Chapter 10

10

I spot him as soon as I walk in, sitting up at the bar reading a book with his back to me. From the deflated slope of his shoulders, I can tell this place bores him. Tony's never been a fan of gastropubs like this, selling ten different types of craft IPA but no draught Guinness. This particular one is shaped to the comforts of the well-heeled residents from across the park, the earthy smell of coal dust and wet dogs is more Chipping Norton than West London.

I walk up behind him, touch his shoulder.

"Sorry I'm late," I say, as he swivels round.

"Hey, stranger," Tony says, placing a large glass of red in my hand. I take him in, this skewed mirror image grinning back at me. A small republic of two, Tony likes to call us. More totalitarian state than democracy, as I frequently joke to him, but he is all I have. Our biological mother, my father, his stepfather, his own father; all gone, one way or another. It's for the anniversary of our mother's death that we're meeting up tonight to spend the evening together.

I pull up a stool next to him and pick up his book with its pristine, uncreased spine, give a small snort of disbelief.

"So you're pretending to read David Foster Wallace."

"I'm enjoying it, actually."

"Good luck finishing it. Even the endnotes have endnotes."

"Have you read it?"

"Of course," I lie. "You'll never get to the end, you never do."

He opens his mouth, pretends to look offended.

Secretly I've always envied Tony's dilettantism, the way he just skims through life only ever dipping a toe. First chapters, first episodes of Netflix dramas, opening scenes of plays and films. Dabbling, tasting, always moving on, the least effort to appear the most erudite. Friendships, relationships, all manner of passions and pleasures, he's never in it for the long haul. There have been flirtations with transcendental meditation, bookbinding, even taxidermy. Who cares about endings when there are so many new beginnings to enjoy?

Somehow Tony makes me feel that it's cowardice, not tenacity, that makes us stick out our life choices long after the novelty fades.

He bags a table next to the fireplace over which hangs a framed Victorian map of Oxfordshire, while I order a bottle of house red, watch him from the bar as he pointedly glances at the couple next to him. Both wear quilted gilets, his in navy, hers pale pink, while their Labradoodle laps from a water bowl close to Tony's feet.

Tony, in stark contrast, is dressed almost entirely in black. His leather jacket is undone, just low enough to reveal the insignia of an XR T-shirt (There is no Planet B) . He looks like the bassist from a '90s Brit-pop band that recently reformed.

"This place! What happened to real pubs?" He shakes his head as I sit down, glancing at me for affirmation.

"Don't start," I say, and he leans back in his chair. Tony is easy most of the time, but he gets like this occasionally where everything is fodder for a sneer or ridicule. It grows worse around this time each year, near our mom's anniversary, and it's down to me to make him feel better.

"Why do they have to bray? Can't people just talk normally?" Tony stares at two young men at the table opposite, speaking loudly with plummy exclamations and guffaws. He tops up his glass again and doesn't fill mine, then reaches for a menu. With a flourish, he takes out and puts on a pair of oversized designer glasses, which lend him a rakish, academic air.

"I never knew you were long-sighted. They suit you." I reach over and tap the frames.

"They're not real," he confesses. "Clear glass."

"You old fake," I say, pushing them a little farther up his nose. "So how long are you back for?"

"Just a few weeks, staying with an old friend who owes me, then I'm off to Tangier and Marrakech."

"Tough life." I smile.

"I'm doing a picture story while I'm out there," he adds, a little defensively.

"That's great, Tony. Who's it for?"

"Some crappy corporate magazine, but still." He looks down and I try to appear encouraging. I'm always worried his photographic work will dry up and he'll flit to the next pursuit. Before this there was travel writing; next it will be film, judging from the TV script that he's been working on. I make a point to take an interest as he tells me about it, wide-eyed, nodding, knowing it's another project that most likely will never see the light of day.

"Hey, why don't you put in a good word with your company and we could finally work together? It must be pretty easy," he says, his hand brushing mine. "It's not like your magazine is even a national title," he mocks. I pick up my drink to avoid his touch, force a brittle smile.

He leans across the table to reach for my arm, a conciliatory gesture but one that provokes me all the same. "Only teasing," he says. I look at his unlined face, piqued by his youthful looks, the absence of a furrowed brow or purple shadows beneath his eyes. How does he manage to look younger than me when he's six years older? Perhaps his levels of self-absorption have a protective effect, never worrying about anyone or anything beyond himself. Narcissism does have one distinct advantage, I think, observing his flawless complexion. If only they could bottle it.

"Come on then, what's been happening? Where have you been hiding?"

"I'm sorry. I kept meaning to get back to you. I've been up to my neck in work—interviews, deadlines..." I trail off, hoping to avoid more unnecessary questions. Tony's chin tilts up so he looks down at me through heavy eyelashes.

"Stop being so evasive. You got it, didn't you?"

"Got what?"

"I bumped into Amira last week at an old mate's party."

"Really? She didn't say anything."

"Maybe she forgot."

"Maybe," I say, finding this unlikely.

"We had a long chat. She told me all about you and the memoir. So, Dr. Nate Reid and my little sister writing the big book together."

"Well, I wouldn't get too excited," I say, refilling our glasses, my tone clipped. I'm not sure I'm ready to tell people anything about this project just yet. "I was asked to apply along with lots of other people. His publisher got in contact with me."

"I'm not too excited, don't worry," he says, frowning a little. "Just interested. Quite a big-shot job for you."

"I'm sure I won't get it," I lie again, rolling the stem of the wineglass between my thumb and forefinger. I always find myself doing this, play down my ambitions to make him feel better about his unfruitful ones. The effort of tiptoeing around my career, downgrading it to a series of lucky accidents, is exhausting. He needs to maintain the illusion that we're equals, orphans together struggling in the storm.

Tonight, however, I'm struggling to suppress my jubilant mood. A few days after my interview, Nate texted. They, although he didn't mention Priya, wanted me to start the job straightaway. I couldn't think of a better outcome. Life away from the office, away from the confines of my work pressures, my cramped apartment.

"You're smiling," Tony accuses.

"Am I?"

He leans back to study me. "You'll get it, you know you will, you're brilliant. Although I'd think we should maybe talk about it before you got into something like that."

"I don't need your permission." I force a laugh, emboldened by the wine.

"Sure. Only after seeing the newspapers, I'd worry about you working for someone like him. I remember reading about it all—the whole situation sounded screwed up. I don't like the idea of you going anywhere near Dr. Nate Reid." He shivers.

"Well, don't worry. Another drink?" I say briskly, eager to change the subject.

"Maybe a bottle?" Tony replies, pushing his chair back. "Snackage?"

"Go on." The pub begins filling up with the clamor of a Friday-night crowd. They push their way to the bar, knocking our chairs. My nerves jangle, my own mood darkening by the minute.

Next time I won't drink, I vow to myself. I know where this can lead. Tony returns and sits down, pouring dry roasted peanuts into a bag of salt-and-vinegar chips and shaking it, a little trick he devised in the pub gardens of Essex when we were kids.

"Dinner is served." He rips the packet open and places it on the table between us, pours us each another glass and raises his to mine. "I'd like to make a toast. To Mom."

"To Mom," I echo and he chinks his glass with mine. We always meet up around the anniversary of her death, and each year I dread it, the grief it brings out of us both. His hand reaches across the table, long slender fingers like our mother's cover mine, his voice softens.

"It'll be twenty-three years on Tuesday."

"Twenty-three years," I echo, conscious of the weight of his hand on mine.

"I thought we could do something special. Maybe go to her favorite spot, that pub on the river back home in Essex."

"I'd love to, but we'd have to find a time when I'm less swamped at work."

"I understand," he says, his eyes raking my face. "Just thought it had been a while since you last visited her grave?"

I open my mouth to say something, then close it. He gives a theatrical sigh, watches me take a long swallow of wine and glance out the window. "Mom loved this time of year, didn't she?" I offer, inadequately.

"What are you on about? She hated winter, always moaned about the cold."

He gets up to go to the bar. I pretend to read the news on my phone but the headlines blur. The room swirls a bit, my eyes lag, the clatter of voices and background music rises up around me.

I wonder, sometimes, how can two siblings grow up in the same family and turn out so differently, feel our grief so differently. As soon as I moved to London, I did my best to forget about the past and move on, more or less successfully. But Tony has become stuck in that time, unable to move forward emotionally, incapable of sticking to a grief counselor or therapist for more than a few weeks. Traveling around the world looking for new adventures is his coping mechanism, not a particularly effective one. When we meet, he drags me back to my younger years with the gravitational pull of a black hole. Armed with anecdotes that he repeats over and over, they are the only version of our childhood I seem to remember. Sometimes I think siblings are like a mirror reflecting back a twisted picture of who we believe we are.

At times it can feel that one's family history is like a Wiki entry, allowing you to go back in there and edit your details whenever you wish. The trouble is so can other people.

This is what I remember still about Tony, my half brother. He was five when his father died from a heart attack and a year later, my mother remarried. She met my dad at the local school where they both worked as teachers and, within months, I was born. I've always wondered if it was a marriage of convenience, or some sort of reaction to grief. Tony maintains she was only ever in love with one man, his own father. The perfect union that created Tony. My father was highly insecure about my mother's first marriage. There was a tacit understanding that her husband was never to be mentioned, no photographs, all memories of him extinguished.

Perhaps that's why my father went along with my mother's suggestion to adopt Tony. For him, I suspect, it was one more way to erase evidence of that first marriage. If the surname was gone, so was her husband. In defiance, of course, Tony resolutely hung on to his original surname, Thorpe, once he left home.

I can still recall the precise shade of her chili-red sundress that she wore each summer, the cinched drawstring waist and spaghetti straps. The smell of her favorite nail varnish as it dried. Toasted almond. How on warmer days the veins stood out on the back of her hand, eau de Nil green, as she held mine. I remember her fingertips in my hair, the soporific feel of them grazing my scalp, how even now the memory of that particular touch makes me drowsy.

I treasure these fragments, no matter how small or fleeting, because I alone own them. No one can steal or reframe those recollections. I have never told anyone, not even Tony, that I visit my mother's grave at least once a month, when I have her all to myself.

From the outside we functioned well enough. There were family camping holidays and theater trips to London, birthday meals out together. But hovering below the surface was a simmering tension between Tony and my father. After the adoption, there was no acknowledgment that we were a blended family, patched together with a stepparent and stepsiblings.

In the end, that turned out to be the least of our problems when my mother went for a routine checkup that revealed a small shadow on her left lung. A stage four tumor, secondary breast cancer. A year later, on an unseasonably bright sunny January morning, she died peacefully in the hospice with us around her. I was eleven and Tony seventeen.

Maybe it was grief or loneliness, the responsibility of caring for us as a widower, but my father began to change. He always had a temper, but looking back, I realize that without my mother there to mediate, his behavior grew more extreme. Tony started out as the target of his anger, but I could never take for granted that he wouldn't turn on me. An innocuous remark, an unfinished meal or muddy shoe marks on the stairs: all these could trigger the molten heat of his rage.

It was verbal at first but quickly escalated. The soundtrack of that time still stays with me: the crack of knuckle on skin, the pop of bone on slate as the back of Tony's head met the flagstone floor. I would cry and plead with my father to stop but he wouldn't listen. Then there were those moments, short-lived, when he tried his best to make up for the bad nights, teaching Tony how to use a camera for the first time, making a skateboard for him.

I could never predict what would push him to extremes, why Tony was the catalyst for his outbursts. Did he recognize a part of himself that he found unbearable? Or did he look at Tony and see my mother's first husband staring back, perhaps the only man she ever really loved?

Tony's reading of our childhood, in those rare moments he pauses for self-reflection, is that his upbringing was as deprived as mine was privileged. I was the indulged one and he witnessed me being indulged, he maintains, yet I see it differently.

For me, my childhood was more like a series of isolated moments that I never understood at the time, standing alone outside closed doors, speculating what was happening on the other side. Violence pulsed at the edges, nudging closer each day. Growing up, Tony and I quickly learned to read the temperature of a room. Like a seasoned weather-watcher, I was hyper alert to signs of potential conflict ahead; storm clouds gathering on the horizon.

I look up, try to focus on the neat rows of malt whiskeys behind the bar, the animated faces of other drinkers, the fuzzy halo of light encircling them. I take an enormous breath, steadying myself.

Tony returns. "One more for the road?" He looks unsteady as he plonks himself back down.

"More?" I say.

"Come on. It's a special occasion."

"Any excuse." I realize how much effort it's taking not to slur.

"So come on, what's this Dr. Reid really like?" He swerves us back to the here and now, his eyes glinting for the gossip like a shark at feeding time.

"He's...you know, normal. A bit up himself..." I shrug, trail off.

"You can do better than that, surely."

I sigh. "I guess, supersmart too. Obstructive, wary of journalists."

He takes out a pouch of tobacco and rolls a cigarette. "Interesting. What did he say about Eva? The rumors?"

"He's pretty guarded about her—so far."

"But you're going to work your magic on him?"

"Something like that."

His smile is vaguely twisted, his mouth weirdly distracting. His lips are stained a mauve from the red wine, his front teeth ashy gray. We regard one another for a moment and I recognize that look in his eyes: hollow. Numbed by grief, and now by alcohol. I let the dig slide.

"I want a cigarette." He screws up his mouth. "Let's get out of this shithole and go somewhere else."

Outside, he stumbles slightly on the step and steadies himself for a moment in the doorway. I feel my phone vibrate, check it quickly. A single text from Priya lights up the screen.

I know it must be about the job but I don't check it for now, decide to stay in this moment with Tony a bit longer. "This way." I let him lean on me, steering him away from the pub. He lights his roll up, which we share as we sway across the park, the sky dark and velvety. My shadow, my other half.

"I'm sorry for being an arse about everything," he says, and I can tell his regret is heartfelt. "You know I only want to protect you," he says, softly.

"I know," I echo. "I know."