Her brother
When he was fifteen, Augie had taken his life for granted.
He’s tried to make up for it since. Is there such a thing as too much living?
His early twenties had been something to colour in, a passport to fill with bright stamps and beautiful faces.
He’d drifted across the continent, fallen into girls’ beds in Bucharest and boys’ bunks in Berlin.
He’d danced on stage with drag queens in the backstreets of Riga, had plunged into an icy lake with a Viking goddess on the outskirts of Reykjavík, naked as the day he was born.
Now he’s thirty-three, and he’s still not ready to grow up.
He wakes, this morning, in a narrow bed in a Roman apartment next to a naked archaeologist from Palermo.
Domenico? Damiano? Two days ago, it had been one of Clara’s actresses, a rushed affair before she flew back to her family in Provence.
She’d never told him her name, but she’d still made him sign an NDA.
Now he kisses Domenico or Damiano a sleepy goodbye, throws on last night’s shirt and steps out in open-toed shoes in the vague direction of the restaurant, closing his eyes against a sun that never fails to bring him back to life.
‘You’re late,’ Clara says, as he slides into his seat.
‘You sound like our sister.’
‘Oh god,’ she says. ‘I’m turning into her, aren’t I?’
She gives him a hug. Nora isn’t quite so forthcoming.
‘How’s my favourite girl?’ Augie asks.
The child ducks behind her mother’s shirtsleeve.
‘You’ll warm up to me eventually,’ he says. ‘They all do.’ He turns his eyes to Clara, tries not to go all serious. ‘You’re looking well.’
‘It used to be me saying that to you,’ she says. ‘I can see why you found it annoying.’
Italy does look good on Clara. Her freckles are out.
Her hair is the same sandy blond it was when Augie was a kid, though she now keeps it forever tied up in a messy bun.
She’s adopted a uniform, faded blue jeans and a creased linen shirt that makes her look like she’s about to start painting.
She’s wearing it in that recent shot where she’s nursing Nora behind the camera, posted on Instagram with an ironic caption.
Of course, it went immediately viral. Everyone saying it was inspiring, everyone else saying it was staged.
The feminist wave of approval and the predictable alt-right backlash.
Augie knows it was real, because he knows that Nora never lets go.
She’s sitting in her mother’s lap right now, an empty highchair next to her, while Clara talks and talks and talks.
She isn’t filming today, so she has plenty of time to regale Augie with tales of everything that has gone wrong so far, from the lead actress’s struggles with a giant prosthetic lobster claw to the lesser actor who’d stormed off set because he’d been nudged in the head by a boom mic.
She moves on to the food she ate in Tuscany, when they were shooting on location.
Mamma mia, food to make Cee seethe with jealousy.
Rabbit ragù and wrist-thick Florentine steaks and gnocchi with so much cheese it made her see God.
This is what Augie has missed: her stories, and the breathless, meandering manner in which she likes to tell them.
‘And you’re coping alright?’ Augie says.
Clara gives him a look. ‘I’m the older sibling, you know.’
The waiter arrives with sparkling water. In London, Clara orders high-end kombucha in wine-sized bottles, but they don’t go in for that kind of thing here.
‘I know, but…’ Augie glances at Nora, at the bottle. ‘You know.’
Clara rubs her neck. ‘I’m tired,’ she says. ‘But I’m trying.’
She tells him that she spoke to Maisie the other day.
That she apologised. That they told each other about their babies, about their lives for the past two years.
They were on the phone into the early hours of the morning, both crying most of the time.
Augie feels like he could cry, too. He’s always been soft.
Their dad used to call him a fairy. His sisters were jealous of his elfin looks, his high cheekbones and his small, slightly pointed ears.
By the time he was thirteen, Cee had already moved out, and Clara had taken to letting Augie borrow her make-up on the sly.
She’d saved him, in a way, though he’d never tell her that, because that’s not what Cowans do.
After it happened, she’d drawn him out with long conversations on the phone, and it was long walks with Jasper that had reacquainted him with the outside world.
And there was Seb, of course. Taking Augie along to gigs he’d have been terrified to attend before.
Handing over his huge headphones, saying, Listen to this.
Echo & The Bunnymen, sad-boy music perfectly calibrated to Augie’s needs.
Seb helped him be happy, because Seb was happy then, too.
Nora has come out of hiding just long enough to grab a fistful of cacio e pepe, which she pulls back to scoff in the crook of Clara’s arm like a beast retreating into its cave.
Strange girl. He’d commit murder for her.
He watches Clara kiss her on the top of her little ginger head, and it feels painful, knowing that this is his last lunch with them, that he’s headed off to Berlin in the morning, then who-knows-where after that.
Even if he teases a smile out of Nora, it’ll all be for nothing, because he’ll have to start again from square one next time he sees her.
She’s a different person even now, transformed from the last time he saw her.
She can walk. She has a vocabulary, not that she uses much of it with him.
Is he a bad uncle, for being so absent? Has he been a bad brother?
Life’s too short to dwell on such things. Everyone is just trying their best.
He kisses Clara on both cheeks. He gives Nora a brusque handshake on one of her meaty little paws, then picks her up and squeezes her in a bear hug which, if it doesn’t make her laugh, at least doesn’t make her cry.
Then he’s off, waving over his shoulder, kicking his ankles together, pondering over how to spend his last afternoon.
He’ll head for a room above the Spanish Steps, see the bed in which Keats died at twenty-five.
When Augie had woken up in hospital as a fifteen-year-old, only Clara and Cee were at his bedside.
Earlier this year, the three of them had sat around another hospital bed, amazed that, of all the families in existence, it was they who’d managed to bid their mother goodbye together.
He smells coffee, and he smiles, dipping into the bar from which the smell is coming. Keats can wait.
‘Altri due caffè, Gigi,’ the woman in front of him is saying. ‘E hai una cicca?’
The old bloke behind the counter gives her a gap-toothed grin, then hands her a cigarette, which she tucks behind her ear.
Her hair is dark and curly. It resists confinement.
As she waits for her espresso, she catches Augie’s eye.
She’s a little older than Augie, but he isn’t intimidated.
The coffee pumps hiss, and the gap-toothed man behind the counter asks for his order.
‘One coffee, please,’ he says.
The old man gives him a look, then turns back to the woman. Augie is just happy to be here.
‘Due caffè qui.’
The woman takes her cup, takes a sip, devours Augie with her dark eyes as she does so. Then a voice calls her name, and the spell is broken.
‘Rezia,’ says the man behind them. Augie’s heart sinks. She’d asked for not one coffee, but two. ‘I’ve got a table outside.’
But the voice is English. And familiar. So Augie, whose heart has now begun its journey back up into his mouth, tenses and turns.
There’s someone standing in the doorway, someone staring right back at him.
Someone he never expected to see again, least of all right here, right now.
Life has a funny way of surprising you when you stop taking it for granted. What can Augie do but laugh?
‘I can’t believe you’re here,’ Augie says, at the table outside. ‘I was just around the corner—’ He stops himself. ‘I’ve been just around the corner, all this time.’
Seb has grown his beard, shaved his head, acquired the kind of tan you only get when you’re half Italian and have been living on the continent for several years.
‘How is…?’ Seb begins, then loses his words, something it seems like he might do a lot, nowadays. ‘Everyone?’
Seb’s cousin gives him a sympathetic look.
Augie knows that Clara cheated. That Seb said something unforgivable the day he left the chateau.
But is anything really unforgivable? He remembers his sister before Seb, has seen her after.
The in-between time was the good bit. Seb, here, under the very same sun, doesn’t seem better for having lost her.
Augie feels a distinct sense of two worlds colliding, the old one bursting the banks of the new.
Something familiar, in an ancient city like this.
Something familiar to Augie, who has borrowed time. An abundance of it.
‘Everyone is…’ Augie begins. ‘Good.’
What else can he say? Our mum’s dead, and Cee’s still vibrating like a tuning fork, and Clara has a baby now, and the baby isn’t yours? Some things are best left alone. He won’t say a thing, and he’ll keep a few things from his sister, too.
He won’t tell her that he saw Seb today. He won’t tell her that Seb is coming home.