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50
June 2019
Marco knocks the fox’s head against the glossy blue-green door. He looks at his mum and she looks at him. After a moment he knocks again. Then he steps forward and puts his ear to the door. There is nothing. No sounds of breathing or of footsteps or of a TV set or radio or food being prepared or phone calls being made or anything. Just silence.
‘Uncle Henry!’ he calls out to the silence. ‘Uncle Henry. It’s me. Marco. Are you in there?’
He knocks once again, twice, three times. Then he sighs. ‘Now what?’ he asks his mum.
She looks at the time on her phone. ‘We could just go and get something to eat?’
They haven’t really eaten anything since the Quik E Burgerat breakfast time. Just the ice cream at the zoo. Marco nods and they head across the street to the brasserie that Peter Lilley had told them about, the one with the one-syllable name that turns out to be Blanche.
They sit outside on a terrace on the sidewalk and are handed large menus by a smiley girl with plaited blonde hair. ‘Can I get you guys anything to drink?’
His mum orders a glass of wine and the girl says, ‘You’re British?’
‘Yes.’ Marco’s mum smiles. ‘Yes, we are.’
‘What brings you to Chicago?’
‘Oh, just trying to find an old friend.’
‘Really? You’re the second person in a row from Britain to tell me they were here trying to track someone down. I wonder if he was looking for you!’
Marco sends his mum a wide-eyed look.
‘Oh,’ she replies coolly. ‘What – what did this guy look like?’
‘He was kind of your age, I guess. But fair, blond hair. I’d say tinted though. Very nicely dressed. Very polite. Do you know him?’
‘Well, yes. I think I might. I think he might be my brother.’
‘No way! Wow! And you’re both looking for the same person?’
‘Yes, I believe we are. Though now I’ve lost track of my brother too.’
‘Oh my goodness! Well, I’ll keep an eye open for him for you. Let him know you’re looking for him if I see him.’
‘Just ask him to call me. He knows I’m here. He just needs to call me.’
The waitress leaves to get their drinks and Marco stares at the windows of the building opposite.
‘Which window is the one with the fox’s head?’ he asks.
‘That one roughly.’ Lucy points at a window on the first floor.
‘We should sit here for as long as possible.’
‘Yes,’ his mother agrees. ‘We should. But first decide what you want to eat.’
He looks down at the menu and sees schnitzel and he remembers something: a similar moment on a pavement in the summer heat. Just before they left France a year ago. ‘Remember’, he says, ‘when we were still in France and your fiddle was broken and we had no money? Remember we had that last dinner? And I didn’t want to eat my schnitzel because I was so cross with you for not telling me why our lives were so shit?’
‘Yes,’ Lucy replies with an edge of sadness in her voice. ‘I do remember that. And we had to use the showers in the beach club and you and I slept under the underpass in the rain. Remember that storm?’
‘Yes. It was insane.’
‘Where was I?’ asks Stella.
