Voices, clear as robins’, making me jump. There were children playing, down at the bottom of the garden: one swooping crazy patterns on a rope swing, flicking in and out of existence as it arced from shadow to light and back again, one rising out of the long grass with hands held high and wide to scatter something. Thin brown limbs in ceaseless movement, white-blond hair shining. Even though I knew they were Susanna’s kids, for a sliding second I thought they were two of us, Leon and Susanna, me and Susanna? One of them called out, sharp and imperious, but I couldn’t tell whether it was meant for me. I held my glass against my temple and ignored them.
The garden had the same look of low-level unkemptness as the front of the house, but that wasn’t new. For a city garden it’s enormous, well over a hundred feet long. It’s lined along the side walls with oak trees and silver birches and wych elms, behind the rear laneway by the back of an old school or factory or something—adapted into a hip apartment block during the Celtic Tiger—five or six stories high; all that towering height gives the place a secret, sunken feel. Gran was the gardener; in her time the garden was artfully, delicately crafted till it felt like somewhere out of a fairy tale, slyly revealing its delights one by one as you earned them, look, behind this tree, crocuses! and over here, hidden under the rosemary bush, wild strawberries, all for you! She died when I was thirteen, less than a year after my grandfather, and since then Hugo had loosened the reins a lot (“Not just laziness,” he told me once, smiling out the kitchen window at the summer confusion of growth; “I prefer it running a bit wild. I don’t mean dandelions, they’re just thugs, but I like getting a glimpse of its true colors”). Gradually plants had strayed and tangled, long tendrils of ivy and jasmine trailing from the wall of the house, tumult of green leaves on the unpruned trees and seed-heads poking up among the long grass; the garden had lost its enchanted air and taken on a different quality, remote and self-possessed, archaeological. Mostly I felt that I had liked it better before, but that day I was grateful for the new version; I was in no mood for whimsical charm.
The smaller kid had caught sight of me. She stood for a while examining me from amid the Queen Anne’s lace, swaying a handful of stems back and forth with absentminded persistence. Then she drifted over.
“Hi,” I said.
The kid—it took me a second to find her name: 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, 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.”