Chapter 2 – Simo
I have never felt more grateful for the emptiness of my home.
Most times I find it suffocating, being here on my own, and so I escape to find Luca.
Then again, even with my parents around, I also escape to find Luca.
But today marks the worst Monday of all Mondays, so I drop my bag as soon as the front door slams behind me and collapse on to the staircase.
Mum has a teacher’s conference, and Dad will be showcasing seaside homes to buyers with dreams of the sweet small-town life. I recommend staying far away if they want their business to remain private. Because sooner or later someone will take their laundry and hang it up in the town square.
I groan and press my palms against my eyelids.
My mind is a maelstrom, relentlessly replaying the day’s events.
It started with a text from Louise – a picture of the town noticeboard plus an endless string of heart-eye emojis – and ended with a near-attempted break-in, when Luca and I stood in front of the town hall’s firmly locked doors.
Clearly neither Mayor Pickering nor Heloise wants to answer our questions.
Whenever one of us has had a shitty day at school, we hole up in Luca’s room or slink away to Clifford Island and watch the light fade from the sky.
But today I needed to be far away from anyone, including Luca.
All day long I’ve been faking it; Simo on the outside, mess on the inside.
Now I feel like there’s nothing left of me.
Just a Simo-shaped husk sprawled across a staircase.
It’s a new feeling, and not one I like. Not the faking being myself thing; I can never fully shake that.
When you’ve lost someone so close to you, a piece of yourself is lost too.
You’re never whole, but have to pretend to be, so as not to alienate people with your grief, or worse, earn their pity.
What’s new is that I don’t want Luca around.
He’s the only one who makes me feel like my real self.
He’s never pushed me to talk about it, that lost piece that I don’t have words for.
The message on the noticeboard hit me like a storm without the kindness of preceding thunder, entirely without warning.
I was still floating on a cloud of summer memories from our time in Granada: the honey-sweet taste of sangria on my lips mixing with the aroma of Abuela’s home-made empanadas, Luca’s toes grazing the moss at the bottom of a centuries-old fountain, the city’s heat pressing against my skin.
But when the realisation struck that the whole town would read these words and think them true, the bliss I felt evaporated in an instant.
For hours now the message has been stuck on loop in my head, a tuneless song that won’t leave me alone.
SIMO AND LUCA ARE IN LOVE
I’m desperate for a run, just to calm my thoughts, but I can’t leave the house for obvious reasons.
Plus I haven’t eaten. Couldn’t get a thing down all day.
I force myself up and into the kitchen, where I fill a bowl with honey puffs and milk.
I stand while I eat – mechanically, without tasting the food – and watch the street out front.
We live on a tight lane of terraced houses that tourists like to call ‘quaint’ or ‘a pain in the arse’ depending on the number of times they’ve reversed up and down to find parking.
Rows of stone cottages, front yards crowded with flower beds, ivy snaking up to the rooftops, the occasional gnome, and our house fits right in with its abundance of daisies.
Dad is obsessed with them. The thing about daisies is that they bloom pretty much all year.
It should be a soothing thought, that there is beauty that never dies.
But it’s the opposite. Daisies last forever; you pick one, and another takes its place, like a botanical hydra.
Human lives don’t work that way. They’re far more fragile.
Since the day we moved here, our garden hasn’t been daisy-less once.
You won’t find a window in this house that doesn’t look out on them.
Seas of daisies, in varying colours. They’re low maintenance, a little sun and water and they’re good, though Dad doesn’t make it look that way.
Sometimes I think he spends more time with his flowers than with us, his family.
It’s silly to resent a plant, but I can’t help thinking that those flowers are shameless attention-seekers.
Dad’s battered Chevy appears on the street, and the milk in my stomach sours at the thought of facing him.
I place the empty bowl in the sink, grab my school bag and disappear up into my room, where I sink on to my bed and grab a book off the nightstand.
Tío Andrés handed it to me when he dropped us off at the airport at the end of our stay.
Federico García Lorca, Obras selectas, it reads – selected works of Federico García Lorca.
I told him my Spanish wasn’t good enough to understand it, but Andrés laughed and took me by the shoulders.
‘Federico García Lorca is your brother and not just because you share a name,’ he had said. ‘You’re both sons of Granada. Your heart will know the meaning of his words, even if your head won’t.’
I didn’t point out that I had been born in another city, in another country, more than a century later than Lorca the poet.
Dad’s side of the family, all born and bred in the Andalusian city of Granada, have a very different sense of the word ‘family’ than the one I’ve grown up with.
Mum long ago lost touch with her parents, for reasons she has certainly never shared with me.
And though I met her sisters once, I don’t think a sole meeting at my brother’s funeral counts as close family ties.
Dad, on the other hand, has several group chats with family members going, but because of work, and money, and Mum, we don’t see much of them.
She’d never admit it, but I suspect it’s because Mum doesn’t speak Spanish and feels uncomfortable around Dad’s boisterous relatives.
The only reason I got to go to Granada this summer is because Abuela guilt-tripped Dad into sending me, by painting dramatic scenes of her own death without being able to embrace her faraway grandson one last time.
I didn’t mind my parents staying behind, because I got a holiday with Luca out of it. The flights were early birthday gifts.
It was overwhelming in the best way, when the family I barely remembered took me into their midst, Luca too, and treated us like they’d known us all our lives. And when Tío Andrés handed me the poetry book, I thanked him and savoured his words.
I pull a slim notebook from beneath my pillow, because that’s where secrets are meant to be kept.
It’s no bigger than my hand, with a mud-brown cover, thick pages and a severely broken spine.
It holds my thoughts, fragmented and unfiltered as they come.
When I say ‘thoughts’, I mean flashes of memories or dreams I don’t want to forget, quotes from Obras selectas and A Monster Calls.
Words like lost puzzle pieces that will never fit to make a poem.
It’s messy feelings turned into messy scribbles where words become too rigid to hold them.
It’s SIMO AND LUCA ARE IN LOVE crossed out so many times it resembles a ragged scar.
It’s not a new thought, but always a perplexing one, the possibility that Luca could be in love with me.
When you’re a boy, and your best friend likes boys, it’s not outside the realm of possibility.
As if, out of all the boys in the world to fall for, Luca would pick me.
As if I wouldn’t notice if he suddenly started treating me differently.
But he’s still the same loyal and genuine boy I met at seven years old.
‘Simo?’ Dad calls from downstairs, his voice muffled by the closed door.
I don’t respond, and soon I hear his heavy steps rising to the first floor.
The closer he comes, the bigger the urge to jump out of the window.
Instead, all I do is slide the notebook beneath the pillow and pick up Lorca’s poems again.
He knocks twice, and when I remain silent, he sticks his head in. ‘Ah, lost in a book, are you?’
Dad is the oldest of his siblings, and though he shares Andrés’ dark beard, his cheeks are fuller, and his skin shows lines far too deep for someone in his forties. But I know what grief does to a person, and I wonder if I’ll inherit the grey beard or the lines, or both.
I can’t detect anything in his eyes that says he knows about the noticeboard. But if he only speaks to his siblings in another country and newcomers looking for seaside homes, he might not know.
‘Yes, sorry, lost in a book,’ I say.
‘That’s OK, Simo. Just don’t forget your homework, yes?’
I never forget my homework. But that doesn’t stop him from reminding me every day. He means well; after all, even though Mum is the primary-school teacher, he’s the one who has always helped me at school.
‘No Luca today?’ he asks, catching me off guard.
‘I – no. Maybe later.’
‘OK, just let me know when you leave. I’ll be in the garden.’
I’m certain he doesn’t know. It’s not like he’d confront me. He’d take the opposite approach, avoiding a conversation until the situation either resolves itself or is overshadowed by a more urgent problem that must itself be ignored.
I see the way my parents treat Luca. They’re polite, but they use this politeness to keep him at a distance.
They wouldn’t utter a bad word about my best friend, but that doesn’t mean they don’t hold prejudice against him – and his dad.
It’s like they suddenly forget to act like normal people whenever they come face to face with someone who’s gay.
I’m not sure if it’s because they’re scared they’ll say the wrong thing or whether they disagree with homosexuality as a whole.
And I don’t know that I want to find out.