Page 44 of Oyster

“Yes. I’m running most of the business and figuring out how to help Max and Zoë. At the moment, the job is fine. The guys who work with us are pulling their weight. But with Max and Zoë, I’m fucking next to useless. I understand why my dad’s struggling to cope, but… but…”

“So, when she’s gone, they’re going to all be leaning on you even more, yes?”

“Yes. I don’t want to… romanticize my mum—she’s just an average woman. But she’s been the lynchpin of our family, and when she dies, I’m petrified we’re going to fall apart altogether.”

I chanced a look at her then. And wished I hadn’t. So much tenderness and care shone in her big grey eyes that mine threatened to overspill.

“I’m scared I’m not the right man for it, Éti. To pick us all up afterwards. To keep the show on the road. I’m just a guy who likes his work and enjoys a beer with his mates and enjoys watching the footie on the telly. I’m not what they’re going to need. I’ll fail them all.”

“Oh, Nico.” Éti sighed. “Come here.”

She kissed me, hard and determined, as if trying to pour her strength into me. “You should trust yourself more,” she said after we broke off. “You tripped into my life and scooped me up then accepted me for everything I am, like the strongest person I know. I can’t think of a better man for it.”

Cupping my face in her smooth hands, Éti brought my mouth to where she wanted it. We kissed again, the kiss saying all the other things I found hard to explain. That she anchored me, that having her by my side might give me the strength to steer my little family through stormy seas, and that perhaps, with her by my side, I could be the man for it after all. That when I struggled, she’d pick up the slack. That after a bad day, she’d give me a better night. That we were both better together than apart.

CHAPTER 12

Max disappeared. Everybody at work assumed he was elsewhere until somebody realised he wasn’t. A tractor went missing too. For the first few hours, we told ourselves going off grid to sort his head was fine. As best we could, my dad and I hid it from my mum—she was zonked on meds for great swathes of the day anyhow—and we told Zoë he’d gone over to a mate’s. But after twenty-four hours of more and more frantic texts and voice mails and trying not to imagine the worst, we were climbing the walls.

At the end of a second day, about to assemble a search party, he responded, a casual one-line text like he’d popped out for a quick beer and why were we all fussing so much? He justneeded some alone timeapparently, the fucker. And me and my dad were booked in for new coronary arteries, but the bugger hadn’t considered that.

“Okay, mate?”

Parked up on the edge of one of the bleaker beaches on the far side of the island, Max slouched in the cab, looking and smelling every inch a guy who had been there all night. “Yeah. You?”

I swung my leg up onto the step. “Budge up.”

“There’s only one seat.”

“I know. Thank fuck we’re both skinny, yeah?”

Big brothers: the gift that kept on giving.

Now I was here, I hadn’t got a fucking clue what to say to him. Half of me wanted to smack him round the head for making me and Dad freak with worry. The other half wanted to… yeah, do the same, except with an extra dollop of shouting. But he was cold and tired and fucking miserable, not to mention very young and about to lose his mother. And Éti had promised me I was the right man for this.

Instead of yelling, I squashed up next to him and stared out at the empty grey sea lapping moodily at the pebbled shore, while he smoked a cigarette.

“Calm today.” I gestured out the window. “South-easterly getting up later.”

Did I mention my struggles to charm my baby sister? My brother sometimes had the same effect too. He gave my banal comment the answer it deserved: none. So I let my thoughts drift to Éti, as they often did of their own accord anyhow. What if I had sent Max, that day we discovered her snoozing in the shallows? Would it be me unable to sleep and roaming the house and the beaches at night with no one to turn to?

“When do you think it’s going to happen?” He examined his fag end before flicking ash out of the window.

“What?”

“You know. You were at the last appointment with her.”

Both of us stared straight ahead. Hard to believe a sea like this one, flat and uninspiring, could callously strip away lives. Or create such a diverse wealth of them, either.

I shrugged. “How long is a piece of string? The doctors don’t know. Everyone’s different.”

“Yeah, but are we talking weeks, months, or years? Because carrying on every day like this is fucking shit.”

His voice cracked and caught in his throat. Putain. What did you say to that? He knew it wasn’t years—that was him clinging to false hope. Did I tell him months was optimistic, too? The pain of that last draining hospital appointment still lodged in my chest, like even my heart was tired. There was a reason my dad had gone straight to L’Escaleafterwards. As the doctor recounted the problems with her failing liver and the golf-ball-sized lesions filling her lungs, my dazed mum sagged in her plastic seat like she almost welcomed the news. Like she wanted to board a plane in the hope it might crash, so it could all be fucking over.

How long was a piece of string?Too long, yet not long enough.

“I think we’ve got to take things a day at a time,” I offered diplomatically. Uselessly. More banal shit. I felt lumpen and pointless. A day at a time? Inch by inch felt more accurate. I wished Éti were here; she’d be better at this than me. She’d have her arm around him for a start, offering some comfort, but if I tried, he’d tell me to fuck off.

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