us together in one great big happy commune, taking turns to cook lentils and tie-dye organic hemp? A few months back I would have been all for selling up—any fraction of the house would have been a big step towards that white Georgian overlooking the bay—but now that whole daydream stabbed like a humiliating joke, it made me feel like one of those deluded caterwaulers babbling about superstardom on The X Factor. It was made worse by the paranoid sense that the other two were thinking things I wasn’t in on, invisible signals zipping back and forth past my face like insects; I felt like an unwanted outsider, like they would be happier if I made some vague excuse and went inside, or even better if I hauled my bags into another taxi and drove straight back to my apartment.
“Can’t you ask your dad what the story is?” Leon said to Susanna. He had taken his lighter out and was flicking the flame at the jasmine stem, blowing it out when it caught.
“Why can’t you ask yours?”
“Because you’re closer to yours.”
“Just because we live in the same country doesn’t mean we’re close.”
“It means you see him. Which makes it an awful lot easier to casually slip the question into conversation, oh by the way Dad, do you happen to know—”
“Hello? You’re right here. You’re actually living with yours.”
Leon blew out the jasmine viciously. “Which means I’ve got more than enough on my plate right now, thanks, without—”
“And I don’t?”
“Why don’t you do it?” Leon said to me. “You’re just sitting there, assuming one of us will—”
I was finding this bickering weirdly comforting, actually, with its familiarity and its implication that I wasn’t the persona non grata here, that maybe everyone was just stressed and out of joint. “I’m living with Hugo,” I pointed out. “I can’t exactly ask him: hey, Hugo, just wondering, when you kick the bucket—”
“You could ask your dad.”
“You’re the one who brought it up. If you’re so desperate to know—”
“You’re not?”
“Of course he’s not,” Susanna said. “Duh.”
“What’s the big deal?” I demanded. “We’ll find out when he dies, what difference does it—”
“If he dies—”
“All right,” Leon snapped. “I’ll do it.”
Both of us turned to look at him. He shrugged, against the wall. “I’ll ask my dad.”
“OK,” Susanna said, after a moment. “You do that.”
He dropped the jasmine on the terrace and twisted his heel on it. “I will.”
“Wonderful,” Susanna said. “So we can quit bickering. I have to listen to that all day long; I don’t want to do it too. Is Oliver still going?”
I cocked an ear towards the door. “Yep. ‘She Moved Through the Fair.’”
“Jesus,” Leon said, rubbing a hand over his face. “Give me that bottle back.”
Susanna let out a breath precariously near to laughter or tears. “Last night she came to me,” she sang softly, “my dead love came in . . .”
Oliver’s voice, eroded to veil-thinness by distance, fell on hers like an echo. My dead love came in . . . Out over the grass, among the Queen Anne’s lace and the leaves.
“Oh, perfect,” Leon said, and tilted the bottle to his lips. “Let’s all see how morbid we can get.”
Susanna hummed a few bars of some tune I couldn’t put my finger on, till Leon let out a snap of laughter and sang along, in a tenor that was surprisingly rich coming out of someone so slight: “Isn’t it grand, boys, to be bloody well dead? Let’s not have a sniffle—”
I started to laugh. “Let’s have a bloody good cry,” Susanna joined in, and we all finished it together in style, cigarettes and bottle raised high: “And always remember the longer you live, the sooner you’ll bloody well die!”
A sound behind us, in the kitchen: cupboard door closing. After one horrified second all three of us collapsed with laughter simultaneously, as if we’d been sandbagged. Leon was doubled over, Susanna had choked on the wine and was whooping, banging herself on the chest; I felt tears run down my face. The laughter felt uncontrollable and terrifying as vomiting. “Oh, God,” Leon gasped. “Look at the coffin, with golden handles—”
“Shut up, Jesus, if that’s Hugo—”
“Wow,” Tom said, appearing in the doorway. “So this is where the real party is.”
We took one look at him and collapsed again. “What?” he said, bewildered. When none of us could answer: “Are you smoking something?”
The question was jocular, but just enough of a serious undertone sneaked through that Leon straightened up and gave him