Chapter 12

After a relaxing weekend Andrew went through to Glasgow to visit Nikki and Fran. Spending time with the two of them was always calming and Andrew was looking forward to it. It had been too long since he had seen them but everyone had busy lives. He would joke with them that they were the one married couple that he knew and hung out with. Their lives were very different, the two of them worked hard, especially Francesca as a doctor, but their life was stable now. They both had fulfilling careers and a loving home life. His own life seemed so uncertain and up in the air compared to theirs. Just as he and Leslie thought of each other as brother and sister, shorthand for all the nuances of their relationship, so it was with Nikki and Fran, his cool aunts, in that mid-generational gap between Andrew and his parents.

“You seem out of sorts this summer Andrew, is there something wrong?”

This was Francesca, who tended to spot changes in his moods, even small ones.

“You know what I have been like for the last four years, there has been a plan with six goals which I have worked at constantly. What I have found is that I miss the Open University degree work, it was this elastic thing that swallowed up my free time. I have had more free time, and I am not used to it, so that is part of it. The other is that life is changing, and I am nothing if not a creature of habit. The changes are significant and I am not dealing with that change very well. I had life structured and tailored to suit me, and now it is all going to change. Sure I wanted to be out of school, I felt constrained there but it was a block of time round which I built my life. Exercise every morning, seeing Suzanne at the pool and on the walk to school. degree coursework, CCF, volunteering at the Food Bank, working with Julian and Leslie, dinner with the Campbells every Sunday. It is all going to be different, and it is not like I am not ready for it but in some ways, I am throwing everything from the last four years away and starting again.”

He shrugged.

“When you lay it out like that, I see your issue. Did you never consider staying in Scotland for university?”

“That is the thing, I never really did. I am really looking forward to Cambridge, it will be a challenge, and I think I will do well there. It is the way that the rest of my life is being altered as well. A lot of this is the realisation that I will miss Suzanne tremendously. I know that we will stay friends just as I know that I will organise a fitness regime in Cambridge and join the OTC and find a volunteer opportunity but it is the, I don’t know, the totality of it that is getting to me. The summer seems to be one long series of farewells, or getting ready for an extended hiatus, you know what I mean? It is necessary and is part of growing up and all those tired old clichés but to me, someone who craves routine and stability it is tough.”

Nikki joined in for the first time.

“I heard all of what you are saying but I am not sure it is 100% accurate. You need a stable routine but you also crave adventure or things that challenge that comfortable existence. You did two Army Proficiency courses when everyone else only did one. You tutored someone two years ahead of you on a subject that you should not know fully, and got her to pass. You take young women to very public places and, I don’t know what the right term is, build them up, let them challenge their fears, conquer their demons, however you summarise that, you do it. You made Allison and Suzanne feel like princesses, absolute goddesses. You coach the women’s 1^st eleven all year. You lost, what twice, in 25 games. June told us about the photo shoot you did with her, booking a studio, working with her to fulfill her dreams.”

Andrew looked confused as Nikki told that last story.

“June stays with us occasionally when she is in Glasgow. She told us the story on one trip and brought the album through to show us on a later visit. June loved it, loved what you did for her. Think about all those things that you did just to fill in your time, to help your friends. Then there are all the things related to the computer work you do which you gloss over but Fran and I know there is more to the story than what you admit to. We don’t care about the details but it is pretty obvious that you did okay with it as a business. You are never, ever flash with money but I don’t think you realise how often you pay for everything. Fran and I work full time and you are a schoolboy and yet you always insist on paying. And finally there are the women, who you never talk about, we got most of our info from June but she admits that there are way more rumours than facts. You could have had a steady girlfriend at any point in the last four years but you chose not to. And that is not a bad thing it is just the truth. You talk about craving routine but you then try to disrupt that routine in as many different ways as possible, all the while being smart, funny, kind and sexy.”

Andrew looked at Nikki as if she had two heads.

“Don’t look so shocked, just because I am gay doesn’t mean I can’t appreciate a guy with a hot body.”

He laughed and shook his head, a move that was becoming as common as shrugging. He seemed to spend his life being surprised by his friends.

“Leaving aside your ogling of me” they both giggled happily “when you lay it out like that I am deluding myself. A lot of these activities became part of the routine, like the hockey coaching, like the computer work.”

Andrew paused here, to think for a second about how to explain about the money.

“I was not aware that I insisted on paying all the time, ingrained habit I suppose. As for the business side of the computers, I have no excuse other than I often don’t talk about that part of my life much. As something becomes more successful it gets ever more difficult to bring it up without sounding flash or boasting. The short version is that I created some software and made a little money off it; Julian and I then created some more software and made a lot of money off it; and then Leslie joined us and the three of us created some software from which we made an enormous amount of money. We were able to set up a charitable trust to fund cancer research as a result of that and Leslie will run it in a year when she graduates.”

The two of them rallied quickly from this bombshell and it was Fran the doctor who got in first.

“You are sitting in our living room telling us you were so successful that you are able to fund cancer research?”

He nodded.

“I am sorry to pry but I have to understand this, how much are we talking about?”

“Em, about £25m I think.”

Andrew answered looking sheepish. Nikki exploded in laughter.

“Only you could look so ashamed for giving away tens of millions of pounds. Andrew McLeod, do you realise that Fran and I are going to dine out on ‘we knew him before he was rich and famous stories’ for the rest of our lives? My goodness, just when I think that you can’t surprise me anymore you drop this on us.”

Fran stood up and motioned for Andrew to stand too and then pulled him in for a fierce hug. Nikki joined her and he was sandwiched between the two of them. She leaned back and then let him sit back down.

“I can’t talk to you when you are standing like that, even though I wanted to keep hugging you. I don’t think you understand what an amazing thing you have done. Your friends and family will have had time to get accustomed to the idea and the amounts but let me tell you as a doctor but more importantly as a friend, what you just told me is genuinely unique.

“Knowing you as we do, I can understand your reticence to talk about this. You didn’t give all your money away, did you?”

So Andrew talked for a few minutes about the Trust and how the three of them kept 10% each and some of the things they were looking to do with their own retained money. It was Nikki who took over.

“Let me guess, you feel like you have achieved one of your life goals and are at a loss as to how to move forward?”

She knew him too well. The day was helpful, they listened to him and let him talk everything through with them. As with Nikki when they first met, it was just someone to listen to him, to give him love. They really were his cool aunts. They didn’t bring it up, rather they let him think about it and talk about it more. Andrew wanted the week not to be all about him so he dropped it for a couple of days and forced them to talk about themselves but the reality was their lives were calm and low key for the most part. Fran was a doctor and was on call several times a month so they had a small group of friends that they saw most weeks but otherwise led quiet lives. They were talking about buying a flat or house and stop renting but the whole process was proving daunting to them and they were still happy with their nice flat in the West End of Glasgow.

Although he didn’t share the thought with Nikki or Fran Andrew thought about how he was spending so much time with them, how they appeared happy to have him stay. It came back to the whole basis of the relationship between the three of them. It was love, familial love. And for both Nikki and Fran they didn’t get love and support from their real family. What Andrew started to realise that week was the same applied to him. When he told Nikki and Fran about the Trust, and their reaction, it gave him pause that his own parents didn’t know about it. Since the start of his 5^th year at school, September 1981, when they had demanded that he pay money into the household budget, Andrew had not trusted them. He didn’t know whether a different approach would have not raised so many red flags with him but the truth was he felt unloved by his parents. At least his father recognised that Andrew was his own son, and not some other man’s child. Just that whole concept and what it meant about his parents, about his mother, had given Andrew many days of thought at the pool. His father liked, preferred and loved Rowan more than Andrew, it was obvious on a daily basis. His mother was. He didn’t know what his mother was, but Scott had come along and taken her focus. But there was no point in denying the truth of the matter. Neither side, parents nor son, were making much of an effort to be a family. Andrew was spending the week with Nikki and Fran and already had shared multiple times more information with them than he had with his own mother or father. The disappointments of his childhood had hardened over the years and the relationship with his parents was brittle. New Andrew bore the scars of old Andrew, they were deep and ever-present. And every day spending time with two unrelated women who loved him just highlighted the issue.

One day Andrew walked over to meet Fran after work, she was done before Nikki and he did his usual lift her off her feet and twirl her around routine, all the while being savaged by her and told to put her down. Typical Andrew, and they laughed and walked over to the Mitchell to wait for Nikki. But the following evening Fran had a gallery to watch her when she came out of the hospital, and this time when he picked her up she leaned in and kissed him. Andrew nearly dropped her he was so shocked, which made her laugh out loud.

“Don’t worry I am not switching sides, I was just fuelling the gossip groups. Come on.”

As she led him away, she told him about people’s reactions to seeing him the previous day. ‘The Ice Queen’ was widely assumed to be a lesbian so the arrival of a tall man, and he must have looked older from a distance, had set everyone a twitter in the hospital. Fran merely added to it with the kiss.

“I was happy to help, although a heads up would have lessened the risk of me dropping you in sheer shock. I thought it was generally known, if unacknowledged, that you were gay. Why the routine?”

“We are a teaching hospital so there is a constant churn of student doctors and nurses. It can be tiresome dealing with the gossip or the pickup lines. It may have been worth it just to see the look of panic on your face.”

That was just mean.

“Maybe tomorrow, I will stand there with a big heart balloon and a box of chocolates? Too much?”

They teased each other on the walk over to get Nikki. She was utterly unsympathetic to him, who can blame her after all the mum jokes he had played on her, and he was picked on by the pair of them on the walk home. Andrew’s face was aching from laughing so much when they got back to the flat. That night they talked to him about the future and finally let him know their thoughts about his sense of ennui.

“Your own nature and your friends will ensure that you continue to do something, to make a difference. Life does not have to be waiting in a queue for you to complete one task so another can immediately pop into place. Think about how we met, the series of circumstances that occurred for me to be on the desk the day after you get told off by Leslie for not trying hard enough to find something to balance your karma. Don’t push it and turn over every rock looking for it instantly. Let me ask you this even although I know your answer. You believe in karma, working on your karmic balance?”

Andrew nodded vigorously.

“So in some unknowable way, you find an opportunity to help others and it resonates with you and your balance stays in equilibrium.”