people there, maximum, apart from me and Melissa, but after months of near-solitude it felt like a football crowd or a rave, much too much, what had I been thinking? My father and Uncle Oliver and Uncle Phil all talking at once and pointing their glasses at each other, Leon leaning over the kitchen table on his elbows playing some hand-slap game with one of Susanna’s kids, Aunt Louisa dodging about clearing plates— After the silted-up debris and dust of my apartment the whole place looked unnaturally clean and colorful, like a stage set freshly constructed in preparation for this moment. I thought about grabbing Melissa and backing straight out of there, before anyone noticed we had arrived—
A cry of “Toby!” and my mother popped out of the mass of bodies, glad-faced, catching my hand and Melissa’s and talking nineteen to the dozen—I couldn’t take in a word—and that was it: we were trapped, too late to run for it. Someone shoved a glass into my hand and I took a big gulp, prosecco mimosa, I could have done with something a lot stronger but that would probably have been a bad idea with the Xanax and at least it was booze— Miriam throwing her arms around me, in a cloud of essential oils and hennaed hair, and congratulating me on the exhibition (“Oliver and I have been meaning to get to it, now that Leon’s home we can all go together, a family excursion—Hugo can come too, a bit of art would do him good— What happened to that boy who was all over your Facebook page? Grunger?”) and on being alive, which was apparently an indicator of my exceptional resistance to negative energy. Tom, Susanna’s husband, pumping my hand like we were at some kind of religious meeting and giving me a great big earnest smile full of empathy and encouragement and all kinds of good stuff that made me hope Susanna was banging his best friend. Oliver landing a back-slap that doubled my vision, “Ah, the wounded warrior! I’d say you gave as good as you got, though, am I right? I’d say there are a couple of burglars out there questioning their career choice—” and on and on, punctuated with belly-shaking chortles, until Phil must have caught my increasingly wall-eyed look because he cut in with some question about my opinion on the housing crisis, on which frankly I had had no opinion even before I got clocked on the head but at least it distracted Oliver. My mother regaling us with the saga of some byzantine department feud that had climaxed with one medieval-studies professor chasing another down a corridor, whacking at him with a sheaf of documents (“in front of the students! It was on YouTube within ten minutes!”)—she tells a story well, but my mind kept cutting in and out, skidding off on tangents (child’s drawing stuck to the fridge and I couldn’t work out what it was meant to be, dinosaur, dragon? had Leon had that platinum-streaked forelock last time I saw him, it looked ridiculous, he looked like a My Little Pony, could I have forgotten that? how was I going to lug Melissa’s and my cases up the stairs?) and by the time my mother finished the story I couldn’t remember how it had started. I laughed when Melissa did and talked as little as possible—the slur in my speech had faded a bit but not enough, unless I was super-careful I still sounded handicapped. The Xanax didn’t stop me from longing to get out of that room, to just about anywhere that didn’t have my mother’s eyes skipping to me too often and Leon elbowing me in the back every time he gestured; it just stopped me from imagining any conceivable way to do it.
“I’m very glad you came,” my father said, suddenly at my shoulder. His sleeves were rolled and his hair was rucked up in tufts; he looked like he’d been there a long time. “Hugo’s been looking forward to seeing you.”
“Oh,” I said. “Right.” Getting to this point had taken so much concentration that I’d practically forgotten why I was there to begin with. “How’s he feeling?”
“He’s all right. He had his first radiotherapy session on Wednesday and it’s left him a bit tired, but apart from that he’s himself.” My father’s voice was level, but the undercurrent of pain made me look at him properly. He seemed somehow thinner and puffy at the same time,