‘Oh you two! That’s so cute,’ Alice says.
‘Adults are gross,’ announces Fran. I ruffle her hair.
‘You just wait, kiddo. Besides, as best friend of the bride and brother of the groom I got to go on both the stag and the hen do,’ I grin, reaching for another piece of focaccia.
‘You weren’t looking so pleased when my friends suggested you strip and serve us shots,’ Ellie laughs.
She’s right.Thatwas embarrassing.
Suddenly Sienna’s setting both her elbows on the table and looking very serious. ‘What are your intentions with Uncle Zach?’ She asks Alice.
The focaccia drops down onto my plate.
I look at Alice in panic, wondering how she’ll take being interrogated by my 5-year-old niece over lunch. If anything, I thought Ellie would be the overprotective relative today. She’s going to freak out, isn’t she? Alice places her glass of juice back down and looks around the table. I follow her gaze. Raff and Ellie are silent-laughing, their shoulders heaving. Sienna looks thrilled with herself.
Alice bursts into laughter and the whole table erupts.
‘Did Uncle Zach bribe you to ask that question?’ She asks once everyone has quietened down. Sienna giggles gleefully, hanging on Alice’s words.
Alice pauses, catching my eye. ‘Can you keep a secret?’ She stage-whispers to my nieces. They bob their heads up and down, thrilled. ‘I do like him quite a lot,’ Alice says.
Fran and Sienna cheer while I savour those words of hers. ‘The feeling is very mutual,’ I say.
‘So,’ Raff says, breaking the spell. ‘No doubt that you’re not just here for a bit of lunch, Alice. I expect you’ll want all the dirt on Zach from when we were younger and Ellie and I are here and ready to share. Shall we start with the teddy bear years?’
Alice clasps her hands together with glee while a little bit of me dies inside. ‘Yes please. My friend Dylan showed Zach some deeply embarrassing photos of me as a child and I’ve been waiting for this moment ever since. It’s payback time’
Dylan again, I think. He peppers her conversation so often and I need to stop finding it annoying.
‘Photos, you say? I can do one better,’ Raff turns to me with a grin. What’s he up to? ‘I was going through a load of storage boxes in the garage the other day and found Zach’s comics. You probably think I mean comics that you might buy in a shop but in fact I mean comics that he’d drawn and starred in himself.’
I am going to kill Raff. He’s rushing back into the kitchen with a look of pure joy on his face. He’s not fetching them, is he? I don’t usually blush but I can feel my skin going a deep shade of crimson right now.
‘Just a friendly reminder that I’m due to dogsit Tiny again soon, bro,’ I call after him. ‘You wouldn’t want me to cancel at the last minute with a severe case of mortification, would you?’
Raff’s hearty laugh echoes out from the kitchen. Ellie, Alice, Sienna and Fran are sat around the garden table on tenterhooks and I’m wondering if it’s too early to crack open the vodka, especially when I see the smug look on my bro’s face when he comes back out.
‘Alice, may I introduce you to Captain Zach the Brainiac,’ Raff says.
If the ground could swallow me up right now, that would be great. I haven’t thought about Captain Zach the Brainiac in years and yet here’s Raff, handing a copy over to Alice.
I clear my throat. ‘I’m just going to go and check the … oven’s off.’
‘No!’ Alice protests. She looks up at me from the comic in her hands, a brief frown casting a shadow over her face. She motions for me to sit down next to her and as I do she whispers: ‘I don’t want you to feel embarrassed. Shall I put this away?’
I’m so touched by the fact that she’s checking in on me that I’m briefly out of words.
I sigh good-naturedly. ‘Thanks, but it’s only fair that you should read it. Just … promise you’ll still like me once you’ve taken a look inside the mind of a teenage, angst-ridden boy? In my defence, I was listening to a lot of emo at the time.’
Alice laughs. ‘I can picture you now, smudging charcoal liner around your eyes with My Chemical Romance playing in the background.’
‘Were you spying on me?’ I joke.
‘The eyeliner phase! I’d forgotten about that,’ Raff’s roaring with laughter. ‘Really Alice, we’ve so much to share with you.’
Lunch turned into dinner, peach juice turned into white wine and now Raff and Ellie are persuading Fran and Sienna that it’s bedtime.
‘But I don’t want to,’ Sienna groans for the fifteenth time.
