“I’m fine, Auddie, I’m fine,” I assured him.
“You were calling for Mumma and–”
“I’m fine,” I cut him off gently. “Are you hungry? Let’s eat breakfast.”
“Aunt Vera says no breakfast before seven.”
“Aunt Vera can kiss my ass.”
Great Aunt Vera lived in a large house—a mansion, if you will. Though I would not call it that in front of her. Four bathrooms, eight bedrooms, two kitchens, three living rooms, a two-storey library, a wine cellar and an indoor swimming pool—it may as well have been a palace.
In the heart of Cambridge, she lived close to public transport and beautiful public parks, the university mere streets away. She was a retired university professor, having written three academic books on the history of feminism and feminist epistemologies.
With nearly one hundred and fifty thousand people, Cambridge was a vastly different demographic than the small, sheltered population of Rose Chapel.
Before Auden and I moved in, Aunt Vera had lived alone with only a housekeeper and a gardener to share her grandhallways and luxurious block of land. Most of her time was spent travelling Europe with her wealthy, academic friends, the house left in the care of Mrs Brighton while Mr Leyton tended to the garden.
Although she wasn’t thrilled to have been given the responsibility of our upbringing, she ensured we had everything we needed. She refused to even consider letting Uncle Brady raise us when his idea of child-rearing was sending a child into the wilderness to learn to survive a cold night alone. And besides, it was her name listed on my father’s will, not his.
“I don’t like children,” she had said when she first brought us home, a displeased scowl on her face when Auden and I stood awkwardly in the doorway, coats and shoes still attached.
Uncle Brady told me of her struggles to conceive a child with her late husband Norman. Perhaps her dislike of children was a result of her inability to have her own.
Auden and I grew on her, though.
Once she learned of my passion for art, she had Mrs Brighton order me a mountain of art supplies, dedicating one of the spare bedrooms as my own art studio. Canvases, easels and paint palettes lined the floor, white sheets covering my unfinished work.
I was hesitant to pick up a paint brush at first. With my family torn apart, I had little inspiration to bring any form of art to life. But it was an itch I could not scratch, and my fingers wrapped around a brush with the eagerness of a frog snatching up a fly. I painted the only light in my life. Auden.
Other than his blue eyes and straight hair, Auden was becoming a mirror of me. Painting him almost felt like I was painting myself, but where I was all dark colours and rainy days, he was sunshine and warmth.
He adored the library. Aunt Vera made him his own little retreat where he could read in comfort, surrounded by acushioned fort draped in expensive blankets with fairy lights hanging from the corners. It won him over, just as his smile of delight won Aunt Vera over in return.
A black cat meowed at the foot of my bed the second the clock chimed seven. Shakespeare, Aunt Vera’s eleven-year-old cat, crawled toward Auden, nuzzling his face with contented purrs, requesting breakfast that Auden had adopted as his morning chore.
Shakespeare and Auden were inseparable from day one. I, on the other hand, avoided the cat, his yellow eyes eerily similar to my mother’s hazel ones when illuminated by flame.
I climbed out of bed and groaned when one of Shakespeare’s toys crunched beneath my feet. He was always shepherding toy mice into my room in the middle of the night, wanting to play with Auden who had snuck into my bed.
“Go feed that monster, and I’ll meet you downstairs,” I told Auden.
“He’s not a monster,” Auden pouted.
Shakespeare meowed in agreement.
“Could have fooled me,” I mumbled as I entered the bathroom attached to my room, a white towel covering the mirror so I wouldn’t catch a glimpse of the Devil when I brushed my teeth.
On the opposite side of the room was a walk-in wardrobe where my school uniform hung—a white-collared shirt, grey buttoned vest with matching grey trousers and a dark green tie.
My new school was a private one, much larger than St Augustine’s, and enrolling five weeks later than everyone else had been daunting. My father’s death, moving to Cambridge, adjusting to Aunt Vera—it meant I was far behind everyone else in my age group. Aunt Vera assured me I would catch up, but it felt like the end of the world to be the only one sitting in a classroom, not knowing what the teacher was talking about when she referred to the article they had read the previous week.
Auden entered year three with the same anxiety. His school was only two streets from mine, but he wasn’t thrilled that we would no longer be in the same vicinity. I was worried, too. Who would he spend time with, if not me? The thought of him being alone broke my heart.
Dressed in my school uniform, hair tamed, and teeth brushed, I made my way downstairs to join Auden at the dining table, his own hair combed neatly.
Mrs Brighton was in the kitchen, humming to herself as she dished out three plates of food. Her ash-coloured hair was tied up in a loose bun, vanilla perfume overpowering the smell of bacon, eggs and hash browns.
Aunt Vera sat at the head of the table, a mug raised to her lips as she flicked through the morning’s newspaper. Her dyed blonde strands crawled away from her greying roots, her straight ends resting just above her shoulders.
