Miss You (4 page)

Wandered.

•
TUSCANY
’
S TALLEST TOWER
?

Conquered.

•
GIOTTO
’
S FAMOUS FRESCO CYCLE OF THE LIFE OF SAN FRANCESCO
?

Seen. (And that was enough religious paintings to last a lifetime!)

•
THE EXCITEMENT OF THUNDERING HORSES
’
HOOVES IN SIENA
’
S PALIO SQUARE
?

Available only on two specific days of the year.

•
A RELAXING APERITIF ON THE FAMOUS FAN-SHAPED PIAZZA
?

Consumed, despite the extortionate price of a gin and tonic.

‘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.

•
THE LEANING TOWER OF PISA
.

Photographed but unclimbed.

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 to 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 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 whinger, 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 offences 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, medics were at it all the time.

On Hope’s first day of school, she was surprisingly amenable to getting dressed in her little grey skirt, white polo top and blue sweatshirt. She ran into Mum’s
room to get a goodbye kiss.

‘Take a picture, Tess,’ Mum said.

We’d decided that Mum wouldn’t even try to come, because then it would become one of Hope’s routines. Hope seemed to accept that I would be the one to go with her. Perhaps it
seemed natural to her, as it wasn’t long since I’d been the one going off to school every morning. I’d been bracing myself for screaming and crying, but as we left the house, and
Mum called down, ‘Bye then!’ it was her little voice that was feeble with tears.

Mum and Hope were inseparable. Mum was forty-three when she had her. ‘An afterthought,’ was the way she put it, because she would never have said Hope was an accident. With all the
rest of us practically grown up, Mum had had the time to do things like reading library books and baking fairy cakes together. Most people considered Hope spoilt. She’d been a pretty little
baby, with a froth of blonde curls, and, with five big people in the house, six if you included Brendan’s girlfriend Tracy, she’d got a lot of attention. We all loved holding her and
jiggling her to make her smile. People said that’s why she was a bit late with walking and things, because everything was done for her. Mum had tried taking her to nursery school but Hope
wouldn’t be left. She could count to a thousand by the time she was four and could sing all the nursery rhymes, which was probably more than most children of that age.

She walked with me happily enough and marched over to stand in line with the other tiny children in the playground. I waited by the gate with my fingers firmly crossed, praying that everything
would be fine, and that school would be her protection from everything that was about to happen.

The perfect silence of those first few seconds after the whistle blew, felt like a gift, a miraculous gift from God who I should not have abandoned. Then a familiar sound tore it apart.

Mum used to say Hope’s carrying-on was what drove my brothers away. I was never sure whether she was joking because she’d always add that it was about time they spread their wings.
Mum had a sharp sense of humour. I think it was because of her being intelligent but not very confident, so she’d put something out there, then make out she was joking if she got the wrong
reaction.

Kevin was the first to go, to London when he got his scholarship, then America. He and Dad had never seen eye to eye, especially when Kevin refused to go into construction. So it made things
easier at home, really. Then Tracy got pregnant, and Brendan dropped the bombshell that they were emigrating to Australia. He’d always felt in Kev’s shadow; this was going one better.
So Hope had got her own room, instead of sleeping in mine, but it was still noisy. I used to spend as long as I could in the library at school. Dad used to spend as long as he could at the pub.
People said Mum had the patience of a saint.

It was natural for a child to be unsettled, Mrs Corcoran, the head teacher at St Cuthbert’s, told me, when there was so much worry at home. She thought the best idea
would be if I came along to school with Hope to reassure her. I could help out with the little ones. The Reception class’s teaching assistant was on maternity leave, so they could do with an
extra pair of hands.

I welcomed the distraction. With a class of thirty small children, there was no time to think about anything except getting coats, hats, gloves, painting aprons and gym clothes on and off,
tracking lost shoes, monitoring trips to the toilet, making sure hands were clean, and handing out slices of apple at break time.

At home, Mum was sleeping a lot because of the morphine. You’d think that if you knew someone was going to die in a few weeks, or days, you’d try to say everything there was to say,
but it wasn’t like that. It was almost like we didn’t want to make it over before it was over and were afraid of getting everything ready and then having nothing to do except wait.

I did tell Mum that I loved her. I told her every day, and then I started saying it every time she went to sleep, or I had to leave the room to cook Hope’s tea or something, until it
started sounding a bit silly. You wouldn’t think ‘I love you’ could become meaningless, would you?