No More Happy Birthdays

Part 4

Vincent would have sat in the upstairs bathtub until he fell asleep and drowned in it had Bo not assisted him. Normally even when he was exhausted such as now, the scarred young man could still take some sort of bath or shower without any outside help. But now he only sat idly in the tub, staring ahead sleepily. Whorls of soap spun in tiny currents on the surface of the water, tainted ghostlike by a hint of blood, all watched by a single, unmoving eye. Bo took no hesitation in helping to bathe him, as he assumed the near catatonic nature of his twin brother was a result of all he had endured within the past week.
“Too tired?” Bo asked, taking a large orange sponge and scrubbing at his brother’s back. He did not expect a verbal answer, and never would. He had a feeling Vincent was perfectly capable of learning how to talk, as clever as he could prove himself to be at times, but perhaps he simply never felt the need to. Not that it mattered anyway, as the young artist could get his point across whenever he needed to.
“Move your head back, your hair’s a mess.”
Of course Vincent did not react in any way, but Bo continued his work and washed the long, black, oily strings that were his brother’s hair. Vincent preferred to stare relentlessly at the line of water droplets falling from the spout of the tub, and he only turned his attention away from the sight when he felt a rivulet of watered down shampoo enter his eye.
“Yeah?” Bo responded when he saw the other man fidget and complain at the discomfort. “See what happens? Move your head back.”
Vincent obeyed this time, squinting at the slight twinge of chemical in his solitary eye. He expected the gestures of his brother to be hard and unkind, and so was faintly surprised at the gentility of Bo’s hands. He obeyed the advice to close his eye and felt relieving water fall upon his hair and half made countenance, the waves clearing soap from his head and feeling pleasant against his skin, both unmarred and deformed alike.
“Bet that feels better,” he heard above him, and as he opened his eyes, he could see Bo standing above him with a towel. “But you can’t stay there and prune up. You wanna sleep, you gotta get out.”
Towel clinging to his slightly damp frame and hair dripping, Vincent walked down the hallway, ready to descend the staircase, but a hand landed upon his shoulder, putting a stop to his journey.
“Nah, come with me. You deserve better than the cellar tonight.”
Vincent obediently followed, and expected to be lead to his real bedroom, only to find himself walking ever down the hallway, straight to the door leading to Bo’s own room. He stopped, puzzled at the sight, but Bo’s gentle grip on his shoulder tightened briefly as a gesture of reassurance. His brother stepped forward to push open the door, allowing safe passage as though he were a mystical gatekeeper in a fairy tail, like those their mother had read to them before sleep.
Once he reached the bed, Vincent landed on the mattress with care, though Bo could see the surrender in his movement, a sure sign of how exhausted he truly was. Vincent, head bowed under the pressure of sleep, fumbled with otherwise dexterous fingers over the knot he had absent-mindedly tied in his towel until his twin assisted him, pulling the yellow article from his naked body. Bo observed as his brother shuffled further onto the mattress just enough to lean back against a pillow and pull his legs upward onto the bed, bare feet diving under the safety and warmth of thick blankets.
“Sure you’re not gonna fall out?” Bo asked, half amused at his twin’s behavior. What a big damn kid, he thought as Vincent proceeded to curl up like a rabbit kit under the covers. Shaking his head, Bo took a seat at a chair aside the bed, watching his brother protectively until sleep claimed him.
About an hour later, the relentless pain which had grown in the bend of Bo neck awoke him. Glancing at the bed, he saw that Vincent had not tried to sneak away in order to retreat to his beloved work station. That was progress, Bo considered as he stood and rotated his neck in an attempt to rid himself of the ache there. Turning to glance at the chair, he was disinclined to continue to sleep there. Looking down at his sleeping brother, he remained where he stood, deep in thought.
Hell, it wouldn’t hurt…
As quietly and slowly as he could manage, Bo eased himself down onto the mattress, lifting the blankets and settling into the place where he usually slept. Looking over at his brother, he saw that the prostrate figure had not moved. Vincent’s breathing had not changed in any way, and his single eye remained closed. Stretching his arms, Bo shifted into a comfortable position and closed his eyes.
No less than ten minutes later, he heard the body beside him stir. The mattress moved in time with Vincent’s very short journey to his brother, where he slowly crept closer to the warmth that was Bo’s body. Bo did not even open his eyes until he was certain that he felt his twin brother’s naked form nestle up against him.
“No,” he whispered, nudging against Vincent to make him turn away. “None of that. Go on, you’re too old for that.”
And I can’t let my brother be a faggot, Bo thought to himself.
The bed rocked as Vincent hesitantly moved away, rolling onto his back. His breath became the tiniest of groans in response to the pain he felt as his bodily weight pressed against that sting in his backside. Even in the dark of the room, where a silhouette was more visible than the muffled black details of a face, the young man’s discouragement was clear as day. Bo had to admit that his brother really was a smart boy. But those emotions… his childlike manner and his actions made him look like some big damn retard that could barely take care of himself. The behaviour of him, the near innocence, also made him look weak. He could kill, that much was true, and he could survive and kick a full grown man’s ass if he needed to, but Vincent Sinclair could also be so soft, so caring. This side of him was mostly exclusive towards his twin, and Bo hardly welcomed the treatment. Mom was dead, and the boys did not need such pampering anymore, especially not from someone like Vincent. He was supposed to be a man, like Bo.
A man and not a simpering woman.
Not a queer.
Bo thought back on the horrible thing which happened over a week ago, and how he had handled Vincent. The loudness of his shouting and the hard quality of the hits in his brother’s body now seemed disturbingly unreal, like viewing a horror picture in Ambrose’s own theatre. He had struck Vincent before in the past, but added to the violation the childish twin, it was a nightmarish image.
I ain’t havin’ a goddamn freak brother who’s a fuckin’ faggot too!
The words had a near nostalgic familiarity to them. Like a song dug up by a Golden Oldies style radio station and played to allow its long separated admirers to reminisce, the words danced in Bo’s head, and he could hear them, though in reality his ears only picked up the breathing of his brother. Nagging at him, they repeated until Bo could finally tell himself he knew where he had heard them before.
“I ain’t having any goddamn freak sons who are fuckin’ faggots too, you ungrateful brats!”
Bo hoped the slight gasp in his rhythm of breaths went by unnoticed by his currently distracted but otherwise attentive twin. Waiting until he knew all was quiet in the black room again, he closed his eyes and focused on the words which were still familiar, but altered by a different voice, this one hidden away in an attic of memories. That attic was crawling with sentient cobwebs and multi-legged creatures and other black, wicked things, threatening to tear away at the curtain of Bo Sinclair’s recollections. The voice was rough, polluted by alcohol and heavy with exhaust and profession addled tension.
Daddy. For a doctor he could be one hell of an angry old bastard.
Though the amount that Vincent could remember was uncertain, Bo could remember the past with their father very well. He was an unhappy man who must have had a particularly sizable inferiority complex, always talking defensively whenever the subject of his occupation arose. Even to Trudy Sinclair, beloved wife, devoted mother and sweetest lady of Ambrose, he spoke down to her of his skills as a physician, as though constantly trying to prove the point that he was brilliant at what he did. The tones of his voice and his choice of vocabulary always proved the opposite of his intent: he had lost his job before living in Ambrose and everybody knew it.
Bo wondered once he and Vincent had no parents and the two of them were put away in foster homes if those insecurities helped to fan the flames of Victor Sinclair’s wrath upon his children.
When Bo threw rocks at puppies and hid snakes in his mother’s bureau drawers, he got the chair. Whenever he pushed one of the other neighborhood children into a ravine or punched one in the nose for so much as looking at him in an unfavorable way, he got the chair. When he did such things to his twin as convince him to stick a paperclip into an outlet, he got strapped to a goddamned chair. His anger knew no limits, and was fueled further by the punishments doled out to him. However, the chair was nothing compared to the rage they summoned from the doctor when he found out about the twins’ other common activity.
Victor Sinclair figured he should have seen it coming when Bo and Vincent where three years of age, but his senses as a doctor had hindered his instincts. He opened the door to their room with the intent of bringing them downstairs for dinner, only to discover the two boys standing with their pants down and prodding at one another’s penises. He excused the behavior at the time, figuring they were acting as typical curious children, learning about their bodies in the first and most simple of ways.
Two years later, shortly following a despicable event involving a plank of wood, the nearby river, and a neighbor’s truck, Trudy Sinclair found Bo and Vincent trying to kiss other boys of similar age on the mouth. Her shock of the discovery led to the information reaching her husband, and he was displeased to the point of spanking both soundly with a brush and making them sit with sore behinds on stools in separate areas of the house. Yet another year later, Bo thought it hysterical to leave Vincent, decked out in Trudy’s best cocktail dress and high heeled shoes, where their mother would find him first. A harmless joke, Bo figured, and one of his less corrupt ones, but Dr. Sinclair did not agree whatsoever.
This was when Victor, brain soaked in whiskey, was at his worst, and he screamed at Trudy to stay out of his business as he loudly reprimanded his twin sons. Still clothed in his mother’s garments, Vincent cried under the shadow of his father’s wrath, messily applied makeup running down his masked face with his tears. First, he watched in fear as Bo was spanked soundly, and then he faced the punishment himself, a rare thing indeed for him.
As envious as he was of his parents’ favoring of Vincent, and as much as he had wished through his young life for the other twin to receive such action from an adult, he loved his brother nonetheless, and seeing the way their father treated him now awakened the fury within. “Stop it!” he remembered yelling as he threw himself upon their father, tearing at his neck with small fingernails and biting at an earlobe, bringing forth blood. Thrown from Victor’s back, he landed on the hardwood floor and the air was knocked from him leaving him gasping and in pain.
The last time the Sinclair twins ever attempted anything similar was when they found some of their mother’s old things in the cellar, such as her glamour magazines and the dolls she owned and loved from her own childhood. Victor had shouted out those familiar words with such clarity and power that they stayed in Bo’s thoughts for months afterwards, and whenever he became angry, his father’s drunken movements came alive within his arms and fists, and Vincent found himself with a new bruise each time.
The memories lived on in Bo’s dreams causing him to moan out half formed phrases in his sleep and awake, weeping in the black empty space of his bedroom late at night. Half asleep now, he jerked into full consciousness, the fading sights and sounds fresh in his mind. Nibbling at flakes of skin clinging to his lips, he found himself wondering how his father would have reacted to the hard-on his brother had sported while building the ideal sculpture of the ideal dead man deep in the belly of the Sinclair estate. Would he have done similar damage to Vincent? Worse?
Thinking of Vincent made Bo notice the soft panting coming from the right of him in the bed. Turning his head, he saw in the darkness that his brother’s shape shook in time with the uneven pattern of his breath. He was crying again, as quietly as he could manage.
“Shh…” Bo whispered, tentatively reaching out as he turned on his side, strong hand pushing aside the jet black locks of hair and stroking his twin’s head like that of a puppy. He remembered their mother would do the same when Vincent got sick and could not fall asleep easily. Slowly, the quiet undertones of sobs slowed, though when Bo’s hand traveled down to touch skin, he could still feel tiny rivers of tears meet with his palm. The tears feel far too often, the volume of fluid causing Bo to think perhaps his left eye was making up for the lack of a right one.
“Don’t cry… you’re okay. It’s okay now…” Bo said softly, trying to calm the small boy inside Vincent who had been hurt so profoundly. “Everything’s better now, and I’m not mad at you anymore. Go to sleep. That’s it…” He felt the twisted visage beneath his hand fall lax and the tears finally ceased.
When he was sure that Vincent was finally asleep, he edged with the utmost caution towards the motionless body, continuing to stroke the long black waves, and gazing upon the relaxed, closed-eyed expression. His voice hardly even loud enough to be a whisper, he spoke with deep sincerity:
“I promise… I’ll never let anyone else hurt you. Vincent… I’ll never let anything ever happen to you, ever… I promise… I promise, I promise…” he continued until sleep was overtaking him as well. “I promise… I’ll never let anything happen to you… I promise…”

.
.
To be continued...