but still. Jesus.” Tossing back his forelock as he straightened: “Is that vodka?”
“Just water.”
“Shit. I left my drink on the windowsill and now my mother’s there, and if I go back for it she’ll start asking me about some amazing cultural event she read was on in Berlin and have I been to it and what do I think? And I honest-to-God can’t.” He inhaled deeply and thirstily.
Leon and Susanna were the ones who had been on my mind the most, over the last few days. When I was a kid, the aunts and uncles—not Hugo, he was different, but Oliver and Miriam, Phil and Louisa—had been basically an amorphous cloud of adulthood that occasionally fed us and mostly needed avoiding in case they made us stop doing something, and even when I grew up I had never really put in the attention to bring them into sharp focus. But Leon and Susanna: they had been, to all intents and purposes, my brother and sister; we had known each other with the same complete, matter-of-fact intimacy with which we knew our own hands. Some tiny inchoate part of me had been hoping, against all reason, that just being around them would magically bring together all my pulverized fragments, that with them I couldn’t be anything but myself. The rest of me had been dreading meeting them, with an awful churning terror that they would take one look and see straight through all my pathetic concealments, to every fine detail of the damage.
“Here,” I said, holding out my hand. I was still thrumming with adrenaline. “Give me one of those.”
Leon glanced over, one eyebrow arched. “Since when?”
I shrugged. “Off and on.” In fact I’d barely smoked a cigarette in my life until a month or two back, but I wasn’t about to say that in case he interpreted it as some dramatic lunge towards self-destruction, which it wasn’t. The head-injury thing had done something weird to my sense of smell; I kept picking up improbable scents (reek of disinfectant off my microwave pasta, sudden rush of my father’s cologne as I pulled the curtains closed for nighttime), and since the awful warnings about smoking always waxed ominous about how it destroyed your sense of smell, I figured it was worth a try. So far I had managed to hide it from Melissa, but I felt safe enough; she was hardly likely to ditch Hugo and come looking for me.
Leon passed me a cigarette and his lighter. Of us three, he was the one who had changed most. When we were little kids he had been sparky and mischievous, in constant motion, but somewhere around the time we hit secondary school that had changed. We were in different classes, but I knew he had taken a certain amount of hassle—small, slight, suspiciously delicate-featured and gentle, it had been inevitable; I’d done what I could, but when I caught a glimpse of him in the corridors he had always been hurrying along, head tucked down, shrunken and self-contained. He was still a couple of inches shorter than me, and he still had the elfin look and the ragged dark hair falling in one eye—although now the raggedness had clearly taken about an hour and a metric ton of hairwax—but I had trouble overlaying either of those memories on this slim guy slouching against the wall, jiggling one foot and looking cool enough to imply that your whole life was an exercise in missing out.
“Thanks,” I said, passing back the lighter.
Leon had relaxed enough to look at me properly—I had to stop myself turning away. “Sorry I didn’t ring you more,” he said abruptly. “When you got hurt.”
“You’re fine. You texted me.”
“Just, your mum said all you needed was peace and quiet and not to be hassled, so . . .” A one-shouldered shrug. “Still, though. I should have rung. Or come over.”
“Jesus, no. No need for that.” I couldn’t tell whether my voice sounded casual enough, too casual— “I just, all I wanted to do was chill out and, and take it easy. Like, shitty daytime telly in my pajamas, you know? I wouldn’t have been great company.”
“Still,” Leon said. “Sorry.”
“You’re here now, anyway,” I said. I didn’t want to talk about this any more. “Are you staying here?”
“Oh hell no. I’m at my parents’. God help me.” He wiggled the lighter into his pocket. “I’d actually way rather be here, except once I moved in, boom, I’d be the designated carer and