Miss You

TWO Gus

August1997

I took up distance running after my brother died because it was an acceptable way of being alone. Other people’s concern was almost the most difficult thing to deal with. If I said I was OK, they looked at me as if I was in denial; if I admitted I was finding things pretty difficult, there was no way for them to make it better. When I said I was training for a charity half-marathon to raise money for people with sports injuries, people nodded, satisfied, because Ross had been killed in a skiing accident, so it made sense.

At optimum speed, the rhythmic pounding of shoe on road delivered a kind of oblivion that had become addictive. It was what made me get out of bed every morning, even on holiday, although in Florence, the uneven cobbles and sudden, astonishing encounters with beauty made it difficult to maintain a pace that made me forget where or who I was.

On the last day of the holiday, I ran along the Arno at dawn, crossing the river in alternate directions at each bridge, then looping back on myself to mirror the route, with the pale gleam of the sun in my eyes one way and its warmth on my back the other. With only an occasional road-sweeper for company, it felt as if I owned the place, or, perhaps, that it owned me. At the level of cardiovascular exertion that freed ideas to float across my mind, it occurred to me that I could come back to Florence one day, even live here, if I wanted. In this historic city, I could be a person with no history, the person I wanted to be, whoever that was. At eighteen, the thought was a revelation.

On my third crossing of the Ponte Vecchio, I slowed to a walking pace to cool down. There was no one else around. The glittering goldsmiths’ wares were hidden behind sturdy wooden boards. There was nothing to indicate that I hadn’t been transported back in time five hundred years. Yet somehow it felt less real than it had the previous evening, heaving with tourists. Like a deserted film set.

I suppose I’d hoped to find the girl there again. Not that I’d have known what to say to her any more than I had on the first two occasions. Handing back the camera, I hadn’t even been brave enough to make eye contact, then, given a third chance, I’d blown that too.

Standing in the queue for ice cream beside the bridge, I’d felt a tap on my shoulder, and there she was again, smiling as if we’d known each other all our lives and were about to go on some amazing adventure together.

“There’s this brilliant gelato place just down Via dei Neri where you can get about six for the price of one here!” she informed me.

“I don’t think I could manage six!”

My attempt at wit had come out sounding pompous and dismissive. I wasn’t very practiced at talking to girls.

“Honest to God, you would from this place!”

Why don’t you show me where it is? Great! Let’s go there!None of the responses I’d like to have given had been available with my parents standing right beside me. Instead, I’d stared at her like a moron, with sentences jostling for position in my head as her smile faded from sparkling to slightly perplexed before she hurried off to catch up with her friend.

On the north side of the river, Florence was beginning to wake up to the mechanical clatter of shutters as bars opened up for the day. As I entered the Duomo square, the sun’s rays lit up the cassata stripes of the Campanile and the air was suddenly full of bells. Florence was a kind of heaven on earth and I thought it would be impossible to be unhappy living here.

I joined my parents in the lobby of our hotel on their way in to breakfast.

“The loneliness of the long-distance runner!” my father remarked.

It was what he always said when he saw me after a run, as if it meant something, when it was actually just the title of a film he’d seen in his youth.

I always felt prickly with my parents, like a Pavlovian reaction to their company.

I knew, from overhearing conversations at school, that a proper Tuscan holiday meant renting a villa with a pool, if you didn’t actually own one yourself, surrounded by olive groves and views of rolling hills. My father had instead booked us into this expensive hotel in the center of Florence. I was never sure how the done thing got established, but I was aware from quite an early age that there was a done thing and that my father often got it slightly wrong. Not having been to a private school himself, but now able to afford to send his sons to one, he would turn up to sports days wearing a blazer and tie, whereas the cool dads, who went to the Cannes film festival or held offshore accounts in the Cayman Islands, wore jeans, polo shirts and loafers with no socks, as if vying for a most-casually-dressed award. As a liberal-minded sixth-former, I upheld the right of anyone to dress as they wished; as his son, I was mortified.

“Who on earth wants cheese at this time in the morning?”

My father inspected the buffet table. He was the sort of man who made loud statements, as if inviting the room to agree with him.

“I think it’s what Germans eat.” My mother spoke in a low voice so as not to be overheard.

“You never hear about the German rates of colonic cancer, do you?” Dad mused. “All that smoked sausage too...”

“Where are you off to today?” I asked, as we returned to the table with laden plates.

Included in the price of the Treasures of Tuscany package were excursions to the other principal tourist cities of the region. Since having to stop the coach twice to throw up on the first trip to Assisi, I now spent the days in Florence alone, visiting the galleries and churches at my own pace, enjoying the wonderful feeling of weightlessness that came from getting away from my parents.

“Pisa,” my father said.

As someone who didn’t quite believe in travel-sickness, he couldn’t disguise his irritation at my failure to get full value from the holiday and the tour company’s refusal to refund a proportion of the cost.

The city center was filling with groups of tourists following dutifully behind the raised umbrellas of their guides, but it was easy enough to peel away down a shadowy side street. I’d walked so much in the past week, I had the map of Florence in my head. The covered market near San Lorenzo, its cool air infused with the smoky scent of delicatessen, was my first daily pilgrimage. Some of the stallholders recognized me now. At the fruit stall, the old man’s practiced thumb roamed over a pyramid of peaches to select a perfectly ripe fruit. At the salumeria, the friendly mamma paid serious attention to my search for a filling for my single bread roll, offering little slivers of different salamis for me to taste or sniff like fine wine. As it was my last day, I treated myself to un’etto of expensive San Daniele prosciutto. She carefully arranged the wafer-thin translucent slices in overlapping layers on a sheet of shiny paper.

“Ultimo giorno,” I told her, attempting a few Italian words. It’s my last day.

“Ma ritorno,” I added—but I’ll come back—as if voicing it would make my intention more real.

I had bought a sketchbook, covered in hand-printed Florentine paper, to take with me to the art galleries because drawing made me look more closely at the paintings and feel less self-conscious about it. Art had always been my best subject at school, if you considered it a subject, which my father didn’t. The more I studied the art in Florence, the more I wished that I had summoned the courage to apply for art history at university. It wasn’t just the skillful application of paint to canvas or fresco, it was what the artist was thinking that fascinated me. Did they believe in the religious stories they made so human, with saints and apostles dressed like Florentine burghers, or were they just doing it to make a living?

I’d been steered towards medicine, because it was “in the family,” as my sixth-form tutor put it, as if it was some kind of genetic mutation. As everyone always said, I could look at pictures in my spare time. Now, inspired by this city where art and science had flourished side by side, I wondered if there was even a way of combining the two. Perhaps I would come back to the Uffizi one day as a visiting professor in anatomy? At least as a doctor, I’d have the means to return. There was no money in art, my father always said. “Even Van Gogh couldn’t make a living out of it!”

I ate my panino sitting on the steps of the Palazzo Vecchio, occasionally tapping my foot to the music of a guitar-playing busker to make it look as if I was doing something. Time on my own seemed to pass very slowly and I was pathetically shy about striking up conversations with strangers. I wondered if I’d have been any better at it if my friend Marcus had been there. We were supposed to be Interrailing together, but he’d got off with a girl from our sister school at the end of school prom, and had naturally chosen sex in Ibiza over trailing around Europe with me. Neither of us had any real experience with girls, and I think we had both assumed that sex was something that wouldn’t happen until university, so I had a grudging admiration for Marcus, but it had left me with the unwelcome decision to cancel our holiday or go it alone.

Around the same time, one of my father’s patients, who’d broken a crown on a slice of panforte, expressed astonishment that my father had never been to Tuscany. The inferred criticism had stung Dad into action.

“What do you think?” he’d asked, pushing a brochure across the kitchen table one morning, as I was shoveling down cereal before cycling to my summer job at our town’s new gastropub.

“Great idea!” It had been good to see him focusing on a plan again.

“Want to join us?”

“Really?” Somehow, through a mouthful of Weetabix, I made dread sound like surprised enthusiasm.

Being a dentist, Dad never expected much more than a slight nod in answer to his questions, so by the time I arrived back from work, the holiday had been booked and paid for.

I’d told myself that it would be churlish not to accept my parents’ generosity, but the truth was, I was a wuss.

Scanning the crowds of tourists taking photos with the replica statue of Michelangelo’s David, I began to wonder if I would actually recognize the girl if I saw her again. She was tall, and her hair was longish and brownish, I thought. There wasn’t anything particularly memorable about her features, except that when she smiled her face was suddenly full of mischief and intimacy, as if there was a thrilling secret that only she knew and was about to share only with you.

Via dei Neri was a narrow street winding towards the Piazza Santa Croce and I missed the gelateria on the way down. It was just a single door with a dark interior. For my first cone, I chose nocciola and limone, because that was what the Italian man in front of me ordered, the delicious creaminess of the hazelnut perfectly complemented by the refreshing citrus tang. I walked back down to Santa Croce eating it, then returned and ordered another, pistachio and melon, and loitered in the cool shade of the shop, glancing at each new customer in the hope of seeing the girl again.

In the heat of the afternoon, I made my way through the crowds on the Ponte Vecchio to the Boboli Gardens. The numbers of tourists dwindled the higher I climbed, and, on the top terrace, I found myself completely alone beside the ornamental lake. The sun was still very hot but invisible now behind a veil of humidity that muted the view of the city like the varnish of age over an old master. Distant thunder rolled around the hills and the air was thick with imminent rain. Opening my sketchbook, I recorded the smudgy outline of the Duomo.

Suddenly, a bright beam of light broke through the unnatural yellowish twilight, giving surreal definition to the trimmed box hedges, lighting up the greenish-blue water. As I raised my camera, a white heron, which I had perceived as a static element of the ornate marble fountain in the center of the lake, took off, startling me. It flew across the water, the flapping of its wings the only sound or movement in the still air.

It occurred to me that I had not given Ross a thought since breakfast.

For a moment, I saw my brother’s face glancing back at me through a cloud of thickly falling snow, his teeth white, the flakes settling on his dark, swept-back hair, his eyes hidden behind mirror ski goggles.

A fat raindrop splattered my drawing. I closed the pad and stood for a few moments with my face tilted towards the sky, enjoying a warm drenching, until a splinter of lightning reminded me that I was one of the tallest objects around, and should probably take cover. As I skeltered down the suddenly slippery marble steps, hordes of tourists were emerging from the gardens, shiny guidebooks held over their heads.

There was a feeling of camaraderie as we stood crowded together in the scant shelter of the Pitti Palace walls, one or other of us occasionally extending a bare arm to test the heaviness of the downpour and judge whether to make a dash for it or wait.

Beside me, three American girls about my age, with cumbersome backpacks on their backs, were consulting their guidebook, trying to work out how to get to the campsite. I knew the route, having passed it on my way to Piazzale Michelangelo on my run the previous morning, but wasn’t sure whether it would be polite or intrusive to show them. One of them was very pretty. I could feel myself going red even before I spoke.

“I couldn’t help overhearing. Can I help?”

My voice sounded as if it were coming from another person, initially croaky, then far too loud and posh.

“You’re English, aren’t you?” the pretty one said. “Your accent’s SO cute!”

“Are you camping too?”

“No. I’m in a hotel,” I confessed, unable to think of anything cooler to say quickly enough.

“Why don’t we all go for an aperitivo?” the loud one suggested.

“Actually, I’m meeting my parents for dinner.”

With the rain easing, I set off in a hurry, convinced they were laughing at me. Ross would have known exactly how to behave. Was charm something you were born with, or just a matter of practice?

The storm had driven the crowds from the Ponte Vecchio. I paused for a last look at the view, but the hills beyond the city walls were shrouded in low cloud and the green-and-white-striped facade of San Miniato al Monte, which I could see floodlit at night from the pool on the roof of the hotel, had disappeared.

The essential experiences for every visitor to Tuscany were listed at the front of the complimentary full-color guidebook that had thumped through our letter box in a stiff white envelope with our tickets. Each evening, when we convened for dinner, my father recapped the day’s activities, counting the completed targets on his fingers, like a conscientious Cub Scout ticking off badges achieved.

“How was Pisa?” I asked that evening, as we waited for menus in an expensive restaurant with beams and bare brick walls that gave it the feel of a medieval banqueting hall.

“Bigger than you’d think.” My father put on his reading specs although he already knew exactly what he was going to choose.

“The Leaning Tower was smaller than I thought it would be,” my mother said.

“They should sort out their queuing system,” my father announced, from which I gathered that they had not been able to climb the monument, and could not therefore deem it a mission accomplished.

It was not an entirely satisfactory conclusion to the holiday.

“There are lots of other buildings,” said my mother.

“Cathedral and whatnot. Jam-packed with tourists, obviously.”

Nothing in their description gave me a reason to say that I’d like to go one day, and if I had, it would only have reminded my father of the wasted place on the coach, so I said nothing.

“Ah, yes, buona sera to you too,” said my father when the waiter arrived to take our order. “We’re going to have the Florentine beefsteak.”

The best place to sample this “most famous typical dish” had been a project from the start of the holiday. Dad had sought the advice of the driver who met us at the airport on our first night and all the receptionists at the hotel. We were now sitting in the restaurant recommended by a majority of five to one.

Priced by the kilo, a bistecca alla Fiorentina was not just a meal, it was a spectacle performed on a raised platform within the dining area of the restaurant. First the rib of beef was held aloft by a chef in a tall white hat; a large knife was sharpened with swift, dramatic strokes; then a very thick slice of meat, a chop for a giant, was severed and weighed before being placed on a trolley and wheeled over to the table for approval. My father swelled with satisfaction as the other tables oohed and aahed obligingly at each stage of the ritual. I didn’t begrudge him this small pleasure, but my insides squirmed with embarrassment.

“What did you get up to?” my father asked, as the meat was trolleyed off to the kitchen and we had to talk to each other again.

“Walking, mainly. I went to the Boboli Gardens.”

Silence.

“I saw this heron, actually.”

“Heron? We’re too far inland, aren’t we? Sure it wasn’t a stork?” said my father.

“It was kind of weird, because I thought it was part of the statue at first, then it just took off, as if the stone had come alive.”

My parents exchanged glances. “Fey” was the word my mother sometimes used to describe me. “Airy-fairy” or “arty-farty” were my father’s expressions. In the shorthand descriptions that parents give to their children, I was the one with my head in the clouds.

I made the mistake of extemporizing.

“It was the sort of thing that might make you think you’d seen a vision, you know... I mean, maybe all those visions of St.Francis actually have a neurological explanation? Maybe there was something different about his brain...”

I realized, too late, that “brain” was one of the words we didn’t say any more. Certain words triggered inevitable associations. Over the last few months our family’s spoken vocabulary had shrunk dramatically.

Now my parents were both staring into the middle distance.

My carelessness had got them thinking about the side of Ross’s head, the thickness of the bandage unable to disguise the fact that there was a bit missing.

Had some of my brother’s brain spilled out into the snow? I wondered. Had the rescue party covered it up with more snow? And when the snow melted in the spring, were there still fragments of skull on the mountain?

If this holiday was an attempt to move on, it hadn’t been a great success. The last time we were on holiday, Ross was with us. A winter holiday, so very different from the sticky heat of Florence, but a family holiday nonetheless. When you remember holidays you think about the sights and the weather, but somehow you always forget the confinement of being together, meal after meal. Ross used to dominate the conversation, bantering with my father and joshing me while my mother gazed at him adoringly. Now, his absence made him seem almost more present.

You know that expression, “the elephant in the room”? You’re the elephant, Ross!

I thought he’d quite like that description. Occasionally, I found myself speaking to my brother in my head even though we hadn’t had that kind of relationship when he was alive. I was surprised in retrospect how much we’d had in common just by virtue of being in the same family. Ross was the one person who would have understood how pitiful my parents were in their grief, and yet how annoying they still managed to be.

“You have to deal with reality,” said my father eventually. I wasn’t sure whether it was intended as a reprimand to me or an instruction to himself. “You have to get to grips with what’s in front of you.”

What was in front of him now was the giant steak, charred and leaking blood onto the wooden board on which it was presented.

My father looked up at the waiter.

“We’d like Chef to cook it for us if that’s not too much trouble!” he barked.

I pictured the chef’s face as the waiter returned to the kitchen. During my summer job I’d learned that customers who sent their steaks back to be well done were even further down the hierarchy of contempt than pot washers.

When the steak was returned to us, it was pale brown all the way through, as if it had been given ten minutes in a microwave.

My father doled out the leathery slices.

“How many for you, Angus?”

“Just one.”

“One?”

“Angus has never had a huge appetite,” my mother reminded him.

Ross had an enormous appetite. Was it over-sensitive of me to hear an unspoken comparison?

I was completely different from Ross. My brother was dark, handsome and built; I had inherited my mother’s willowy height, and, although my hair wasn’t orange like my father’s, I had enough of his freckly complexion to be called a ginge at school.

Ross had been captain of the rugby and rowing teams and Head Boy; I enjoyed football and had never been considered for the prefect body. Ross’s summer job after leaving school had been as a lifeguard at the local open-air swimming pool. Being a lifesaver was something to boast about, unlike being a kitchen boy. Not that Ross ever actually saved a life, although plenty of girls pretended to be struggling in the hope of being manhandled by him. Ross had starred in his own version of Baywatch. In Guildford.

I was never sure whether the truth was that my parents weren’t very good at disguising their obvious preference, or that I was in fact pretty mediocre compared to Ross. It wasn’t something you could talk about without sounding like a whiner, so I never did, except occasionally to Marcus, who knew what Ross was really like. Was it Ross’s sporting prowess that had made the teachers at our school so willing to turn a blind eye to his other activities, we’d sometimes speculated, or had they too lived in fear of him? Perhaps Ross and his acolytes kept a record of punishable offenses committed by the staff as well as the lower-school boys? I’d never know, because nobody said anything remotely critical about him now that he was dead.

We sat in silence, chewing our steak.

“I expect you’re itching to get to uni...,” my mother said.

Was my discomfort so obvious?

The truth was that although I was counting down the hours until the claustrophobia of the holiday would be over, I was also feeling pretty nervous about what was coming next. I thought I’d probably be OK at medicine because I was good at biology and interested in how people worked.

“Which makes you sound like an agony aunt!” Ross had needled, just the previous November, which now felt like a lifetime ago, because, in a way, it was.

In spite of his ridicule, or maybe because it had made me think harder, I’d performed well at the interview and been offered a place conditional on achieving three As at A level. But I’d always felt uneasy about following in my brother’s footsteps. Over that Christmas holiday, I had actually made up my mind to ask if I could defer a year and use the time to decide if medicine was what I really wanted to do.

Then the accident happened.

When I returned to school the deadline for acceptances was looming. My father had been so proud at the thought of both his sons becoming doctors. Doing medicine, or at least, not not doing it, was the only small way I could begin to make it up to him.

Only the previous day, calling the school to get my A-level results, with my parents hovering in the hotel corridor just outside the door, a tiny part of me had still been hoping to be granted a reprieve. But my grades were good enough.

I realized I hadn’t responded to my mother.

“Yes, really looking forward to it now,” I assured her.

At least there would be sex. If Ross’s experience was anything to go by, medical students were at it all the time.