‘Jesus.’ Sean straddled his board, swinging his legs under the water. ‘Well, why don’t you try and view it as a good thing?’
If Niall could have predicted Sean’s response, it would have been something like this. He looked on the bright side of things, albeit sometimes in an objective, black and white way. But his outlook was always welcome.
‘Go on.’
‘Listen, if you run away from things, they will always be a shock when you have to face them again. If you’d stayed here instead of going to Australia, these things would have become part of everyday life and not be as significant. It’s like noticing the wrinkles on someone’s face when you’ve not seen them in ages. If you’re with that person every day, you don’t see them ’cause they creep in slowly.’
‘You saying I’ve got wrinkles?’
‘Maybe a few lines, but what I’m saying is if you go away and come back then things become a bigger deal than they need to be and get referred to in mysterious terms like “the incident”. It’s not as big a deal as you think, and if you stay longer – maybe forever – you’ll see that.’
Niall liked Sean’s perspective. It was true that what happened wasn’t a huge deal now, but at the time he’d seen it that way and decided Carli would hate him for it, so he’d chosen to let her go without telling her why, instead pretending he’d fallen out of love with her. And that’s why it became such a dark cloud hanging over him.
‘Aye, you could be right,’ he said. ‘I am thinking about it. Moving back.’
‘Really?!’
‘Yep.’
‘That’s great.’ Sean stilled for a second. ‘I’m thinking of doing some sort of fundraising thing for MND. Maybe an adventure challenge or something. You should take part.’
‘I’d love to if I’m about. Dad will be proud of you.’
‘Ach.’ Sean shrugged. ‘That’s not why I’m doing it. But you take part and he’ll be proud of you too. I mean, he already is, but you know what I mean.’
Niall picked at the wax on his surfboard. He wasn’t sure what to do with the idea that his dad was proud of him. It wasn’t something he was comfortable with, and it showed on his face and in his body language.
‘You don’t believe it?’ Sean asked.
Niall trailed his hand through the cold water, giving himself a dose of Scottish reality. ‘I do, in theory. In practice, I have trouble believing it, but that’s on me, not him.’
‘And what makes you so special that you’re the one he’s not proud of?’ Sean hit back pointedly.
This threw Niall a little. It was a fresh perspective. ‘Dunno. I’m the one that makes all the mistakes, fucks up all the time. It’s hard matching up when your other brothers are so accomplished.’
‘Mate, you run a surf school with franchises wherever there’s surf.’
‘Aye. On paper, it’s all there. But up here,’ Niall tapped at his temple, ‘it isn’t. I’m like the odd one out.’
‘Are you serious?’
‘Yeah, see, Jamie’s got this bond with Cal because they remember Archie and how he died. Nate, Cara and Eilidh are triplets, and you’re like Dad. I don’t remember Archie and I don’t measure up to Jimmy Butler’s boots. Now Rafe’s dead, it’s obvious how much he was the backbone of the surf school. I was the floating partner, so to speak. Drifting along on the tide of his hard work. I think about coming home, but then there’s all the memories I ran away from.’
‘Listen,’ said Sean, riding the crest of this conversation now. ‘You are as much a part of that business as Rafe was. Is it still going strong? Haven’t you been running it the past few months?’
‘Just about.’
‘But you have. You’re a success. And if you stay in Scotland, nothing here will seem as bad as it does when you’re thousands of miles away. You’ve got to decide what you let define you.’ Sean threw his fist down on his board as if he were giving an impassioned motivational speech, which he kind of was. ‘If it’s the bad stuff and you decide you’re a bad person, then you become a person who lets bad stuff define you and it becomes a self-fulfilling way of living. It’s lame and lazy. You can do what Cal and Jamie did and try hard not to be defined by Archie, or you can worry over every indiscretion and become shaped by that.’
Niall chewed over this for a moment, checking for a wave coming that one of them could hop on, but the waters were still, like they wanted him to talk about this. ‘I did try not to be defined by him,’ he said, ‘but sometimes no matter what I did, there he was roaring out of me.’
‘Or maybe you set yourself bloody high standards and kick yourself hard when you don’t meet them.’ Sean fixed Niall with a hard stare and Niall was acutely aware of how vibrantly green his brother’s eyes were, sparkling in the morning light. ‘I’ll tell you something I’ve never told anyone. It would be easy for me to let myself be defined by being the odd one out in the family.’
This surprised Niall. ‘How are you the odd one out?’
‘Because I’m the one without the tragic back story. The one who got both his parents, who it all went right for. I’m not into sob stories, but that could make me the black sheep, the one who’s destined to fail because he hasn’t had any hardships to fight. Stupid, right?’
‘Aye.’
