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Liam shrugged and wrinkled his nose. “It’s Mum, mostly. I think she doesn’t get that you can be perfectly happy single, you know? And Dad thinks I study too hard. So they kind of meet in the middle with their whole ‘Liam needs to have a boyfriend’ thing because Mum thinks I’m lonely, and Dad thinks I’m not having any fun. Also, Bridget and Neve are both a lot more outgoing than me, so they think that I’m some kind of a shut-in or something.”
“I can see it would be difficult to be the quiet one in your family,” Ambrose said.
“I’ll bet you weren’t the quiet one, were you?”
Ambrose laughed. “No. But me and my sister were both very loud in very different ways.” He met Liam’s steady gaze and felt a pang in his chest. He looked away and fiddled with a thread coming loose from the hem of his T-shirt. “I think it’s nice that they worry about you. That they pay attention.”
“Your parents didn’t?” Liam ducked his head as soon as he asked, Ambrose noticed, as if he were worried that he’d crossed a line. He had, but he didn’t know that, so Ambrose was able to shrug it off and give something that resembled an answer.
“It was just Mum and us kids. And she tried, but she had a lot on her plate.” He raised his eyebrows. “Speaking of plates, is it pizza time yet?”
It was clumsy, but Liam obviously recognised a diversion when he saw one. “Not quite. Wanna walk back through the vines? By the time we get back to the house, it’ll be dinnertime.”
Ambrose forced his mouth into a smile. “Should we be late, tell them we were taste-testing the body paint?”
Liam grinned back. “We’re here for four days. Save something to throw at them tomorrow, yeah?”
“Yeah,” Ambrose agreed. “Piss them off in instalments.” Then he wondered why even the suggestion of upsetting the Connellys made him feel like the worst person alive. “Okay, let’s go and swing through the vines like Tarzan.”
Liam’s smile was a little exasperated, and a little fond. “You know they’re not that kind of vines.”
“Dear TripAdvisor,” Ambrose said. “Worst. Vineyard. Ever. No swinging in the vines, complete lack of Tarzan look-alikes. Zero stars.”
Liam’s laugh carried them outside again.
Dinner was okay. Ambrose had been glad that Liam had asked him to tone things down, because it gave him the chance to take back a little of the ground he’d lost with the Connellys, and when he wasn’t being an arsehole, they didn’t hate him. He could tell that Bridget and Orhan were still a bit reserved with him, and Fi didn’t quite know how to take him, but Will, and Grandad Billy and Riley were happy to include him in their conversations.
He knew that there’d been some sort of conversation between Liam and his dad over the afternoon tea dishes earlier, because when he’d offered, deliberately grudgingly, to help, Fi had told him that no, a boy and his father needed time together, and if that wasn’t a big fat ‘stay the fuck away’, Ambrose didn’t know what was. However that conversation had gone down, it seemed to have made Liam’s dad like him more.
“What did you think of the vines, Ambrose?” Will asked now, leaning forward expectantly with his elbows on his knees. “Aren’t they something?”
Ambrose felt like he’d just been asked if someone’s ugly baby was attractive, because the vines had looked like nothing more than a bunch of sticks with some leaves strung along wires to him. The sheer volume of them was impressive though, and Liam had assured him that they didn’t look like that all the time, honestly, and he’d been almost as weirdly proud of them as his dad. Ambrose tried to think of a diplomatic answer. In the end he settled on, “There are a lot of them, aren’t there? But where are the grapes?”
“Ah, they look like they’re half-dead, to be sure,” Grandad Billy said, “but come harvest, you’ve never seen a more beautiful sight than acres and acres of green, with all the fruit. Come back at Christmas, and you’ll see what I mean.”
“Ooh, yes,” Riley said, “you can come and pick. It’s a shit job, and we’ve all done our share, so no reason you shouldn’t have to.”
Except Ambrose wouldn’t be around at Christmas, but he couldn’t say that, could he? So he settled for a shrug and said, “Maybe. I don’t really like hard work.”
“That’s probably why you want to be an actor,” Bridget said, and Orhan choked on his drink laughing.
“Hey, some families are into grapes, and some families are into the arts.” Ambrose picked a piece of spinach off his wood-fired pizza. He immediately regretted it—the family comment, not the spinach—because he never talked about his family, at least not his real family, when he was being a Bad Boyfriend. He’d once told a date’s parents that his father was the One Nation Party member for their local electorate, and that had gone down, as intended, like a lead balloon. But even when he’d said it, he’d wondered if they would think it was worse to have an imaginary father with some shit right-wing politics, or no father at all.
“Oh, your family are artists?” Fi asked, looking interested. She was probably looking for a redeeming feature and clutching at any passing straw with the same desperation as Jack had grasped at that door in Titanic.
Ambrose bit his lip, deciding how much to reveal. But in the end, he decided, In for a penny, in for a pound. He could work it in somehow, make the arrogance of an almost-Logie-winner’s child part of his act. Besides, they probably wouldn’t even remember who his mum was. Nobody else did.
“My mum was an actress,” he said at last. “Soapies, back in the nineties. Harbour Med. She played Angela.”
Grandad Billy’s face lit up. “Oooh! You aren’t Bella Newman’s son, are you?” He leaned forward, his eyes narrowing as he inspected Ambrose as carefully as a piece of slightly bruised fruit on the Reduced for Quick Sale table. “Oh! I can see it! You’ve got her eyes, don’t you? Oh, she was a pretty one, and feisty too. Will, you remember your mum used to love that show?”
Will smiled and got a faraway look in his eyes. “Yeah, Mum loved it. She was mad about that doctor, the one with the moustache and the good hair.”
Grandad snorted dismissively. “Pfft. Who wants a pretty boy anyway?”
“Well, I do for one,” Ambrose said before he could stop himself.
“Our Liam’s not too rough on the eye, is he?” Grandad Billy asked.
