Missed Calls

A Willerby Story

If it had just been the once, I’d have put the missed call from my brother down to just one of those things and never thought about it again.

“It must have been a pocket dial,” Oly said, “weird it’s not on my call register thing though. How are you anyway?”

We had a nice chat. I told him about Iris’ new job at the council and how much we liked our new house in Willerby. He told me about Steffi, his new girlfriend, and the flats he was looking into buying in Berlin where he’d moved to the year before.

“You sound like you’re doing well,” I said to him. “I’m glad the move worked out for so well.”

“Thanks,” he said, “it really has. Let’s speak again soon.”

But we didn’t – not because of anything going wrong but just because all lives are busy and when you live in different countries the lack of shared landmarks makes it harder to find the time.

I missed Oly and wished he lived closer but understood.

He was happy and right to make the choices that worked best for him.

I saw him next at mum and dad’s house at Christmas.

It was a good one. Everyone was on form, and we all had a great time, which was why – the next time I returned one of his missed calls I was surprised at how down he seemed and told him so.

“I don’t know why you would be,” he said, I told you at Christmas about it all.”

“I thought you said things were going well?”

“You can have hardly paid attention then,” he said, “lost my job, girlfriend broke up with me and your take-away is that everything was super.” He paused, sighed in frustration. “Steve, I swear when people have kids everyone else just sort of stops existing for them.”

That hurt and it felt unfair, but I swallowed it and apologised because inattentiveness on my part was the only explanation for how I’d missed such important stuff.

Feeling guilty, I phoned him just a week later to check up and was confused to hear him sounding upbeat. He was in a bar – I could hear loud voices and what sounded like Oktoberfest oompa band music in the background, which he had to shout over to make himself heard.

“Hey, Steve!” He yelled, sounding happily tipsy. “How are you and Iris?”

“Fine!” I shouted back. “But how are you?”

“Great! I got that promotion!”

“It’s great you got another job so fast.”

“It’s not really new,” Oly shouted louder, “same place but a step up.”

“But didn’t you tell me..”

“Steve, I’m really sorry, but I can’t hear you. I’m out celebrating with Steffi. We have other big news too – I’ll call tomorrow.”

And he did – to tell me he was engaged and had no recollection at all of telling me things were bad,

“You must have dreamed it, Steve-O,” he said, laughing when I brought it up. “I’ve never been happier.”

But I was almost certain I hadn’t. But what other explanation was there? In any case there was nothing I could do about it so again, I put it down to one of those things.

Until a couple of weeks later when be called when I'd just got back from church.

“Sorry being rude to you last time we spoke,” he said. “I know you’ve got your own shit going on. I shouldn’t have taken stuff out on you. But do you have time for a chat? It’s all a bit crap at the moment.”

“Of course,” I said.

It was then, hearing about his struggle to find the sort of work he wanted and how depressing it was to be waiting tables, I first realised the timelines had got muddled and I was now in contact with two versions of my brother.

It was all very odd, but I did always ring back because as his big brother I worried about him when he was down, and by the time things had picked up, the uncanny feel of it all had faded and I realised I liked both of him, and the different-but-similar lives they ended up living made the whole thing fascinating.

I started keeping notes after each call and still – years after it all ended – I still re-read what I wrote again and again, both to try and find meaning, which I never do, and to remind myself that as incredible as it seems it all really happened.

Once, on a whim, I read a few pages to one of my A Level English classes who found it all too wildly implausible with too many plot-holes to work as a short story and until now I’ve never tried to force any of it into anything like a coherent narrative.

But I haven’t had a missed call from the other Oly in years now, and because of the terrible thing that happened in this universe around the same time I last heard from him, I’ve decided to get it all down in case I convince myself none of this ever happened.

Or maybe that’s not it at all and this is just closure.

…

If this were fiction the two versions of Oly would contrast more than they did – a happy and a sad one, or a good and an evil one, but it wasn’t like that.

Both ended up in pretty similar lives, albeit thousands of miles apart. Both worked in computer games. Both had a bit of an issue with alcohol, and both got over it. Both got into cycling.

The Oly who stayed with Steffi moved to England just a couple of years after they were married. They had their kids in London where Oly’s head office was and after the world went all remote after Covid they moved to Beckworth, and we saw them all the time.

Those years, when all the kids were young and we were all mixed in with each other, were – I think – the best of all our lives.

I think of them often – particularly the unplanned weekend evenings in the Green Man, just down the road from the farmhouse we still live in.

The other Oly followed a lead to New York where he found and married Angela, who was German like Steffi, and it seemed to me from what I heard a lot like her.

In that universe we saw less of each other but from hearing him reminisce I know the long summer holidays we and our families spent together were special.

The accident wasn’t anybody’s fault.

February freezing rain a driver from miles away who didn’t know that the turn-off into Willerby isn’t properly signposted. Oly with his earphones in, who might not have stopped at the junction when he should have or might have tried but been foxed by the black ice.

It doesn’t matter.

We all hope it doesn’t ruin the driver’s life.

She seemed nice - it made us all feel worse to see her crying at the inquest.

There was never another missed call after that.

The lives of my two-different-and-the-same brothers rhymed with each other in enough ways for me to be as sure as I need to be about what that means.

I don't pretend to know how it all works and know I never will. But I suspect some things are set solid and don't move, and while events can bend around those things all the rivers of lives flow in the same direction as surely as all earth’s rivers must obey gravity and end in the sea.

Not the same, but similar.

Is it sadder to mourn two brothers than one?

I don’t know.

I miss them both.