Sallie—regarded me with opaque, feline blue eyes. I couldn’t remember how old she was; four, maybe? “I have dolls in my shoes,” she said.
“Oh,” I said. I had no idea what she meant. “That’s nice.”
“Look.” She balanced herself with a hand on a big geranium pot and turned up the sole of one trainer, then the other. An inch-high doll, encased in a thick bubble of clear plastic, gave me a stupefied leer from each one.
“Huh,” I said. “That’s cool.”
“I don’t know how to get them out,” Sallie said. For a moment I was afraid she was expecting me to do something about that, but just then her brother—Zach, that was it—followed her over and stood beside her. He was a head taller, but apart from that they were a lot alike, the same pale tangled curls and fine egg-brown skin and unblinking pale-blue eyes. Together they looked like something out of a horror movie.
“Are you going to be living here?” he asked me.
“For a couple of weeks. Yeah.”
“Why?”
I had no idea what Susanna had told them about Hugo. I had a vision of me saying the wrong thing and both of them exploding into piercing howls of trauma. “Because,” I said. And when they kept staring: “I’m visiting Hugo.”
Zach was holding a stick; he swished it through the air, making a fine, nasty hissing sound. “Grownups aren’t supposed to live with their uncle. They live by themselves.”
“I don’t live with him. I’m visiting him.” Zach had struck me as a little shit before. One Christmas Susanna had had to take him away from the dinner table for spitting in his sister’s turkey because it looked better than his.
“My mum said you got hit in the head. Are you special needs now?”
“No,” I said. “Are you?”
He gave me a long stare that could have meant anything, although probably not anything good. “Come on,” he said to Sallie, flicking her on the leg with his stick, and he headed off down the grass with her trailing after him.
My leg was starting to judder—too much standing. I sat down on the terrace steps. Stretch of grass by the camomile patch where Leon and Susanna and I had pitched a tent and camped for a week one summer, giggly and eating biscuits and scaring each other with spooky stories all night, heavy-eyed and ratty all day, redolent of camomile where we had rolled over onto the plants. Over there the tree where in the dizzying darkness of Leon’s fourteenth birthday party I had had my first real kiss, a slight sweet blonde called Charlotte, illicit cider taste of her tongue and the softness of her breasts against me, cheers and whoops from the lads somewhere Go on Toby you legend and the unending soft whoosh of the breeze in the leaves overhead. This terrace where we had sprawled the first time we smoked hash, stars overhead bouncing into tantalizing coded patterns and the smell of jasmine strong as music in the air, and I had with total solemnity convinced Leon that Susanna had turned into a tiny fairy and I had her cupped in my hands, him trying to peer between my fingers Hey babes talk to me are you OK in there? while Susanna was right beside us and there had been someone else there too, Dec, Sean? someone at my shoulder and shivering with laughter in the darkness, who? Holes in my mind, blind spots shimmering nastily like migraine aura. All these landmarks, close enough to touch and miles out of reach. Now, great big grown-ass man me, I could no more have mustered the courage to sleep in that tent than I could have flown.
“Oh my God,” Leon said, behind me, slamming the terrace door with a flick of his wrist. “What a nightmare.”
“What?” I asked. The slam had made me leap like a startled cat, but Leon didn’t seem to have noticed; he was fishing a pack of Marlboro Reds out of the pocket of his jeans, which were black and shredded in weird places and so tight that he had trouble getting the smokes out. He was also wearing a Patti Smith T-shirt and Docs the size of his head.
“The whole thing. Like some lovely family reunion and we’ll all be sent off on a scavenger hunt any minute. It’s grotesque. But I guess that’s Hugo, isn’t it, keep calm and carry on—” He bent his head to the lighter. “Which, yeah, respect, he’s got guts and whatever,