eye and then the other so the stars jumped across the sky.
‘I’ve been meaning to ask you something.’
‘Ehh?’
‘God—.’ He laughed. ‘I’ve said this in my head so many times and now I can’t get the bloody words out.’ He pushed his fingers through his hair, frustrated, and made an airy animal noise. ‘Humph. OK, here goes: I’ve been meaning to ask you if something happened, Lol, back when we were kids? Something …’ He dropped his voice to a whisper. ‘Something violent?’
She’d known then. Some sixth sense had made her pulse start rippling beneath her skin and she’d been hot all over. He remembered. They’d always presumed he was far too young, but he remembered.
‘Violent?’ She sat up but didn’t turn to face him. She didn’t think that she could look into his eyes and lie. ‘You mean aside from Iris and Daphne in a bid for the bath-room?’
He didn’t laugh. ‘I know it’s stupid, only sometimes I get this feeling.’
‘You get a feeling?’
‘Lol—’
‘Because if it’s spooky feelings you want to talk about, it really should be Rose—’
‘Jesus.’
‘I could put a call through to the ashram if you like—’
He tossed a cushion at her. ‘I’m bloody serious, Lol. It’s doing my head in. I’m asking you because I know you’ll tell me the truth.’
He smiled a little then because seriousness wasn’t some-thing they did often or well, and Laurel thought for the millionth time how deeply she loved him. She knew for a fact that she couldn’t have loved her own child more.
‘It’s like I’m remembering something, only I can’t remember what it is. As if the event has gone but the feelings, the ugliness and the fear, shadows of them anyway, are still there. Do you know what I mean?’ Laurel nodded. She knew exactly what he meant.
‘Well?’ He lifted one shoulder uncertainly and then dropped it again, almost in defeat, although she hadn’t disappointed him yet. ‘Is there anything? Anything at all?’
What could she have said? The truth? Hardly. There were certain things one didn’t tell one’s baby brother no matter how tempting. Not on the eve of his going up to university, not on the roof of a four-storey building. Not even when it was suddenly the thing she wanted more than anything in the world to share with him. ‘Nothing I can think of, G.’
He didn’t ask again and he made no sign that he didn’t believe her. After a time he went back to explaining stars and black holes and the beginning of everything, and Laurel’s chest ached with love and something like regret. She made sure not to look too closely because there was something about his eyes, right then, that made her see the bonny little baby who’d cried when Ma put him down on the gravel beneath the wisteria, and she didn’t think she could bear that.
The next day, Gerry left for Cambridge and there he remained, an award-winning, game-changing, universe-expanding honours student. They’d seen each other some-times, and written when they could— hastily scribbled accounts of backstage antics (her) and increasingly cryptic notes sketched on the back of cafeteria napkins (him)—but in some ungraspable way it was never the same again. A door she hadn’t realised was open had closed. Laurel wasn’t sure if it was just her, or whether he, too, discerned that a fault line had fractured silently across the surface of their friendship that night on the roof. She’d regretted it, the decision not to tell him, but not until much later. She’d thought she was doing the right thing, protecting him, but now she wasn’t so sure. ‘Right then, love. Charlotte Street Hotel. That’ll be twelve quid.’ ‘Thank you.’ Laurel put her phone into her handbag and gave the driver a ten and a five-pound note. It occurred to her now that Gerry might be the one person aside from their mother whom she might talk to about it; he’d been there, too, that day; they were tied, the two of them, to each other and to what they’d witnessed.
Laurel opened the door, almost hitting her agent, Claire, who was hovering on the pavement with an umbrella. ‘Lord, Claire, you scared me,’ she said as the taxi pulled away.
‘All part of the service. How are you? All right?’
‘Fine.’
They kissed cheeks and hurried into the dry and the warm of the hotel. ‘The crew’s still setting up,’ said Claire, shaking out the umbrella. ‘Lights and all that jazz. Would you like something in the restaurant while we wait?