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I get Finn’s attention and gesture behind me, trying to tell him I’m leaving. His smile drops a little and he wriggles his way throughthe crowd.
‘What’s up?’
‘I completely lost track of time and just realised I was meant to leave twenty minutes ago.’
‘Oh, right, yeah, no problem.’ He shakes his head like he’s coming out of a dream, and he’s tentative for once when he asks, ‘I’ll see you tomorrow?’
‘Yep,’ I reply, already moving towards the Tube, too preoccupied to give him a longer goodbye, too worried about wasting another second. God, I need to get it together. I can’t get distracted by ridiculous, fanciful daydreams again.
12
Avraham Lincolin, at your service
A V A
‘Colin!’ my brother’s voicelaunches my longest-running nickname across the concourse of Waterloo station, turning a few heads in the process.
Max’s nicknames for me have a habit of warping and evolving, picking up debris as they move through the years like a snowball tearing down a slope. I’ve lived under a myriad of names, including but not limited to; a bizarre stretch as Avanti West Coast, a brief stint simply as Van, and now? Avraham Lincolin.
‘I’m so sorry.’ I reach up on my tiptoes to hug him, inhaling the familiar citrusy smell on his plaid shirt that never seems to fade. Pretty sure he’s been using the same shower gel since we were teenagers. He prolongs the hug by squeezing me and I duck out of his grip. ‘I can’t believe I’m late.’
His eyebrows raise behind messy hair. ‘Really? I can.’
‘Hilarious,’ I say, rolling my eyes. I’m not exactly known for my punctuality, and frankly, neither is he, but I hate that I missed him arriving. I made a promise to myself to be there whenever he needed me. As we walk I notice he’s not putting his full weight on his right leg, which I haven’t seen him do in a long while. But it’s barely perceptible, and I know him well enough to know he won’t want to talk about it. Instead, I shield my eyes as if I’m looking up at the sun. ‘Were you always this tall?’
‘Were you always this short?’
‘Stop, you know I have a complex about that.’ I spent years taller than him, shooting up to five-ten and a half (the half is important) before most other kids at school had figured out the truth about Santa. But then at fifteen I swear Max came out of hisroom one day and suddenly he was six-five.
As we walk through the station, I wonder if strangers can tell we’re related. We have the same colouring; same blue eyes, same dark hair that never quite lies right. But the rest of Max’s features are sharp and angular like our mum’s, while I take after our dad’s side of the family, with fuller cheeks and a rounded chin.
I lead us towards the lifts to take the more accessible route for his bad leg, but the scowl he gives me makes him look like Mum when she tells us off, so we head to the escalators instead. Someone passes us on the left as I look up at Max on the step behind to ask, ‘How was the train?’
It’s about an hour by train back to the nondescript Kent town we grew up in, with its dilapidated high street, nosy neighbours and multiple Spoons in a mile radius. Max always seems too big for it, which is probably why he spends so much time in other places.
‘Dead, thankgod.Got a table seat all to myself and managed to finish a video I was editing.’ He swerves out of the way of a man shooting past to get his train and looks down at me. ‘Mum and Dad send their love, by the way. But you knew that. And Dad wanted me to tell you that he’s finally figured out Spotify so can you please send him that playlist you were talking about.’
Max is a travel content creator, and after a couple of years paying rent on a flat he hardly ever spent time in, followed by some health issues, he moved back in with our parents. This means that any of his free time between trips is spent eating Mum’s vegan bolognese and listening to Dad’s one-hit wonders from the eighties.
We catch up on the Tube. Any time he moves the conversation over to me, I push it back his way, reminding him that I am essentially a hermit and nothing about my life has changed since we last saw each other.
As always, I eat uphis stories, just like I did when we were younger, when he’d bring me on his adventures to imaginary kingdoms. In his imagined worlds, I’d be as bold and brave as him. In real life, he’s just come back from a road trip around Scotland and is raving about the beaches. Because only he would go swimming in the near-Arctic water.
‘Got this to commemorate it,’ he shows me, rolling up his sleeve to show me yet another tattoo; the tiny head of a Highland cow near his elbow. It joins a selection of entirely random images he’s inked onto his skin. ‘Honestly, it’s so underrated. I’m gonna tell everyone to go.’
‘Isn’t that what you were paid for?’
‘Yeah well, I’m gonna influence thefuckout of this one. Seriously, I wanna bring the whole family back. With Spud, obviously.’ Our mother loves the dog more than she loves the two of us combined; a fact we’ve begrudgingly accepted over the years. ‘Do you have any trips planned? I can probably get you included on one of mine if you want.’
Now it’s my turn to give him a Mum-inspiredlook. ‘Can you imagine me backpacking? Going to new places every day? Using a sleeping bag?’
He peers at me like he’s trying to read my mind, but instead says, ‘I was thinking earlier about when we used to go camping with Mum and Dad.’
‘Shit, remember that one time with the sheep?’
‘And the wheelbarrow?’
‘I genuinely thought we were going to die.’
