his eyes when he felt Joe looking at him. He was so familiar and such a stranger that it was like meeting an actor. He was the man from the sea, the one who waited, and looking at him here, Joe could finally remember the beach. It was where Jem and Agatha had been married.
He could remember that Kite had slipped away after the celebrations, which had been on the deck of the Victory. He must have thought he was giving the newlyweds some privacy. It had always been impossible to make him understand that he was wanted; having been told all his life that he was nothing but human jetsam attached to his famous sister. So they’d run down after him onto the beach. The three of them colliding had sent them all tumbling into the sea.
He could remember grasping Kite’s hands, unbroken then, and promising there was always space for him, and how Kite had never believed it, though he had pretended; and how Agatha, guiltily, had been glad her brother had never believed it. In bed that night, she’d confessed how badly she wanted something – someone – who was just hers, not who she cultivated for her brother’s career or the benefit of a hospital.
He could remember how his heart had splintered when he understood that, far from having made the three of them a proper family like he’d meant to, he’d just taken two people who belonged to Kite, and made it so that neither of them did.
‘I’m not going to see you again, am I?’ His heart was juddering. ‘After this. That’s it.’
‘No.’ Kite was quiet for a second. Joe thought he was going to change the subject or close in on himself again, but he did the opposite. ‘Are you all right? You’ve gone white.’
‘Of course. I’m …’ He trailed off, because he wasn’t. ‘You could stay.’
‘I can’t. I’m on leave for now, but I have to be back next week—’
‘You can’t tell me all this and then just vanish!’ What had begun as the steam from a small worry was building and building, powering whole pistons and mechanisms that were well on their way to firing full panic.
‘Then what am I supposed to do?’ Kite said, quite gently. ‘I can’t stay here, I have eight hundred people to look after. You have people here who need you too, the twins and your brother. I don’t know what—’
‘Then take me with you,’ Joe said, before he had decided to. He swallowed hard. ‘Look, those visions – those memories, those are the best things I have. Please.’
‘Your family, Joe—’
‘You’re my family! You were family before any of them. I’ve missed you even when I didn’t remember you. Everything I’ve done since losing you has been about getting back to you. And I know I’ve left you behind before for other families, but not this time. I can’t do it again.’ He swallowed when he noticed how much he was saying I. ‘Sorry. If you don’t want me to – look, I’d understand if you said you never want to see me again. I didn’t mean to just invite myself.’
Kite said nothing for a while. But then, ‘Seven o’clock, platform three. King’s Cross.’ He inclined his head, careful and full of courtesy. He was holding himself at a distance from the idea. ‘I’ll expect you if I see you. Don’t worry if you change your mind.’
Joe pulled him close. Kite turned to stone, but little by little he unstiffened, and hugged him back.
Home was a painting. There was a thinness to everything and sometimes he could see the canvas through it. He walked around the whole house, all the way up to the attic; the same attic where Joe and Alice Tournier had lived, in that other version of now, where M. Saint-Marie had not gone home to France, fed up with all the post-independence paperwork and restrictions designed to discourage Parisians from moving here, and left it to Joe. The view beyond its round window had been of a London blackened by the steelworks. Now, the towers were sandy-coloured, even in the dark, uplit by the street lamps. He stood in the place where Lily’s crib had been. The attic was just an attic now, full of the accumulated rubbish of past Christmases.
It had been real. There had been a real little girl who he’d fought to come back to. Kite was real, and had waited for him years ago by the sea.