It’s tempting to blame it on the stress of Hugo dying, or on the cracks, neurological or psychological or whatever, from that night, but if I’m honest I think it was a lot more mundane and pathetic than that. The truth, I suppose, is that I envied Leon and Susanna. The sensation was so unfamiliar that it took me a while to recognize it; I’d spent my life taking it for granted that, if anything, it was the other way around. Social stuff had always come easily to me—not that I was some charismatic leader type, but I was always effortlessly part of the cool crowd, invited to everything, secure enough in my footing that Dec had been accepted into the fold in spite of his accent and his glasses and his atrocious rugby skills, simply because he was my friend. Leon had spent school as the kind of kid who got regular wedgies, and while Susanna (in our sister school, next door) hadn’t exactly been a reject, she and her friends had been a bunch of generally ignored Lisa Simpson types who did stuff like selling handmade candles to raise money for homelessness or Tibet or something; if the two of them got included in anything remotely cool, it was because of me. Even once we grew up, Leon had dropped out of college after a year and ricocheted around the world picking some crop or other in Australia and living in a squat in Vienna and never holding on to a job or a boyfriend for longer than a year or two, and Susanna had turned into Mrs. Stay-at-Home Mummy and spent her time pureeing green beans or whatever, while I had got straight on track for a snazzy career and pretty much the perfect life. It honestly wasn’t that I looked down on them, ever—I loved them, I wanted them to have every good thing in the world—just that I was aware, in the back of my mind, that if they were to compare their lives with mine, mine would come out on top.
But now: they ran up the front steps two at a time, juggled multiple threads of conversation without missing a beat; Leon told scurrilous stories about nights out with bands I had actually heard of, Susanna had just dusted off her degree and got into a prestigious master’s program on social policy and was sparking with excitement about it; and then there was me. I was functioning fine, give or take, within my new miniature simplified world, but I knew perfectly well there was no chance I could handle even a single day in my old job or my old life. I envied them, hard and shamefully, and it felt against the natural order of things. It made it impossible for me to see their foibles and flaws with the old warm, amused tolerance. Stuff that a few months ago would have had me grinning, shaking my head, set my teeth on edge to the point where I could barely keep back a roar of rage. It was always a relief when they left, and Melissa and Hugo and I could slip back into our gentle, crepuscular world of rustling pages and card games and hot cocoa at bedtime, of delicate unspoken agreements and accommodations; of—and I only see it now, really, for the rare and inexpressibly precious thing it was—mutual, grave, tender and careful kindness.
* * *
?Leon was right, though: Hugo was getting worse. It was subtle enough that most of the time we could almost convince ourselves it wasn’t happening. A sudden wild buckle of his leg, me or Melissa grabbing at his elbow, oops! mind the rug! but it was happening more and more often and there wasn’t always a convenient rug to blame. The dazed, tractionless gaze skidding around the room sometimes when his head came up from his work, What . . . ? what time is it? and then his eyes lighting on me with such a total lack of recognition that it took a lot not to back right out the door, to say instead Hey, Uncle Hugo, it’s almost three, want me to make the tea? and he would blink at me, coming back into his eyes little by little, and finally smile, Yes, I think we’ve earned it, don’t you? The occasional snap of irritability that verged on anger, out of nowhere—No, I don’t want more vegetables, I’m perfectly capable of serving myself, don’t rush me! The drag at one corner of his mouth, subtle enough to look like a wry deprecating quirk of expression, except that it didn’t go away.
One evening he fell. We were in the middle of making dinner—empanadas, I can still smell the rich greasy mix of chorizo and onion suddenly hitting the back of my throat. We had Chopin waltzes playing, Hugo had gone upstairs to the toilet and Melissa and I were rolling out dough on the countertop and debating how big the disks should be, when we heard a confused scuffle, a thick terrible thud, a tumble and clatter; and then silence.
We were out of the kitchen and calling Hugo’s name before my mind had time to understand what I had heard. He was half-sprawled on the stairs, white and wild-eyed, clutching the banisters with one hand. His cane was far below him and there was something awful about the flung angle of it, earthquake, invasion, everyone fled—
Melissa got to him first, kneeling on the stairs beside him, hands on his arms to hold him down—“No, stay still. Don’t move yet. Tell me what happened.”
Her voice was brisk and unfazed as a nurse’s. Hugo was breathing fast through his nose. “Hugo,” I said, catching up, trying to squeeze in beside him. “Are you OK? Does anything—”
“Shh,” Melissa said. “Hugo. Look at me. Take a deep breath and tell me what happened.”
“It was nothing. My cane slipped.” His hands were shaking violently and his glasses were askew halfway down his nose. “Stupid. I thought I had the hang of it by now, got careless—”
“Did you hit your head?”
“No.”
“Are you sure?”
“Yes. I’m fine, really I—”
“What did you hit?”
“My backside, obviously. I bounced down a few stairs, I’m not sure how many— And my elbow, that’s actually the worst— Ouch.” He tried to move his elbow, grimaced in pain.
“Anywhere else?”
“I don’t think so.”
“A doctor,” I said, finally coming up with a contribution to the situation. “We need to call a, or an ambulance, we—”
“Wait,” Melissa said. Deftly, matter-of-factly, she ran her hands over Hugo, turn your head, bend your elbow, does that hurt? what about this? Her face was intent and detached, a stranger’s; her hands left smudges of flour like long-settled dust on his brown cords, his misshapen jumper. In the kitchen Chopin was still playing, the “Minute Waltz,” demented frenzy of trills and runs speeding on and on and I wanted savagely to make it shut up. Hugo’s breathing, fast and labored, was setting off some frantic alarm at the base of my brain. It took everything I had to stay there.
“All right,” Melissa said in the end, settling back on her haunches. “I’m almost positive you haven’t done anything serious. Your elbow’s not broken, or you’d never be able to move it like that. Do you want to go to the ER? Or shall we get the doctor on call to come have a look?”
“No,” Hugo said. He struggled to sit up straight. I grabbed his hand, much bigger than mine and so bony, skin sliding, he had lost weight and I hadn’t even noticed— “Honestly, I’m fine. Just a bit shaky. The last thing I need is more doctors. I just want to lie down for a bit.”
“I really think you should get checked out,” I said. “Just in case—”
His hand tightened in mine. With a flash of annoyance that was almost anger: “I’m an adult, Toby. If I don’t want to see a doctor, I won’t. Now help me stand up and get me my cane.”
He was shaking too hard for the cane. We got him upstairs and into bed, one of us on each side with our shoulders braced under his arms, Chopin whirling and looping crazily in the background, the three of us tangled into one big ungainly creature moving with infinite care, up! OK, up again! Once he was settled, Melissa and I brought him a cup of tea and started making tinned chicken soup and toast for dinner. None of us wanted the empanadas any more.
“He really didn’t do any damage, you know,” Melissa said, in the kitchen. “And it could have been just what he said: his cane slipped.”
It hadn’t been, and I didn’t want to talk about that. I was pretty shaky myself; my heart was racketing, my body didn’t believe the emergency was over. “How did you know? How to check him over?”
She stirred the pan of soup, caught a drop on her finger to taste. “I took a course, ages ago. My mother has falls sometimes.”
“Jesus,” I said. I wrapped my arms around her from behind and kissed the top of her head.
She took my hand off her waist, pressed it to her lips for a second and put it aside to reach for the herb shelf. The leftovers of that cool detachment still hung about her, and I wanted it gone; I wanted to take her to bed and strip it off with her clothes, burn it off like mist. “No, it’s good. You’d be surprised how many times it’s come in useful.”
“Still,” I said. I had heard enough over the years to know that I would never be able to meet Melissa’s mother without wanting to punch her face in, but this was the first time I’d recognized the grim irony here: all Melissa’s childhood soaked up by taking care of her mother, she finally got away and found a guy who would take care of her instead, and all of a sudden, hey presto, she was right back in carer mode, only now she was stuck looking after two people instead of one. “This isn’t what you signed up for.”
She turned to look at me, herb jar in her hand. “What isn’t?”
“Being Hugo’s carer.”
“I only checked him over.”
“You’re doing a lot more than that.”