Page 24 of Oyster

“Putain, I feel like a voyeur!” laughed Florian. “You don’t get a view this good on the telly, do you?”

“Salvador’s a lucky bugger,” griped Max. “Which one do you reckon he’s with, Flor? The fit blonde girl on the end?”

The big screen camera lingered on the preening women next to us, and I began to breathe again. Once more, Éti’s teammates swamped her, and the moment passed.

“Your brother would be a better judge of that, Maxi. He’s a little more familiar with the ladies than me. But my money’s on the brunette with the brown eyes. What do you think, Nico? Closest to us? He was definitely looking at someone towards this side of the group.”

“Brunette, I agree,” I managed to croak. “I think Salvador prefers brunettes.”

“Hey, turn it up! Let’s listen to the interviews.”

The game ended at four-nil. Better than Max had predicted. Because Éti Salvador snuck in another goal in the closing seconds, dancing a polka between a couple of tired defenders, just for the hell of it. The footballer’s smooth, solemn tonesechoed around the car as Florian drove us from the train station back to the island. Thank fuck I wasn’t driving.

A confident, attractive voice, the same as Éti’s but flatter somehow, lacking Éti’s verve, gave a bland and modest summary of PSG’s dominance. As if her animation had been turned down a notch.Stuffing Éti back inside is hard.Breathier too, since the interview was recorded minutes after the match. The interviewer Éti so accurately lampooned posed the questions.

You had a great match today, Étienne. I think you showed us you were back to fully fit.

Yes. On the whole, I was pleased with my performance. Nantes put up a good fight—they are always a strong team—but tonight we outclassed them in the second half. Xavier (Ruiz) had an opportunity to show everyone what he’s capable of when he’s given free rein in the midfield. The manager got the tactics spot on tonight against tough opponents.

Absolutely. The team have had a couple of lacklustre performances in their last two outings. They were glad to have you back on the pitch. What do you think made the difference for you personally this evening, Étienne?

A few seconds of radio silence ticked by. Then Éti’s voice came again, softer, more her own. And like she was speaking to no one but me.C’est simple. My guardian angel was watching from the stands. And I wanted to put on a show. I wanted my angel to see me dance.

CHAPTER 8

I watched the Champion’s League game against Porto from the sitting room sofa next to my dad, already on his third beer. Max sprawled in a beanbag on the floor; he’d followed the entire pre-match build up, though I wondered how much of it he’d taken in. Having cooked a beef lasagne for dinner, my mum had eaten nothing, declaring herself full after an earlier slice of cake. None of us called her out on it. She’d headed to bed early.

There were no prizes for guessing where Zoë hid herself. Allegedly, she hadn’t been hungry either.

“I suppose I could see if Zoë wants to come down and watch,” Max suggested with a lack of enthusiasm. Did he miss his younger sister? They were nearer in age to each other than me and Zoë, separated by a little over two years. Once upon a time, before all this happened, they’d been as close as an arse and tucked shirt tails. These days, they skirted each other, as if to avoid the sorrow in the other’s eyes.

I swung myself off the sofa. “I’ll go.”

My mum used to joke that entering Zoë’s room was like shopping in IKEA. You went in with a single mission and came out with six cups, four bowls, a wastepaper bin, and somerandom cutlery. These days, however, it was clean as a new cent. Like a ghost lived there.

I chose the bold step of taking a pew, uninvited.

“You okay?”

The Zoë of our livesbeforewould have demanded I get my stinky fisherman’s jeans off the fucking bed. Older by ten years, I oscillated between the fraternal roles of protector or nemesis, depending on our relative stages of adolescence. In her eyes, the disruptive teenage boy of her young childhood had become an interfering, annoying twat of an older brother, but also a reliable soft touch for a few euros if she was skint.

Thisafterversion of Zoë didn’t care. Not turning, a cotton wool ball halfway between her face and the neat dressing table, she shot me a blank stare through the mirror.

“Yeah. You?”

No,I wanted to say.I’m lost too.We don’t talk anymore.“Yeah, not bad. Fancy coming down and watching the footie?”

The blank expression switched to distaste. “Uh… no?”

I shrugged. “Just asking.”

As if I wasn’t there, she resumed pasting gloopy cream onto her face. I resisted the temptation to tell her I thought she didn’t need that stuff, that she was very pretty with her skin bare. Experience, however, and an awareness that my opinion and the opinion of every other man who walked the planet was irrelevant, told me that wouldn’t go down too well. Often experimenting with different styles, she planned on becoming a beautician when she left school. The Zoë ofbeforeused to beg me to let her practise by painting my toenails. Come to think of it, she hadn’t mentioned her career plans for a while.

“Your eyes look good,” I offered, with a vague gesture. “That… um… dirty… um… smudgy black stuff around the edges.”

I had managed to entice women to sleep with me, honest. I could be quite the charmer—unless the girl in question was my scary seventeen-year-old sister.

“Gel eyeliner,” she corrected in a bored tone. “Not smudged.” Her hand paused again. “Was there something else?”

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