Vivaldi in the Dark Box Set

Chapter 10-2

“Oi!”

Scott interrupted a YouTube recording of Vivaldi’s Winter by hammering on Darren’s door, interrupting both the music and Darren’s attempts at rearranging the score. Mr. Weber had decided, after a wave of complaints from his students, that they wouldn’t do Vivaldi for the summer recital. Strictly speaking. Instead, each string section would elect a soloist and play the proper movement as an accompaniment to the soloist’s edited version.

Darren had hated the idea the moment it had been voiced, and sure enough, the other violinists had instantly dropped him in it. So what if he was the best violinist in the orchestra? That didn’t mean he wanted to spend hours creating a new twist on Vivaldi’s work. The Four Seasons was boring enough as it was—give Darren Tartini or Paganini any day. At least they were technically interesting.

“What?” he called, scribbling out his notes and sliding the sheet back into his music case. He was tempted to play Paganini anyway and get detention for a month. It would be worth it to not have to play Winter for the fifteen millionth time.

“Jeff says can it until Misha’s piano lesson is over,” Scott said, sticking his head around the door. “What you doing, butchering a cat?”

Darren’s father was the source of musical ability in the family—and was Scott’s stepfather, so Scott was about as musically gifted as a tone-deaf tomato. That had been made into ketchup.

“Tuning the cat,” Darren said blandly, and they both grimaced as Misha’s ‘playing’ (banging the keys) stomped up the stairs like a rude houseguest. “Okay. I’m quiet,” he said, stopping the video. “Now go away.”

Scott lingered. “You going out again on Saturday?”

“Dunno.”

“Where you been?”

“Out.”

“Seriously, what happened?” Scott scowled at him. “You used to be chatty.”

“No, I wasn’t.” In fact, Darren was fairly certain he’d been the quietest child on the face of the earth. Mute kids had talked more than he had at Misha’s age.

“You were with me,” Scotty said and wandered across the room to flop across Darren’s bed, messing up his chemistry notes. Darren rolled his eyes. “You used to tell me all about your day. Now you just tell me to get out.”

“Which you’re notably not doing.”

“Come on.” Scott kicked the back of his chair; Darren nearly hit the laptop screen. “Where’ve you been?”

“Out, Jesus.”

“With who?”

Darren fought the urge to say whom. He then fought the urge to text Jayden in the worst text-speak possible to make up for the lapse. “A mate.”

“Riiiiight.”

“What do you want?”

“Have you got a girlfriend?” Scott pushed.

“Nope.”

“A boyfriend?”

“Nope.” Fifteen years of it made Darren a good liar; over his shoulder, Scott huffed.

“Well, you’ve been out with someone. And I heard Jeff yelling at you about letting practice slide, so don’t fob me off with the orchestra losers.”

“Scott, what do you want?”

“I want to talk to my baby brother!”

“I’m like four years younger than you.”

That was a mistake; Scott promptly launched to attack him in a hug, pinning him into his chair, and started ruffling his hair into a frenzy. Darren knew better than to fight, so screwed up his face and stayed put, waiting it out.

“Still my baby brother!” Scott crowed and used Darren’s hair to pull his head back until they made eye contact. “Come on,” he said, shaking Darren’s head like a toy. “What have you been up to? New girlfriend?”

“Why do you care?”

“I need to know these things.”

“No, you don’t, now sod off.”

“Yes, I do!”

“Come off it, Scott, when have I got time for a new girlfriend?”

“When you’re not practising all those dead Italian musicians like Jeff says you should.”

Darren wrinkled his nose. “That sounds sick.”

“Urgh, yeah, kind of does,” Scott agreed and let go of him to collapse back on the bed. Darren finally turned his chair to watch, tucking his feet up under himself. “So you in Saturday or not?”

“When?”

“Evening.”

“…Why?”

“Well, maybe you’re out all the time now being sociable or whatever, but I did some spying and Mother has one of her stupid dinner parties, and Misha has a sleepover at Katy’s.”

“Kitty’s.”

“Whatever. My point is: ‘rents are out, kid sister is out, we have the sofa and the widescreen, my DVD collection and takeaway Chinese. My treat,” Scott said and grinned. “I haven’t watched any shitty action films with my baby brother in waaaay too long. You do know Bad Boys II is s**t without your running commentary?”

“It’s s**t anyway.”

“Hush your sacrilegious nonsense,” Scott said loftily. “Book it in your diary and tell your slag to sod off for the night.”

Darren rolled his eyes. If Jayden were a slag, he’d have gotten some by now.

“And when you decide to come out of the closet and tell us you’re hitting up Lucy Love from last year’s music camp, you know where to find me,” Scott said, peeling himself off the mattress and ruffling Darren’s hair again for good measure.

“Oh, piss off.”

Scott stooped to hug him again, nearly strangling Darren with his shoulder. “Seriously,” he said lowly in his ear, “you haven’t properly talked to me since you were like twelve. I miss you, bro.”

Darren squashed the twinge of regret in the middle of his chest. “Call me ‘bro’ again, and you’ll be missing me from the seventh circle of Hell,” he threatened and shoved Scott off. The guy was like an octopus.

“Yeah, yeah. It’s adorable when you try to be a man.”

Darren hit him; Scott darted out the door, cackling like a madman, and Darren slammed it for good measure, ignoring Father’s thunder of “BOYS!” from the living room where Misha was still punching the s**t out of the piano.

He eyed the rumpled sheets where Scott had ruined the cleaner’s attempts at tidying Darren’s room, and pinched the bridge of his nose. His contacts were itching, he had a headache, and…he had a bit of chest-ache too, at Scott’s admission. They hadn’t really talked for years, and Scott wasn’t the only one who missed it, but…

But the shadows nudged at the back of Darren’s brain, and he knew that telling Scott would be the stupidest thing he could do. Scott didn’t get it. Scott was the bumbling, lucky, cheerful i***t of a big brother who had been handed confidence, skill, looks, and brains on a plate and never had to do anything he didn’t want. He had the brass that Darren envied; he had the sheer force to barrel over everything Mother and Father said, and…

And Darren didn’t. Darren sat in his room shuffling around Vivaldi’s already dull creations and pretending that he was fine with it. Pretending that Father really did know best. Pretending that one day, once he was done with Weber and Vivaldi, he would enjoy the violin.

But he’d never enjoyed it in the first place.

There was no fun to a violin. There never had been. His lessons had been sombre from the beginning: Paganini and Bach, Vivaldi and the lilting strings in Holst. There had been skill, yes, and Darren knew if he’d been handed anything, it was the ability to just listen to a piece of music and replicate it, draw out the finest qualities of it and stun a room into silence with his talent…

But he hated it. The trombone had always been a laugh, because there was no grace or finesse to it. The piano could be entertaining, flexing to fit the music. But the violin was a sad, solemn instrument, and it had taken Darren with it. He knew that. He knew, the way the darkness gnawed into his chest when he played, the numbness in his fingers when he listened and composed, the way he felt so hollowed-out and empty after every practice, every rehearsal, every recital.

He had been ten when he’d been given the violin. He had been eleven when he had performed in his first recital. He had been twelve the first time that he’d locked himself in a dark room, played until his hands were shaking too badly to finish the piece, and scratched a six-inch mess of skin away from his bow arm.

He had stopped telling Scott everything the moment he’d looked at his arm and realised what he’d become.

What he still was.

He hadn’t hurt himself—physically—in a few months now. It was his longest streak. The penknife was still locked in his bottom drawer; he still found himself biting around the edges of his thumbnail in music classes. But he hadn’t done it properly for months. Not since August. He’d come back from music camp, looked at the mess of scars and fresh, blurry wounds on his left arm in the downstairs bathroom, and decided that he’d had enough.

So far, he’d been lucky. Bloody, bloody lucky.

And he wasn’t going to be able to keep it up. Darren knew himself. His moods—his good days, and his bad ones—followed the music. The run-up to Christmas was quiet, because the string orchestra were never involved with the Christmas melee, so he could make it sometimes weeks at a time without a really bad day. But after…when the spring came, and the recital dates were booked, and Weber started frothing at the mouth with how bad they all were and how he should have stayed in Dresden teaching deaf children the drums…

The bad days would come.

Darren sat on the edge of his bed, grinding the heel of his left hand into his face. What was he doing? Getting involved with someone else while he was still so f****d up in the head—what the hell was wrong with him? He wasn’t blind; he knew the way Jayden looked at him, like he had all the answers to everything. Like he knew what he was doing. Like he was f*****g perfect.

And what happened when Jayden found out that he wasn’t? What happened when Jayden found out why Darren woke up some mornings and couldn’t move, or when he found out why Darren had broken both legs two summers ago? What about when he found the scars? Darren was just lucky that he hadn’t yet, just lucky.

“You’re a f*****g i***t,” he muttered to himself and swallowed. He couldn’t do that to him. Jayden deserved more than that; he deserved more than Darren, period, but if he insisted on being interested in the first place, then the least Darren owed him was a little bit of honesty. A little bit of laying it out on the table and letting Jayden make a proper choice, an informed one. Let him know just what he was letting himself in for.

And if he decided he couldn’t deal with it, then…

Then fine.

It wasn’t fine—but it was, because Darren knew better than to think anyone was going to put up with the s**t his brain threw at him. Even he didn’t want to put up with it and had tried to check out three times now. Jayden wouldn’t want to either—but Darren would rather let him walk away, with only the facts to go on, than to get tangled up in the shadows in his head and the numbness in his hands without having the first clue about what he’d gotten himself into.

Saturday.

He’d tell him Saturday, then come home and veg out with Scott and criticise films until he could forget having told Jayden at all.

Because, inevitably, Jayden was going to walk away.

* * * *