My brother flips on the indicator, glances over his shoulder, and pulls out into the road. The car groans in response. It’s an old Ford. A very old Ford. Minty calls it vintage, but that would be too kind. Fix Or Repair Daily – it’s all in the name. But I get the feeling Minty kind of likes the constant struggle to keep it on the road. My brother is a man who enjoys a challenge.
‘You sing like an angel, C,’ he says enthusiastically. ‘Seriously. No exaggeration.’
He always calls me C, as if familiarity has rubbed away all the other letters in my name.
The lights fly past, the familiar streets pulsing outside the rain-streaked windows in a blur of colours. ‘You are a little bit biased, Minty, what with being my brother.’
In reality, Minty is so much more than biased and so much more than my brother. After our musician parents died tragically on the way back from a gig, it was Minty who made sure we stayed together. He had only just turned nineteen, but Minty brought me up with a dogged determination and a smile. No matter the mishap, he was always there. He made it to every school parents’ evening, and parents’ evenings had never been his thing, but Minty took the responsibility of raising his scrappy ten-year-old sister seriously. He made sure I was never without, taking on a series of extra jobs, from home removal to Saturday sales assistant. When necessary, Minty even wore a shirt and tie. My brother is not a shirt-and-tie person. All Minty ever really wanted to do was fiddle with engines, but somehow, he managed to fit it all in. He even cooked every evening, ensuring we sat at the table each night for a debrief on my day. He must have read somewhere something about broccoli being necessary for life. So, every mealtime, out came the broccoli. Even today, we have it with pizza.
I glance at him as he steers the car through the familiar streets: his fierce, angular jaw; his tuft of unruly toilet brush hair; his glittering, proud eyes. Even now, when I could easily get a bus home, Minty drops whatever he’s doing so he can pick me up from choir practice. So he can be there to hear my news.
‘You’ve got serious talent.’ He grins.
‘You didn’t even hear me.’ I laugh.
‘Heard you in the shower.’ Minty shrugs. ‘Just speaking the truth, little sis,’ he says nonchalantly.
‘How’s the house looking?’ I ask. I’m hoping he hasn’t been busy with another oil-smattered project.
‘Yeah. Pretty good.’ He nods. ‘Just a few bits in the sink.’
I glance over at him and can’t help but smile. When I was seven years old, Minty decided to take apart the washing machine to see ‘how it worked’. Only he forgot to put it back together before Mum got home from a shift she occasionally stood in for at the local supermarket. Mum had found Minty sitting in the middle of a pile of tangled wires and bolts, grinning from ear to ear. ‘I learnt such a lot!’ That was all he said.
After my parents died, money was tight. It was always make-do and mend, but Minty seemed to go that extra mile. He’d tried fixing up an old bike he found at the scrapyard, intending it as a surprise for my birthday. But when he tested it out, the pedals jammed, and poor Minty went careering down the high street, narrowly missing an old woman with her groceries. The bike was beyond repair. After that little mishap, I said I hated bikes in an attempt to avoid mechanical interventions. To this day, I don’t even drive.
‘So, Clara…’
Hmm, I’m not so keen on that tone of voice. He hardly ever calls me Clara. I know where this is going. ‘No.’
Minty takes a moment to peel his eyes from the road and shoot me a look. ‘You don’t even–’
I feel my eyes narrow. ‘I don’t need you to fix me up with one of your mates.’
This was beginning to be a bit of a problem. In his desire to fix, Minty was taking it upon himself to sort out my life, and for Minty, a nice young man was part of that fixing.
‘My mates are great guys. Vetted.’
‘Minty!’
He shrugs. ‘This one you’d like.’
‘You said that about the last one, and that was an all-out disaster.’
‘Phil?’
I nod. ‘Phil.’
‘Phil’s a great guy. On the right track, I’d have said.’
‘Track?’ I laugh. ‘He took me trainspotting. That’s not a date.’
‘Well,’ Minty shrinks down into his shoulders in a sheepish attitude, ‘okay, so it’s a bit of a specialised interest. But you know what, he’s never late.’
‘Then there was Darren.’
Minty breathes out sharply. ‘Yeah, I don’t know what went wrong there. Darren’s a great bloke.’
‘He told me my phone was running slow, so he downloaded new software. He fixed the gate on the front drive before he took me through it.’
