His dad
He loves her, which is a good start. Enzo does not think that he has ever seen his son in love, except maybe with his teenage drum kit.
They used to hate those drums, he and Helen.
Now that the sound is gone, it’s amazing how cavernous a flat this small can feel.
Today, things are full again. Today, every seat at their table is taken, which is exactly how Enzo likes it.
‘So,’ Helen says. ‘How did you two meet?’ She stops Seb before he can say anything. ‘I’ve heard your version. I’d like to hear Clara’s.’
Clara dabs at her mouth with a napkin. ‘It’s a funny story,’ she says.
And it is. She tells them about the square, about the drawing.
About her boyfriend and the year that followed, and the awkward audition that followed that.
She doesn’t spare any details, which Enzo approves of.
She gesticulates like an Italian, too, which gets her extra points.
How did his son end up with someone so talkative?
Seb is barely blinking, so fixated is he on her.
His laugh, which is usually deployed sparingly, is out in full force where Clara is concerned.
‘More importantly,’ Clara says, glass of wine in hand, fixing Enzo and Helen with eyes as blue as the sea back home, ‘how did you two meet?’
Clara had seemed nervous when she’d first arrived, holding out a ludicrously large bunch of flowers, tripping over her words on her way up the stairs.
We don’t shake hands here, Enzo had said, with a hug crushing enough to flatten the flowers.
Enzo is a host. He’s also a storyteller.
He flashes a mouthful of metal fillings, now, and begins.
He remembers the years before Helen like a faded stack of postcards, hours spent lounging in the back corners of coffee bars and on the backs of Vespas in every fishing village from Pisciotta to Palinuro, long lunches with wine and mozzarella di bufala, wine and parmigiana di melanzane, wine and fritti misti fresh from the azure sea, and wine, wine, always more wine, wine-soaked trysts on the decks of patched-up boats and on the sunbeds of bleached-white lidos.
He’d been grabbing a bite to eat with a friend in Paestum when he’d spotted a tall young history student from England, standing at the entrance of the ruins with a Leica camera dangling from her slender neck.
He’d left the table mid-meal, crossed the road without looking and hailed the tourist. Her chestnut hair. Her almond eyes.
‘I’m a tour guide,’ he’d told her, flashing a smile with fewer fillings.
‘No, you’re not,’ Helen had said, returning her eyes to her map.
She’d be a tough nut to crack. ‘I could be.’
He’d stood under ancient columns and made things up, and Helen had been kind enough to humour him.
They’d even posed for a picture, obligingly taken by a passer-by.
That same picture, now pinned to their fridge with a gaudy magnet made to look like Amalfi lemons.
He plucks it from beneath the magnet, passes it to Clara.
Clara’s eyes travel over the other photos, Italian family gatherings at which Seb makes silly faces with his cousin’s kids. She can’t help but smile.
‘Wasn’t I handsome?’ Enzo says, proudly.
‘Humble, too,’ Helen says.
‘I see the resemblance,’ Clara says.
‘Very handsome, then,’ Seb says, seriously.
‘Seb is too self-conscious to show off that much chest hair,’ Helen says. ‘Enzo likes to flaunt it, even if he hasn’t got it any more.’
Clara strokes Seb’s forearm, then takes his hand.
It’s clear that she loves him, that she loves hearing his parents’ stories about him, tales taller than the platters of aperitivi piled up in front of them.
She nods and she nods, fiddles anxiously with her cutlery.
She cares what they think of her. Enzo can’t tell her that there’s no need to be nervous, that it’s clear from Seb’s face that she’ll always have a place at this table.
And he won’t tell her that life isn’t always a postcard, because everyone knows it, and no one needs to hear it.
Salerno might have been the sunnier option, but Helen’s burgeoning career, her friends and her family, they were all here.
Enzo was just happy to follow her. Leicester had seemed grey at first, and her parents hadn’t exactly rolled out the red carpet.
He’d struggled to find work as a foreigner with a flimsy grasp of the language, and Helen’s teaching position at the local comp could only stretch so far.
But they’d managed. They’d built a life.
‘Where’s this?’ Clara says, to Seb.
She’s holding another polaroid. A teenage Seb standing at a stainless-steel sink, looking as serious as ever.
‘Downstairs,’ Seb says, with a grimace.
‘You used to work downstairs?’
‘If you could call it work,’ Enzo says. ‘He and Nimesh were as bad as each other.’
They say that there’s a person from every country in the world on Narborough Road.
That was definitely Enzo’s experience of his adopted hometown, where an Italian could start a restaurant next door to a Sri Lankan and find a best friend in the process.
Enzo and Viraj have always shared a love of feeding people, and Enzo has always loved feeding them here, under the very same roof as his restaurant below.
When he’d first started circling the idea of opening his own place, Enzo had made it clear that it wouldn’t be what everyone expected: plastic tubs of Parmesan and comically oversized pepper mills, Enzo in a chef’s hat and pomodoro-spattered apron.
Che schifo. His new friends had all raised their eyebrows when he’d decided on a fish-and-chip shop instead.
But the place was still going strong, even after all these years, even after all Seb and Nimesh’s best attempts to ruin it through sheer gormlessness.
Viraj wouldn’t employ his own son, even as a waiter, but Enzo was soft.
Besides, those few years in which the three of them worked side by side in that kitchen might have been the best of his life.
Seb heaving enormous sacks of potatoes into the industrial chipper, Nimesh forgetting to water down the acetic acid in their industrial-strength vinegar and almost causing a city-wide chemical burns epidemic.
All three of them, pausing during the afternoon lull to shovel down battered sausages and chips, mushy peas and curry sauce, this uniquely beige English slop that Enzo has never been able to get enough of.
Enzo wonders what Clara must think of this place, a family home above a fish shop with walls the colour of batter and a carpet that smells like reheated chips. Enzo wonders if his son ever wished for more.
‘What about your family?’ Enzo asks, his hand making circles in the air around her. ‘I imagine this is all very different to where you’re from.’
‘Don’t interrogate her,’ Seb says.
‘Let the lady speak,’ Enzo says.
‘The lady,’ Seb says, rubbing his forehead. ‘Christ.’
‘It’s fine,’ Clara says, squeezing Seb’s hand. ‘There’s not much to say,’ she says. ‘They definitely don’t cook as well as this.’
‘Don’t flatter him too much,’ Helen says. ‘He’ll never let you leave.’
‘Has Giuseppe cooked for you?’ Enzo says.
There’s a pause. Clara looks like she isn’t in on the joke. ‘Who’s Giuseppe?’
Seb isn’t one for blushing, but he looks like he could right now. He raises one hand. ‘That’s me.’
And then he has to explain that his name isn’t Sebastian like Clara had assumed. That he’s Giuseppe on his passport, that his dad used to call him Peppino or Peppe, that an unassuming ‘Sep’ was soon bastardised by the English kids at school into a name they could manage. Seb.
‘He’ll always be Peppino to me,’ Enzo says.
Although, of course, he isn’t. Seb was always going to be tall, with Helen for a mother, with a father who’d always been far broader than his peers.
Corazziere, the fishermen would say, when Enzo was little but already not-so-little.
Strapping chap. Seb is a corazziere like his father, but without the personality to match.
A pensive poet. Pensa un po. Seb stopped being peppino when he was barely a teenager, when the world showed all its cruelty to someone who should never have had to lose so much, so young.
The broadest of shoulders would have struggled to bear Seb’s burden.
Enzo is a glass-half-full person, and even he was almost shattered by it.
There’s no picture of this, pinned on the fridge door for the whole family to reminisce over: Enzo standing outside a hospital ward, a thirteen-year-old Seb’s head buried in his chest. Occhio non vede, cuore non duole.
In the years after, Seb spoke very little, and asked for even less.
Enzo wanted to give Seb the world, but all he had was a fish-and-chip shop.
In the end, they’d settled on a drum kit.
‘My strong boy,’ says Enzo, his hand on Seb’s shoulder, his eyes moist.
‘Dad,’ Seb says, and there’s a warning in his voice. Don’t bring it up. Don’t bring down the mood.
Clara glances from one of them to the other, unsure what to make of this. ‘You don’t seem like a Giuseppe,’ she says, eventually.
‘Well,’ Seb replies, before kissing her. ‘You can still call me Seb.’
Helen and Enzo share a look, remembering what it was like to be young and in love and unafraid to show it.
To be aflush with all the possibilities of a thing, before everything else has weighed it down.
The drums were an outlet, suggested by a therapist. Seb disappeared into noise, into the fury that came with it.
He got into fights at school, got caught skiving and smoking.
Music was an escape, and he was never seen without his Discman, fringe hanging over his face and frayed black cable headphones hanging from his ears.
Enzo had cried on Viraj’s shoulder, wondering what to do about him.
Little did he know, Viraj’s son was already coming to the rescue.
Nimesh, who suggested to some of the other boys that they form a band around Seb.
Nimesh, who petitioned his father to keep his car at his restaurant so they could have a garage to practise in, a not-quite-soundproofed escape from the outside world.
Nimesh, who accompanied Seb to every single Leicester game, even though Enzo suspects he’s never truly been that bothered about football.
And that same Nimesh, all those years later, bringing a little dog home from work, pretending he didn’t know why he was bringing it, and whom he was bringing it to.
‘Seb can’t have the chippy, even if he wants it,’ Enzo is saying now. ‘I’m leaving it to Jasper.’
At this, the dog’s bat-like ears prick up, so Enzo leans down and scratches behind them.
He feeds Jasper a slice of prosciutto, followed by a bruschetta laden with tomato and olive oil.
When Enzo had first met Jasper, a scrawny little thing that looked and smelled like it had been left out in the rain, he’d cursed Nimesh for dumping the dog on them.
But Seb had laid out newspaper and curled up beside the frightened creature in a dog bed far too small for a corazziere.
And Helen and Enzo had known that their son wouldn’t always be alone.
Now Seb’s going to be in a film. Now Seb has a girlfriend, and he’s actually brought her home, and there’s a look in his eyes which suggests that even he knows this is something new, something different.
When they put their heads together and talk quietly to each other, it occurs to Enzo that he has only ever seen his son talk like this to Nimesh.
But his son does not look at Nimesh like this.
It’s the same look he’d have when he was playing with the band, or when he’d put on his headphones and disappear into his music.
Serenity, security. A look saved for Clara, who has arrived in this flat like a lit firework, who is now talking about Seb’s film with a passion so infectious that his parents can see why their son struggles to look away.
They’ve always said that Seb is older than his years.
Clara seems wiser than hers, like she’s already figured it all out, or is fighting her hardest to.
Like she’s waiting for everyone else to catch up.
‘Right,’ Enzo says, slapping his thighs. ‘Who wants more?’
The Bonamis are a greedy family. No one goes hungry here.
After what they’d lost, they’d always kept their door wide open, a seat free at this very table for friends, family, family friends and cousins, so many cousins, scattered so far and wide.
Now Clara is here, in that very seat, and she’s laughing, and Seb has never looked more relieved.
It’s the start of something. It’s a good start.