the room. His eyes fall on his mother’s flowers, on his brother, the man who was once a boy who took him everywhere, did everything for him. Danny cannot overpower the fighting men.

Or a different truth: Danny has always had the power, the kind that matters.

Danny moves as quickly as he can on his crutches to the opposite wall and hits the emergency call button. He has one in every room of the house. The alarm sounds. He casts his crutches aside. Using the wall for support, he slides down it, sinking to the ground.

John the gardener, attuned to the emergency call sound, pulls away from the fray, looks around, and sees Danny on the ground, his crutches beside him, askew, and yells, “Danny! It’s Danny! Get help!” and he runs to Danny’s side. Max the chef finally manages to pull Liam from Brendon by yelling in his ear, “Your brother! It’s Danny!”

“What?” Liam gasps to himself, jumping away from Brendon suddenly, as though he has seen a ghost, as though he has reentered his body and is not sure where he has been, the spell of the violence that overtook him now broken. He looks around the room, sees Danny’s body limp in the corner.

“Call an ambulance!” John yells.

“On it!” Max replies, pulling out his phone.

“Danny! Can you hear me!” a bloody Liam shouts, and then cries as he gets to the floor, hooks his arms under his brother’s body, cradles his head. “Danny?” he almost whimpers, “What have I done, what I have done,” he almost whispers, smoothing Danny’s hair across his forehead, like their mother used to do.

It is at this moment, when only the tone of the medical alarm and the heavy breathing of winded men can be heard, that Liam knows he has made a fatal error, that Danny opens wide his alert, hardened, angry eyes, looks into his brother’s worried face, and says, “You—should—know—me—bet—ter—than—that.”



* * *





Soon we will reach the meeting of Liam and Emma in her kitchen in her house of evening gowns and bare walls and desperation. Soon we will get to Emma asking, on behalf of Danny, for Liam to sign the documents that will give him his half of the business to walk away from D-Tech and sever his connection to his brother forever. Brendon will agree not to press criminal charges, despite the week he spent in hospital for his injuries. Danny will agree not to release a statement accusing Liam of a hate crime, committing a homophobic assault and attempted murder of Brendon on the couple’s wedding day. All Liam has to do is agree to leave with his share and not look back.

Danny knows Liam’s assault on Brendon was not homophobic. But if he released it, that’s how it will play to the press. He will be believed. He knows how the public have always seen him and Liam, he has always known how to manipulate their prejudice in his favor, and he will do it now if Liam doesn’t get out of his life. He knows that Liam knows that no matter how he tries to defend himself, the press will believe Danny, and Liam’s muscles, and height, the gap between his teeth that women love, and his working-class charm will suddenly seem aggressive, and creepy, and bullying. The story will ruin him.

The brothers have agreed, via messages sent through Emma, not to involve lawyers. The details of Danny’s disastrous wedding day are so potentially damaging, not just to Liam and his family but to the company, and neither of the brothers trusts that even with attorney-client privilege the story won’t get out, through a secretary or a paralegal or an assistant who could make a mint on selling it online and to the tabloids.

Emma is the perfect choice because she has something to lose. Danny has seen how she started disappearing when she came back from maternity leave, how colorless her eyes became by the time she resigned. He’s kept tabs on her because he knows something about difficult births. He knows something about mothers coping alone. He knows she has secrets she wants to keep, that her life with Gideon is hard, and that mothers, even strange mothers like her, will do extraordinary things for their children, even children that they can’t love. So Emma could be useful to him one day. And the day has arrived. She will handle this for Danny because a simple anonymous call to social services is all it would take to make things much harder for her and Gideon than they already are. In exchange, Danny will pay her enough to cover Gideon’s therapeutic school.

Despite how it seems, Danny’s aim is not to hurt Liam. He is acting from self-preservation. He makes the threat, not out of hatred for his brother, but out of love for Brendon, to show Brendon that his love is real, so real that he will choose their found love over the love that bound him to his brother even before their birth.

But first, before the documents, before the blackmail, there is Liam sitting in Danny’s grand reception room, several days after the fight, looking at the bottle of unopened Dubonnet that is kept there in homage to Doreen. The swelling has gone down in his face from the few punches Brendon landed, but his knuckles are still cracked and swollen.

“I didn’t think, I was just so angry that he was stealing from you—” Liam says.

“No.—You—did—not—think—he—could—love—me,” Danny says.

“Love? I love you, Mum loved you, not that fucker, me, your brother, me, who’s always been here, always looked after you, I love you,” Liam tries not to shout.