Archive of Our Own

The streetlights have come on by the time he makes any move to call a taxi. The deluge that had been threatening to break all afternoon pours over the pavements and gurgles around storm drains, while the few souls still roaming the streets brace umbrellas against the brute force of the wind. Far-flung thoughts of a night out are left to dissipate in favour of another night-in. Cesare sighs and packs his case.

He holds his jacket over his head to shield himself from the onslaught of rain as he dashes out beyond glass doors. The taxi waits for him at the curb, its driver a dour-faced bear of a man who speaks with a broad Newcastle. The world passes by in wet blurs; twenty-four hour sarnie shops shine out as oases in the darkness; sodden teens light fags under the awnings of darkened store-fronts; the world beyond the glass muted by rain. He takes in the sights with a dim recognition, mind still fixed firmly on the file which weighs heavily in his case. He pays with two battered tenners before mounting the steps to the flat; the wallpaper curling from the walls in the staircase and there emanating a pervasive scent of damp. The key sticks in the lock, he jostles it once, twice, and a third time before it gives way and he’s able to peel the door back on mournful hinges.

Evenings have begun to take on a degree of grating monotony. Shoes tucked into the bottom of the coat-cupboard. Cufflinks twisted off and nestled back into velveteen boxes, then tucked in amongst other like boxes and odds and ends which he hides away at the bottom of his sock drawer. Waistcoat, shirt, and trousers stripped, buttoned, and hung. He pulls a worn cotton t-shirt over his head, splashes cold water over his face, and only then turns on the lights. Hall, living room, kitchen. He pours a generous heaping of Sainsbury’s own brand muesli and a half-hazard slop of milk into a bowl. The television is clicked on, then the lights back off- kitchen, living room, and hall. The light is draining and sound tinny, a distracting solace from the exhaustion of too many days of having been stretched too thin and worked overlong. His mind wanders between impressions of steam hoovers and miracle bamboo pillows, then back to the case, and the Sforzas. It has become an all-consuming obsession. The devotion of each waking hour. Sometime between round three and round four of teleshopping he drifts off, spoon clutched in his right hand and mouth lax against the pillow snatched from the bedroom.

When he awakes it is with a pain in his neck, a foul taste in his mouth, and the murky rememberings of some distant nightmare. The woman on the television brandishes cookery and admonishes him on the state of his frying pans. He forces himself up and down the darkened hall to the toilet, and then without turning on the light swipes a furious toothbrush over his gums- counting each stroke before spitting and then swirling water in his mouth. He pisses, flushes the toilet, and then rinses his hands before padding back to the couch on socked feet. The following hour is passed by flicking back and forth between an Attenborough programme and Hotel Inspector- both reruns. He has just started to drift off to an explanation on the reproductive cycle of seahorses when his mobile buzzes. Methodically, he stretches out an arm, fingers brushing cold metal and twisting the screen so that he can peer at the minute letters. It takes him a second to work out the the name is not that of any of his colleagues, but Lucrezia.

His fingers fumble, he nearly drops the phone. It takes him two tries before he manages to answer.

“Sister,” his voice is hoarse with sleep.

“Cesare,” clear, and calm, and cool. He wonders if she has slept, or if she has taken to staying up every night to watch the sunrise once again. “Jesus, this was ill-thought out. You see, it all seemed perfectly reasonable five minutes ago, but now that I’ve gone and woken you. Well.”

“It’s--” but he cannot say exactly what it is, his throat feels dry and his voice wavers. He settles for: “Is everything all right?”

“It’s only just this: I’ve had a spot of trouble with Alfonso, and I’ve ventured it best to give him space while he makes up his mind about what he wants. It isn’t anything to worry about-” -here he hears the briefest intonation of warning- “-but he isn’t from London, and I thought it would be cruel to turn him out of the flat, so I’ve turned myself out. Or at least I hope I have, it’ll be hard to save face if I go knocking about in the morning like nothing has happened. I’m sorry. It’s just this- could I stay with you? Just for a few nights until this is sorted out? I’m very sorry to spring this on you-”

He pulls himself up, now fully awake.

“-No. No need to apologise, my love. Come, I’ll make up the guest-bedroom. You’ve a room here as long as you need.”

She thanks him, and after a few traded words of parting the line disconnects. For a few moments he can do nothing but sit and stare at the stacked coasters atop the coffee table. He looks at the darkened room, at its familiar shapes and edges and wonders when his life had fractured into so many disparate halves. There stands some precipice before him and beyond a vastness which he cannot entertain. He has not seen her for three years.

The morning is spent in a state of uneasy irritation. He has half a mind to dash off to the twenty-four hour Tesco, but reconsiders and spend his time arranging and rearranging the bedding until he judges it sufficiently fluffed. He hasn't the faintest what sort of food she likes now. Three years do not pass without making a mark. She had left, and it is a fact which he has never been able to reconcile. He tries to claw back the sense of wild uncertainty and panic, tries to claw it back and compartmentalise it until it is small and manageable and he able to keep some semblance of composure. Three years- enough to make her a stranger.

He takes the tube in to work and realises when Blackfriars is called that he has forgotten the key to his office, his coffee thermos, and the file that he was meant to be working on. His father, fearing any electronic tampering had insisted on keeping the vast majority of company records offline- they’d even typewriters in the offices for the most crucial work. He could dash up and hail a taxi, but the journey there and back again seems exhaustingly long. The window of possibility ticks by and he continues to sit. At work he will have to atone for a moment’s weakness and indecision.

In the ride up the lift to the forty-third floor he begins to feel a sense of disquiet, of unease ticking just below the surface. Why, he tries not to ask; self-reflection is something from which he abstains with an unwavering devotion. He remembers her signing off custody documents; handing her child over to their mother; pale and withdrawn telling him that she needed to get away from the family for a time, from all of them. He had had to tell their father; and then the only word he had from her was through scribbled lines in the post. He tries to steady his breathing, in through the nose and count to five, hold for five, out through the mouth for five, hold for five, and repeat. At floor twenty-seven he’s forced to stop as a wizened old man embarks, but starts again when the man disembarks at thirty.

Forty-three, when he reaches is, is near empty. He voices wordless thanks as he’s forced to fetch the security and have them break into his office for him, first vetting his identity- to which Cesare loudly objects: “You see me every day, don’t pretend you don’t know who I am!”.

Sometime later after they’ve picked the lock and are attempting to quell the blaring alarm, Ascanio, his father’s assistant, joins the gathering crowd. He eyes Cesare for a moment with amusement, before tipping a coffee cup in greeting and making his way to the inner offices.

The rest of the day is markedly less eventful. It drags by in stops and jerks, sluggishly ticking its way closer to four. He twirls pens between his fingers and compulsively taps his foot against the linoleum to pass the time.

After lunch Juan appears: “Back from La Paz, brother!” he shouts after pounding on the door for good measure. He pushes up the sunglasses on his head, and when he sees that Cesare will rise to no further bait, leaves in favour of some more willing entertainment.

When he packs his things for the day he notices that his hands are shaking. He tries to suppress it as he sways between tube stops- subjecting himself to a complex series of balancing maneuvers to avoid touching the sweat-slicked poles. She had come to him, had grasped his hand and told him she’d had an affair-- Giovanni Sforza was a brute, he had to understand. She was pregnant. She was only seventeen. At Embankment he transfers over to the Northern line, and then at Leicester for Piccadilly. For a few moment he thinks of nothing, focusing on the completion of these simple tasks. At Leicester the next train is four minutes getting in and he paces wildly at the edge of the platform while reminding himself that he is completely in control. He had handled far worse- had he not? Of this fact he has almost convinced himself as the train finally pulls away from the station and he is left staring at his own pallid reflection in the window.

This is Russell Square. Alight here for the British Museum.

A Canadian tour group streams out, touting overlarge cameras and matching maple-leaf emblazoned jackets. Cesare follows them into the weak light of early evening. The wind is fierce, blowing his hair awry, and the clouds threatening another downpour. He glowers as he’s forced to dodge the tour-group which has stopped to collect itself conveniently at the top of the steps. The crime of touristry is one he has never been able to bring himself to forgive.

He checks and double-checks addresses as he passes, though he knows that he has not yet reached the cafe. It proves unneeded, the moment he sees it, he knows that it must be the one- large wood-framed windows and advertising itself as cafe, and Italian deli. It is so like Lucrezia to choose such a place that the corners of his mouth rise unbidden.

He is worried as he pushes open the door; a thousand what-ifs flit overhead. What if she not here- she having changed her mind.

But he spots her and the torrent ceases. Blonde hair, grown long again, and twisted up into tortoiseshell clips, and black-stockinged legs twisted gracefully around one another. He sneaks up on her, an old game, and places his hands on her shoulders. He can feel the twitch of surprise as she twists around.

She stares for a beat, wide eyed with unfamiliarity before there is the flicker of recognition. She folds one of his hands between her own.

“I have missed these hands," she says.

Something desperate lurches within him. He pretends to inspect the table.

“Tea, sis?” he teases. She had hated it once.

Lucrezia laughs prettily, and he feels an easing of the tension he’d been carrying all day. She is not entirely changed, then.

“Tisane,” she corrects and holds the mug up for inspection.

He smiles.

There is a weighted silence on the return journey. The air between them heavy with memories of a once shared familiarity and the consideration of things untold. He cannot think what to say, and so says nothing.

The train screeches around a bend, she looks up at him and smiles. They are, for a moment, children again. Fellow conspirators- sneaking around their mother, teasing Juan, stealing biscuits from the pantry. The feeling of her fingers on his arms is grounding.

When he manages to wrestle his way to success with the flat door, she surveys the unadorned space with appraising eyes. He had never before considered that he should be so eager for her approval, so desperate that he and his life should not be found wanting. When she turns to him with shuttered look in her eyes, and crease between pale brows he feels panic well up.

“This is-” she weighs her words “-clinical. Cesare, you’ve not- not again-”

“No, no-” he offers his knuckles for her inspection.

She regards them, twisting them between her small hands, but the unease that has crept up does not immediately dissipate. He can recall a time when there were no secrets between them. Some stains, he feels, cannot be wiped clean.

For lack of anything else to do he shows her to her room.

“There aren’t nearly enough pillows,” she laughs.

For a moment he cannot see the jest, has made his way to the doorway to fetch the remaining two from his own bed before she pulls him back by the hem of his jacket.

“I’m joking, Cesare. You do remember what a joke is, brother? You spoil me. Be careful or I shall never leave. I’ll force you to wait on me hand and foot until the end of our days. I shall appropriate all of your bedding and you can content yourself with sleeping in the corner on the floor.”

“I would let you,” he says, unthinking.

“Yes, I know. My brother: the gentlemen.”

“I didn’t know you thought so highly of Juan. Perhaps you’d prefer to go live with him?”

“God forbid.”

The remainder of the evening is spent eating Indian take-away out of polystyrene cartons.

“Alfonso would have a fit,” she confides to him.

“Why?” he chokes out after managing to swallow a generous fork-full of rice.

She taps the side of one of the containers: “Terrible for the environment.”

He can think of nothing to say in response, never having considered the matter before, and nor is he able to laugh at this quirk of an unshared acquaintanceship.

The following day the rain has finally eased up, and a smattering of blue peeps out between a veiling of clouds. Cesare finds himself thoroughly chastised for the contents of his pantry- or lack thereof: a packet of soggy ginger-nuts, the stale muesli, and a premade-casserole-for-one that has gone off, prompting a “Gone OFF-- Are you trying to poison yourself, Cesare?” from Lucrezia.

Bowed by the onslaught of criticism and feeling a little ashamed, he treks with her to the Sainsbury’s Local where he pushes around the trolley while Lucrezia throws in tubs of soup and pre-cut veg.

“Almond milk?” he questions, more than half-amused.

“Alfonso is a vegan- force of habit, I suppose.” she says airily, but the carton remains wedged between the broccoli and bourbon creams.

They settle into an uneasy routine of domesticity. At time he feels that he is dancing around her, at others he feels himself subjected to her quiet scrutiny. On Monday they each travel to their respective jobs-- Cesare chained to his desk and pouring over legal documents and warding off Ascanio Sforza’s mocking calls: “What, no sledgehammer required to get in this morning, Borgia?” which he shoots from the doorway where he stands with crossed arms-- Lucrezia, Cesare learns, to a nursery from where she returns with sequins in her hair and finger-painted monstrosities that she displays with pride around her bedroom, and which eventually overflow into the whole of his flat.

There are a thousand questions he thinks to ask, but he fumbles them, comes short, and is silent. She moves with a fluid nimbleness, much the same as ever, but he cannot shake the fear that she had irreconcilably changed. The space of the parted years grate upon him. He can sense her unhappiness.

There are moments at which he feels on the brink of some great revelation. A sit-down in which she would divulge every minute facet of their unshared-life. He has pieces, written in a childish scrawl on the back of photos of Tower Bridge that he keeps tucked at the bottom of his sock drawer; the merest snatches of conversation which tell of lunches and books but not of hopes or fears or the stuff of life. These he could only glean in the traces of conversations with his mother in Spain over the crackling line of the telephone. He had not cried when Lucrezia left, had simply felt more thoroughly hollowed out, and had gone to work.

But there is no confession, no grand revelation. Instead there is a piecemeal of fleeting references from which he tries to discern a greater story.

He works late one evening, the Sforza case has continued to prove a troublesome irritant. When he finally returns exhausted to the flat it is to find a stranger curled up on his settee. Both she and Lucrezia are doubled over in such racking fits of laughter that introductions are withheld for a few moments.

“This is Francesca,” Lucrezia finally wheezes.

Francesca, it is revealed, is exceptionally talented at providing filthy commentary to terrible films. They spend the evening watching Ghost Rider and eating vinegar crisps straight out of the bag-- a fact which Cesare will regret once he sees the state of his rug in the morning. He finds himself laughing, despite everything, despite himself.

So he is admitted, fraction by fraction, into the confidence of this other life. These moments are borne with far more sentiment than the dogged questions about the substance of his own circumstance.

“Are you happy working for Papa, Cesare?” she asks.

His non-committal answer does not satisfy her.

“If you are not happy, why don’t you leave?”

He gives a windabout response. A pick n’ mix of familial duty, expectations, responsibility, and a what-else-would-you-have-me-do?

“Then you think that I was wrong to leave, is that it?”

He thinks of the years which have passed, of their father and Giovanni Sforza, and of Lucrezia’s flight. Of the postcards which have bridged Cesare and her for the better part of these three years. He thinks of think father arranging and insisting upon the match. And later of Giovanni Sforza in the backroom of some corporate function beaten to within an inch of his life before Cesare is discovered and torn off of him by his mother and Micheletto. The memory prickles. Micheletto: another relationship he had spoiled.

“No, never- you know that.”

“Then why should it be different for you?”

He cannot put words to the answer which looms before him, indistinct and menacing. She reaches over to hold his hand in hers.

She does not divulge the source of her own disquiet.

Alfonso is never discussed except in familiar passing. Alfonso who is a vegan. Alfonso who is an avid recycling sorter. Alfonso the Comparative Literature and Religious Studies student. Alfonso who wakes Lucrezia at odd hours of the night with neurotic studying habits which include, but are not limited to: marathons of Friends, baking three-tiered cakes at half-three, putting Spiceworld on repeat, sliding around the parquet in his socks, and sporadic bouts of interior redecorating-- once he toppled over their shelving unit and Lucrezia was picking his potpourri out of the carpet for weeks. Alfonso who has hurt his sister. Alfonso who he has never met. Alfonso whom he despises.

Each turn, he finds, churns up old memories and it becomes more difficult to quell the rising tide of remembrance.

One morning he is struck by the familiarity of it all. He bends to collect a copy of The Second Sex where Lucrezia has left it dangling on the arm of a chair, and he realises that the time before her arrival has acquired a sense of confused fuzziness.

Thereafter he finds it difficult not to take notice of her deoderant on the shelf next to his, the two toothbrushes in their cup by the sink, the lurid smelling soaps and shampoos which he pretends to detest but which have lent a certain brightness to the unremitting monotony.

It is not the easing into a comfortable cohabitation that gives rise to the sense of dismay, but the recognition of dependence which has attached itself to the matter. She would one day have to leave, and he would be left with his misgivings and case-files. After their parents had divorced she had cried in fear that they would be separated. He had not cried, but had felt the same grip of uncertainty. He looks at himself in the mirror with an uncomfortable awareness.

He tries to shove these thoughts aside, concealing them as he conceals the restlessness and persistent doubt.

She asks what Micheletto has been doing, and he brushes her question away, unable to admit another ineptitude.

Always he has cared for her with an unwavering devotion and tenderness.

They make plans, one evening, for dinner. He travels to the nursery to collect her, but a single child is left behind, the result of traffic and a late meeting.

“This is my brother,” Lucrezia tells the boy who is shy and clings to her skirt rather than risk making eye contact with Cesare.

He finds himself relegated to the corner, where he tries to continue his case-work, while the boy, Liam, climbs over Lucrezia. He touches her hair clips and looks her quite seriously in the eyes, before telling her “You’re very beautiful. One day I’m going to marry you.” Cesare has to check himself to keep from laughing aloud.

Liam finally settles down into her lap to colour in black and white line drawings of Peter Rabbit. She helps him to shade in the feet with thoughtful precision. Cesare can only regard her with a painful tightness in his chest, marvelling at the fact that it is possible to care so deeply for another human being. He would bear every hardship to ensure her own happiness.

When they are finally freed from the confines of wellingtons and crepe paper streamers that comprise the nursery, they walk the distance to New Oxford. He’d spent hours of careful consideration and reading a myriad of reviews before settling on the Italian. When they arrive it is to the dusky smell of basil and marjoram hanging in the cool evening air.

Lucrezia regards the street with wavering reluctance.

“Cesare, would you be absolutely crushed if I say that I’m more in the mood for some disgustingly greasy chips?”

He laughs, unbridled and loose, and does not object.

The course for chips is meandering and leisurely. They cross paths with a florist shop whose wares spill out onto the pavement. Bundles of peonies and lilies pour out of water-filled buckets in shocks of coral and lilac. Lucrezia stops to admire an unassuming bouquet of violets, and he scoops them up for purchase without a second thought.

At Waterloo, they cross over to find a street vendor near the Southbank Centre, weaving amongst home-bound workers and eating greasy potatoes with their fingers. The violets are tucked beneath Cesare’s arm where they dust pollen along the black velvet of his blazer.

He returns them back to her with an absurd flourish as she tosses their empty chip-cartons into a bin.

They are accepted with an indulgent smile, before strolling off, glancing over her shoulder to ensure that he is following.

“Oh no, Lucrezia, not there,” he frowns as she turns in the direction of Westminster.

She only laughs at him, dances out of his reach with a sense of unsuppressed mirth.

“Is my brother afraid of some little tourists?”

“Yes, yes, I am. So lets go back that way shall we?” he tries to steer her away, but finds himself lead towards the Eye instead, past some dump of a haunted house and carousel.

“I hate tourists,” he says bitterly as they are engulfed in a stream of camera-toting Russians.

“They make me happy,” she replies, and she sounds so earnest that he cannot help turning to look her in the eye.

“Why?”

They are forced to dodge around a group of prepubescent boys taking a selfie. Cesare glowers at them, murderous thoughts flitting through his head, but they are oblivious.

“They must dream about coming here all their lives. Think about how full of joy they must be.”

“It’s not like they’re seeing anything worthwhile. They’re paying twenty quid to go up a ferris wheel.”

She looks in his direction at that, “No, definitely not, but they’re so excited all the same. It’s sweet, isn’t it, in a way?”

The sun has begun to set, lighting the buds of the trees on fire and painting the muddy water of the Thames scarlet and rose. He looks out at it in lieu of answering, listens to the water washing against the stones of the embankment. It is lulling in the sea of shouts and continuous chatter.

She leans over the rail, watching something catch on a wave below, but Cesare cannot tear his eyes from her, from the soft light which turns her hair to gold, or from the flush which has risen to her face.

“Are you ever struck by how very lucky you are to be alive?” she lifts her face to look out into the distance at the steeples of St. Paul’s which peek out from behind bricked edifices.

He does not respond, his thoughts have turned liquid, he feels half-drunk despite the coolness of the night. He was never good at putting his thoughts to words.

“Sometimes I feel so consumed with despair that I think it shall never pass. That there is no escaping. And then something as small as the rush of wind through the trees, or the laughing of a child passing on the street puts everything in perspective. There is so much beauty out there, Cesare, I feel so very lucky to be able to behold it.”

She turns to him, her eyes wet in the dimming light, and he moves without a thought, pulling her to him, bowing down to brush his lips against her own. The violets are crushed between them, the scent heady, and her mouth soft.

A small sound of surprise tumbles from lips; she reaches up to grip his shoulder.

Cesare opens his eyes, takes in what he has done, and is flooded with a sense of horror. He pulls away and spins to look at the facade of the County Hall building. He scrubs a hand over mouth, swaying slightly with the breeze.

“I’m sorry,” he says, but it is fumbled and tense.

She says nothing, and he is filled with this desire to run, not trusting himself and wishing to dispel the thick tangles of shame which have begun to pull at him.

Instead, he takes off a reasonable pace, and she follows, never more than a half-step behind, still clutching the violets to her chest.

That night he tosses and turns, unable to drift off even into the uneasiest of sleeps. He questions himself repeatedly and comes to no conclusive answer. Uncovers and covers himself with the quilt, both too hot and too cold at once, all the whilst trying to assure himself that it had always been thus. Always his love for her had eclipsed all others, had been filled with the obsessive need to protect her, to see her happy. But he is unable to reconcile this once reality with the years that have made and remade them. The years separated that have left them both the same and changed. Years that had created strangers that might be learned and discovered anew; that had left him reconciling the disparate halves of past and present.

The thoughts are not the sort that one is able to brush away with ease. They trail after him, dragging with them confused notions about his upbringing, of his adolescence, of the inevitability of human action. He attempts to rationalise them, to fit the questions of love and morality into the neat frameworks of narrative; to link together the detritus of childhood and adulthood until from within their depths he might glean some small fragment of sense.

Work provides no sense of relief, Juan’s return from La Paz having been welcomed by their father and their father alone. Daily he makes a nuisance of himself at the office, spewing vulgarities about Latin American women and stinking of cigarettes and overmuch cologne. The women in accounting, with whom they share a floor, he treats like the help, bidding them fetch him his coffee, and once, his dry-cleaning. Juan mocks him continuously.

Cesare is the one forced to make amends. To attempt to smooth over the roughened slate of offence with false assurances. One of the team members quits, and when Rodrigo is told he responds vaguely with a “Yes, yes, I’ll talk to Juan,” and a wave of his hand.

His presence grates on Cesare until he feels rubbed raw and on edge. Of late the nightmares of half-buried things resurface with alarming frequency, of blood beneath his fingernails, of the smell of copper and excrement, of his name being called over and over and over. Memories are like a cracked dam against which his will flounders.

He begins to wash his hands again, a futile attempt to try and get rid of the sick crawling just beneath the surface of his skin. The skin of his knuckles crack.

“Do you think that I don’t notice what’s going on, Cesare? Do you think me so stupid?”

He evades her questioning with silence. Never was he able to lie to her, but neither can he put to words the shape of things unspeakable. Cannot bear to see her horror or recoil. He thinks of her gentle hands, the softness of her lips, and of the stain on his soul. He dwells constantly on the nature of family and duty.

There are moments of respite. Moments when he is able to focus on the present and none else. Curled on the settee: Lucrezia with stacks of Austen, Wharton, and Forster which she reads and rereads obsessively; Cesare watching mindless television, although his favourites are wildlife documentaries- a fact which amuses Lucrezia to no end. He had lost his love of reading, for years had not been able to concentrate, but he enjoys the dull attention that television requires.

“I fear that I’ve lost you, brother.”

He hums a questioning sound.

"You’ve watched that gyrating frigatebird open-mouthed for ten minutes. I think its mating call has worked its magic on you.”

For lack of a biting response, he threatens to tickle her. She bats his hands away with a copy of Hons and Rebels-- “Don’t you dare, Cesare Borgia. Don’t you dare--”

At these moments he is contented, if not outright happy. For brief flickers of time the veil of insensibility brushed back, and the might-have of some other life revealed to him.

Her gaze flicks to his mouth. He pulls his hands away, suddenly afraid of touch and searching eyes.

Thereafter she takes it upon herself to send him increasingly ridiculous articles on wildlife at the most inopportune moments.

Once he is on a conference call with a member of their distributive team based in Nova Scotia. The local competition is minimal, and there exists only the maneuverings of permits and the assurance that they adhere to local governmental regulations.

When his phone buzzes, it’s only to alert him to an article on mating rituals titled Wild Romance.

He manages to stifle the laughter by biting down on a knuckle.

It would suffice to say then, that the second time is entirely his fault.

The question of the Sforza mining interests in Eastern Europe had grown more troublesome. His father’s company had only a modest investment in the mining sector, but the challenge to their established authority in the region was not one which he was willing to overlook. Since the failed attempt to smooth the matter over by uniting with the Sforzas, a series of sabotaging machinations had drawn out the matter, and the head of their legal team, Burchard, called in for some terse words with Rodrigo and Cesare.

“This matter with your cousin, Ascanio, is getting rather tiresome, I must say. Could you not, I don’t know, buy her off? You are family after all?”

“I would rather feed myself to a pack of ravenous wolves, sir- at least they can’t smile as they disembowel me. But if that’s what your good self desires…” he says coolly.

Rodrigo responds with a grunt of amusement, before turning back to the matter at hand.

“Well then, Burchard, since Ascanio has failed to deliver us, please, tell us that you can,” he leans back in his chair, one leg outstretched.

“Well, as a manner of speaking…” he manages to monologue on the intricacies of international commercial law pertaining to the mining sector without any clear direction for a good fifteen minutes before Cesare’s phone buzzes, and is retrieved from his inner jacket pocket.

A text, and another article: Ten Sexiest Male Birds.

He laughs, chokes on his coffee, and dissolves into a coughing fit. The room descends into a pained silence, Burchard looking rather less than amused at having been interrupted.

Rodrigo runs a hand over his eyes.

“Are you quite done, Cesare?”

He nods, not daring himself to speak.

There is a berating which follows, once everyone is out of earshot. Family matters are never dragged out in front of outsiders.

When he tells Lucrezia of the events which have transpired she laughs until her face is flushed and she’s mopping at her eyes with the back of her hand. He takes more pleasure in the sight than he should.

“But what did Papa do? What did his face look like?”

Cesare does his best exaggerated imitation to see her laugh again.

Juan’s amusement is rather less tolerable. He shadows Cesare, making progressively more lewd queries about the nature of the infamous text.

He stumbles around the building half-drunk, never showing his face before noon. He makes himself comfortable in Cesare’s office, lounging back in the desk chairs, feet atop the desk and his arms stretched behind his head.

Cesare finds himself unable to work, unable to concentrate on the most minute matters. His mind spins upon itself until he is left tense and exhausted. The smell of cigarettes and sharp cologne so pervasive that he smells it even when he’s returned home.

Telling him to piss off proves futile, and the only avenue left to him is broaching the topic with his father.

“Are you starting on this again, Cesare? You are his brother, he need you to guide him.” and that proves the end of the matter.

There is no doubt in his mind as to what ‘this’ refers to- a series of arguments and vented frustrations, all brushed off at the behest of familial duty and unity. Juan free to do as he pleases as he gallivants about on international diplomacy, Cesare confined to the innards of the corporate cloister.

He resigns himself to having to wait it out. Attempts to assure himself that soon enough Juan will be shipped off abroad to some place from which he will fail to answer his calls in a timely manner and leave other members of the public relations team mopping up the proverbial mess.

But the days stretch out unbelievably. Juan’s half-wit comments echoing around the recesses of his skull.

He begins to feel perpetually on edge, high-strung and nervous and ready to snap at nearest provocation.

On Tuesday of the following week Juan swaggers in at a quarter-two, shadows under his eyes and breath smelling of whisky. The very scent of it leaves Cesare nauseated and on-edge.

Juan leans back in the chair, tucking a cigarette behind one ear and licking his cracked lips. He regards Cesare for a moment with malicious amusement.

“Father told me that you went to talk to him. That you tried to have him send me away. Me-- your brother-- but of course that means nothing to you,” his lips turn upwards in the barest hint of a smirk.

Cesare says nothing, pretends to work though the words before him blur and his back hurts with the effort of restraint.

“You have nothing to say, brother? Of course not, you pathetic coward. Don’t you think I see what you’ve been playing at?” Juan, seeing that he is getting no visible rise out of Cesare, continues. “You’ve been jealous of me all your life. Of my status. You want to take my position. Well you know what, Cesare? You’ll end your life at this desk,” he spits where he’s standing. A dark spectre on the edges of Cesare’s vision, breathing down his back.

He snaps, stand so abruptly that his chair tips over. He could grab Juan by the front of the shirt. Could throw him back; he could overpower him, it would be no true match. But then the vents click off, and they are left in an uncomfortable silence, the sound of his own ragged breathing echoing harshly against the walls. Juan begins to laugh, and with it Cesare reigns himself back in, shuts himself down, grabs his case in one hand and leaves the file where it lies spread over the desk. He does not lock the door.

Something rages in his ears as he walks the distance to the flat, hoping beyond hope that the exercise will somehow quell the uncontrollable fury which thrums through his every limb, the danger which lurks just below the surface. He can feel the veneer of self-control splinter.

His hands shake so violently that he has difficulty getting the key into the lock. He has to ease it back and forth a few times before he is able to force it open. It is then that he registers the raised voices.

Once he is able to unstick the door from its frame, he freezes on the spot. Lucrezia, tear-stained and livid on the settee, a stranger paused in the act of pacing- both turn to stare.

Cesare carefully shuts the door.

“Who’s this?” the man spits out, he is short and curly-haired, and judging by his swaying stance, thoroughly drunk.

Cesare takes several cautious steps until he is at Lucrezia’s side. Her fingers reach for his until they brush.

“It’s my brother, my brother Cesare.” Lucrezia has begun to mop at her face with the back of her hand.

She gives Cesare an indefinable look; whether willing understanding or an intervention he cannot fathom out. He holds her gaze with furrowed brow and, after a moment of dim contemplation, pulls his hand away and touches it to her cheek instead. It an unconscious gesture, one that he has performed a thousand times before.

The man’s eyes flick between them, suspicious and then stricken, and he laughs, half-hysterical and crazed. Cesare looks up, and it is Juan standing before him again; he takes an abrupt step back.

“I’ve been replaced by your brother, is that it?”

“Please, Alfonso, sit down, my love. You’re not yourself.” She rises to pull him back.

But he will not be reigned in, some whispered suggestion having set his mind to fever. He is wild, and laughs again. The sound jars Cesare, something primal and base is loosed within him. The past a series of echoes which fashion the future.

“Am I your love-- do you love me as much as you love your brother?” Alfonso turns from Lucrezia and rounds on him, stepping dangerously close, voice rising to hysterics. “You’re fucking your sister, is that it? God-- I’d heard things about you, loads of things about you, but I never imagined you could be so fucked that you would just-- just-- fuck up everyone stupid enough to get near you. Your own family. God.” He spits out the last word. The smell of whisky overwhelming.

“You’re in bad humour,” Cesare manages to force out through clenched teeth.

“You know what-- we all know I’m useless, but I’d welcome a bloody fight,” Alfonso grabs the lapels of his coat.

“Don’t you love me, brother? Then you must help me” unhinged laughter and Juan’s bloody hands twisted in Cesare’s shirt-front.

The smell of cheap whisky.

Cesare throws him to the ground. Smells blood and sick and cannot tell if he is smothering or punching. The rushing in his ears reaches fever-pitch, thoughts racing- Juan or Alfonso- no matter. He could kill him.

Something grabs hold of his shoulder, tugging at him so that for a moment he falters.

“Cease, please. Cesare, please don’t,” something broken and something which breaks the spell. He turns to look at her face, still tear-stained, but settled into a frightening calm. He can see the fear in her eyes, and feels the intense urge to be sick.

He clambers off of Alfonso who he has not killed, but who seems to have been woken from some hellish dream. He is nursing a bloodied nose and regards Cesare with unbridled horror. Lucrezia, the fear now ebbing, is furious.

Cesare does not collect his case, only removes the keys from where he’d left them dangling in the key-hole and flees.

He walks and walks and walks with no destination in mind. Pulls off his tie and chucks it over the railing into the Thames. The cracks had turned into fault-lines of a great deluge which had swept him away at last. The breaks allowing some Golgotha to rise up and swallow him.

At half-four he finds himself in some twenty-four hour Costa’s nursing a fifth americano. There is a wildness which rages within him, his thoughts untetherable and senseless, the present and past bleed into one another. He is alone in a wilderness with only the conviction that if by some mischance there should be a god in heaven, Cesare himself is surely going to hell.

There are moments of pale lucidity, hands clenched around the paper cup, when he tries to add up the equations of his past, to devise when the illusion had shattered so irreparably. Desperation claws its way within him when he thinks of Lucrezia’s horror; her fear of him. The last tumbling block in a series that had trailed him these past years. She who had trusted him, had idolised him, had loved him when none, chief among them himself, ever had. What remained in this precarious existence if not that? His eyes burn.

At a quarter of seven he returns to his flat. Too dulled inside to feel fear. His legs ache and his mind worked dumb in exhaustion.

The flat is empty. He showers and allows the water to scorch his skin red. A minute form of absolution to wash away the night. He scrubs at his hands, once, twice, until he loses count.

He cannot entertain anything else, and so goes to work, goes through the motions, locks his office door, and returns home.

Juan had been shipped to Kinshasa in the night.

The flat remains empty when he returns. He sits on the settee and attempts to quiet the growing hysteria; tries to divine some way of freeing himself from this prison of his own devising.

At half-eight there is a hesitant knock at the door. Cesare considers leaving it be, to continue his vigil in the dark, but he resolves himself and twists the knob open.

Alfonso rocks back on his heels, sporting a black eye and something awful lurches in Cesare’s stomach. He says nothing, fearing self-betrayal.

“Is Lucrezia home?” Alfonso stares into the darkness behind him.

“No,” he does not add that he thought her with him.

“Oh,” Alfonso says and rubs his good eye nervously.

Cesare does not understand. The first conclusion that springs to mind is that some continuation of the night previous is about to be enacted.

There is something about Alfonso’s stance which suggests otherwise. He is ill at ease, shifting his weight from one leg to the other, seemingly weighing his options. He hesitates, then chances a glance at Cesare’s face.

“Sitting alone in the dark, are you?” he smiles, eyes flitting to the darkness within the flat.

“Yes,” Cesare does not smile back. He hears the rushing again, feels the strong instinct to run, leave everything behind. Leave himself.

“Can I come in?”

“No.”

“Fair enough, I mean, after last night-- I wouldn’t let myself in either,” he tries a laugh, but it comes out strangled.

Silence settles heavily around them, the only sound audible is the distant plunking of rain against windowpanes.

“I don’t know how to--” he breaks off, rocks again on his heels. “Okay. I behaved abominably last night-- to both your sister and yourself. I wish more than anything it could be forgotten.” he stares intently at his hands folded before him.

“My sister is not here.” Cesare says shortly.

“Yes, yes, I know. I came” he falters again. This, Cesare thinks, is a man uneasy with himself. “--I came to say that I don’t wish to quarrel with you. I had far, far too much to drink, I’m afraid, and I know that’s not any excuse for what I said, but, well--” he trails off, rubs a hand through his hair.

“I could have killed you,” Cesare replies. And it is the truth. The voicing of some perverse thought.

Alfonso looks him in the eye before focusing intently on the door frame, his eyebrows drawn together.

“Well,” he says at last, and tries a half-hearted smile once more. “You didn’t, thankfully, and here we are.”

“Yes.”

“I am sorrier about it than you can imagine. I never wanted any of that to happen. And as I can’t think of any more to say, I think it best that I vacate myself from your doorstep-- before I overstay my welcome.” A brief upturning of the lips, and with that he takes a step back, and with another aborted glance in Cesare’s direction, disappears into the darkness of the stairwell.

Cesare shuts the door, and seats himself once more. He places his hands on his knees.

Sometime during his eventide watch he must have drifted off, for when she returns he is asleep. He feels her before he sees her.

Her hand ghosts his face; her breath a faint stirring of the air. When he opens his eyes he can see that she has been crying.

“You cannot hide things from me, brother. I can see it in your eyes.”

He says nothing, only pulls himself up so to make room for her, but she passes him to look out the window into the night.

“I’m sorry for bringing Alfonso here. I know you dislike him, although I wish you didn’t, no matter how tiresome he has become.”

“He’s hurt you, isn’t that cause enough?”

She fixes him with a look, guarded but intense. It is a few moments before she answers.

“Pity him, if anything.”

“Do you love him still?”

She braces herself on the windowsill, but does not answer. There is a fleeting look, mirrored in the glass, that suggests that she is at the verge of letting some greater truth spill from her lips, but she holds her tongue.

Cesare tries to ignore the dark chasm that has grown more treacherous within him, that seems to have ensnared him even further with this silence. Disgust mingles with shame when she looks at him again, and it is burning and too much filled with false-hopes.

“You should pity him,” she says again. “Alfonso always claims that he doesn’t care what others think of him, but he is so incredibly self-conscious. I think, no-- I know, Cesare, that he’s insecure, he struggles with it constantly. He doesn't like to speak of it. I think his childhood left him feeling inadequate. His parents wanted him to be a doctor, but he studies literature, and, I think, finds himself overwhelmed by this desperate desire to please them.

“He is so desperate for love, for favour, which he feels he was denied- it doesn’t matter if this is in his head, or a reflection of reality, because it’s all too real for him. He wants to be loved, but he’s chased by this past which he’s tried to forget. It is never enough for him, or else he just can’t bring himself to accept it or to believe it. Perhaps it is the same for each of us.” her glance is distant, fixed on some miniscule point of London in the distance.

He goes to stand by her, wants to reach out and hold her to him, to erase a hurt that he does not understand. Instead, he looks at the trails of raindrops along the windowpanes and the glint of the yellow light on wet pavement. Out there, beyond the glass, the shadows of the past linger and trail like an impenetrable fog. He is struck by a feeling of his own minuteness, of the inconsequence of his life which is the merest blip in some great spectacle.

“It comes down to this: Alfonso has known about my child since we began seeing each other. Our flat is filled with photographs of him that Mama has sent me.”

Cesare’s breath clouds the glass, but his gaze remains on the light on the pavement, on this film which separates him from the shape of existence.

“We have all these photos. Alfonso wants to travel to Spain to visit Mama and to meet Giovanni. He says that he has no problem, that after he graduates he wants to marry me,” her breath hitches. “But when his parents come to visit, he takes down all the photos and shoves them at the back of the linen cupboard. He’s told them that I have a university degree, and that I am training for a career in nursing. He says it’s better this way, just to ensure their complacence, his parents and family, he says, would cause unneeded complications otherwise. But it’s very difficult not to feel ashamed.”

Cesare is silent, something horrible has settled in the pit of his stomach. He half-wishes to rage, wishes that he was propelled into some action rather than this unnatural stillness.

“Last time his parents came round, he told them I was doing a new nursing placement. After they left I waited for him to take the photos out from the cupboard, but there they remained for ten days. It’s insignificant, really, in the grand scheme of things, but all of those minute disagreements and slights pilled up and suddenly I found that the bridge upon which I was standing had broken under my feet. We fought, and then I phoned you.”

He turns to look at her, pale and golden and trembling in the glow of the streetlights. She does not return his glance, seeming to wrestle with her thoughts. Cesare remains in the shadows.

“So, you see, you should pity him, Cesare, because he can’t allow himself to be happy. Alfonso’s convinced that there must be some flaw that makes him in some way unloveable. It’s made him paranoid, a coward, and has decided for him that the approval of his parents is more important than his own happiness. Maybe he thinks that he is undeserving of it all. All he can see when he looks at himself is this imperfection; that he is in some way monstrous. He makes himself miserable.” Lucrezia’s hands on the windowsill are white.

“Now you know what this thing between him and I was about. A fool’s hope, perhaps, but a fool’s hope is still a hope, nonetheless.”

Cesare cannot be sure how long they stay thus, rigid, each enveloped in the past, and staring out into that incomprehensible night. Both suddenly aware of the fragility of their existence, of the limits of will and action in the face of such phantoms of time. The stars are drowned out by a dualed veiling of cloud and city lights.

In time she turns to him, and he feels that perhaps he has missed something key in the spate of reminiscence. She looks to him, but is it is obscured by the shadows and lost in the stream of thought. Despite the wide breadth of the flat around them, he begins to feel hemmed in.

She does not blink, only regards him steadily as she tells him, “And now that you know this, it is time you stopped keeping things from me Cesare,”

When he attempts to adopt an expression of feigned incredulity, she fixes him with a unyielding look, something which warns him that there is no escape, the past behind, and only an indefinable void ahead. He watches her, and is afraid.

“You have lied to me for far too long. I’m no longer a child.”

He cannot unstick his throat, cannot free the words from his lips. His fingers twitch of their own accord; his palms have gone sweaty.

“Yesterday, you weren’t yourself. I could see it in your eyes. Why, Cesare? You owe me that, at the least.”

His mind has gone blank, a tremor running through him. Is this not better? he thinks bitterly. A clean break-- the last in a series of tumbling blocks.

“He reminded me of Juan” he says simply, steadily.

Her breathing is even. A knife twists in his gut.

“It wasn’t only that. The smell, his laughter-- it could have been Juan.”

“And you want to hurt Juan?”

His head spins, he is going to be sick. His hands do not shake.

“When I was nineteen, I received a phone call from Juan; three weeks after we had returned from Spain. It was very late at night, but I listened to what he had to say. He was very drunk, half-deranged, and more than half-hysterical.”

Her hands dance at the end of his sleeve, over his wrist, brushing his cracked knuckles, searching for something he cannot give her.

He feels numb beyond recognition.

“Don’t you love me, brother? Then you must help me” unhinged laughter and Juan’s bloody hands twisted in Cesare’s shirt-front.

“I went to him, and his hands were bloody. He grabbed at the front of my shirt, but it was no matter-- the shirt was black and the blood didn’t show.” He inhales, exhales. The city is silent.

“Father had mentioned off-hand a few weeks earlier that he needed to get rid of Djem--” her breath is sharp. “--he wasn’t doing his job well and father meant to send him to some useless department where he wouldn’t be able to cause any trouble.”

Her fingers still, cold against his pulse. He knows that she remembers; they had been friends. He cannot face her.

“Juan took the comment in a rather different way. He tried to sort it, but when he couldn't, he asked me to help.”

“Cesare, I’m your brother, you must help me- you must.” Juan clinging to him.

“Cesare, Cesare, oh God, help me, please, God,” another voice.

“Juan stabbed him, but he cocked it up, he didn’t finish the job. He stabbed him.”

There are ruptured intestines trailing across the floor like a grotesque trail of bread-crumbs. The smell is revolting, he gags, and has to swallow the bile which rises up in his throat.

“Cesare, oh God, please help me.”

“I did what I had to do, for the good of the family.”

His first instinct is to call for an ambulance, but then thinks of the scandal, of his mother and father and Lucrezia, of everything which would be lost.

“I did what needed to be done.”

She releases his wrist, steps back, out of arm’s reach.

He shuts himself down, compartmentalises everything. Lifts the jumper which had been thrown to the side when the evening was still light with its false gaiety. When he stoops towards Djem, he finds that he has accidentally dipped his hands into the pool of blood.

“Thank you, Cesare, thank you.”

But Djem’s eyes follow Cesare’s bloodstained hands, still clutching the jumper, and there is a sudden comprehension which shows in his expression.

“Cesare, no! Please, please, I beg you. Cesare-- Cesare-- Cesare!” it is mad and frantic, a command and a plea. Cesare stifles it with the jumper, holds it in place until the incensed twitching ceases and silence rings.

Juan laughs, and laughs, in mania and in relief.

Cesare phones Micheletto.

He cannot look her in the eye, watches instead the hand which rises to cover her mouth, looks at the trail of a tear which skirts the edge of her cheek. Something has broken within him.

He stares down at his bloody knuckles.

She says something, muffled by her weeping, something he does not catch, does not ask her to repeat. He only looks up when the door has closed behind her and he left alone in the darkness.

A clean break.

He realises then that he has needed her far more than she ever had him.

He cannot account for his actions. He must have sat down, must have stayed there the entire night with his hands on his knees. Just after six he received a call from his father, who informs him that the flight has been booked in his name from Heathrow to Thessaloniki. From there, a driver will meet him to take him north into the Belasitsa mountain range. The Sforza business must be settled immediately. He does not ask if Cesare is willing, only issues commands to which Cesare does not object.

He packs his bags and pauses only to extract a photo from amongst the odds and ends at the bottom of the sock drawer. He is numb.

By the time the rain begins to pour, he is strapped into his seat and bound for Greece.

The memory of the plane ride is fuzzy. He drifts between the unconsciousness of sleep and a shapeless waking; not speaking except to wave away a stewardess when she comes round with pots of burnt coffee. The roar of the engines drowns out the sound of his breathing, and for a muddled instant as he drifts awake, he forgets where he is.

Later he is unable to recall how he managed his way out of the plane or around the baggage collection, can only remember the oppressive heat which engulfs him when exits the airport.

There is a driver waiting for him, who gets him to load his own baggage into the boot rather than assist. He introduces himself as Niccolò Machiavelli, and asserts that he is not the driver, but a member of the Balkans team. The ride is filled with his drawling on multitudinous subjects, of which he seems to know every facet inside and out. Cesare must respond, though he is unable to recall what is said.

Eventually the motion of the car does a number on him, and he finds himself lulled into a fitful sleep. He does not notice the Greek shift to Cyrillic; wakes only occasionally to watch the cypress-littered horizon drift by. At the border he hands over his passport, and, being a westerner, is given no trouble. The road up into the mountains is narrow and twisted, bordered only by spindly guardrails. Once he may have been impressed by the view, but now all he can muster is a dull indifference.

In his hotel room he collapses on the bed. The room is a relief from the sweltering heat outside. He peels off his jacket, shirt, and trousers and sits on the edge of the bed shivering beneath a layer of sweat.

The job is completed with surprising efficiency. The locals being indifferent to corruption while being more than willing to divulge details of every illicit dealing in exchange for some hefty compensation. He compiles a file over the course of a week detailing over fifty violations, ranging from the felonious disregarding of building and environmental codes to corruption of elected officials. It is enough to seriously damage the international reputation of the Sforzas, if not dismantle the corporation entirely. In any case, they will be forced to capitulate. He should feel pleasure at this, would have mere weeks ago, but simply he tucks it into his suitcase and locks it.

That evening he is driven into the city, where he shares drinks with other high ranking employees of his father’s company. The patio is hazy with smoke, and Cesare has difficulty keeping to the conversation, which is exchanged part in stilted English, and part in a thick Slavic dialect. Machiavelli sits to his right, from where he leans to offer Cesare brief sardonic translations, half filled with the matters at hand, and half with local gossip.

“I thought it was just a stereotype that all of you drank vodka,” Cesare makes the mistake of saying.

Even Machiavelli cannot contain his laughter.

“You westerners, you think all Slavs the same-- there are no Russians here. You know where Russia is on a map?” a burly man claps him on the back.

“It’s mastika-- the local speciality, you try-- yes?” someone else shouts, and before he can reject the courtesy a glass is placed in front of him, and anise-smelling liqueur is poured out.

“Water it down, water it down! His father won’t pay us if we poison him!”

Machiavelli tips half a glass of water into Cesare’s cup, and the liquid turns milky. He downs it in one shot, feeling it burn his throat. It fails to improve his mood.

Both he and Machiavelli are silent in the ride back to the hotel, which stands outside the city at the edge of a village. There is a sinking in his stomach which he cannot rid himself of.

Back in his room he feels that he is standing on the brink of despair. He had wanted this job for eons, but now that he has it, he cannot shake the unhappiness or the sense of futility. He lies in the bed, and tries to force himself to sleep. He turns constantly, before he is forced to get up to tug the curtains closed. The brightness of the evening outside makes him restless. He had never realised how much of the light London blocked out.

The next morning he feels keyed up, though he had slept poorly the night before. The idea of sitting in the room all day is intolerable. The only thing which the hotel has to offer is an outdoor patio, a massage room, and a pool filled with screaming teenagers. None seem particularly appealing. To go to the city would require phoning Machiavelli, and he thinks the man would be more than amused at his sudden penchant for playing the English tourist. He is in no mood to face him, and instead sets himself on walking the course of the village. Perhaps, just perhaps, he will be able to exhaust himself enough to be able to sleep before the flight.

In contrast to the cold cleanliness of the hotel, dust coats the streets outside in a thick swathes, evoking some distant impression of a childhood snow. It kicks up beneath his feet, and beneath the wheels of the tractors which rumble past. Where he is going, he does not consider. There are no street names, only roads pocked with gaping holes and the hazy memories of crumbling landmarks; a vandalized building and a convenience store plastered with advertisements for cigarettes. He feels that he has ventured into some uncharted wilderness, untouched by the outside world yet oppressed by it. He has never felt so detached.

When he turns off the main street he finds that there is no pavement at all, the road extends in a cut path of dirt liberally strewn with horse droppings,. He tries to imagine a rain smothering the dryness and beating the road to a mud, but he cannot; only feels the sun scorching his neck raw and the sweat which pools under his arms and along the expanse of his back.

Common sense urges him back; back to the familiarity of artificially cooled rooms and sterile sheets; away from the skulking dogs and flocks of hens. But he can no longer sit at ease with his thoughts, they have turned into a tempest that he cannot restrain. Even the thought of the hotel room stifles him, so he looks to the crumbling gateposts encircling scraggly yards. Everything before him must have once been new, but now he sees only the remnants of some lost grandeur faded to twilight. He wonders if the current degradation will give way to another dawn; and dwells on the precarious foundations on which society flourishes. In one of the yards children tumble together in the dirt in chase of a football as once he, Juan, Lucrezia, and later Joffre had in the grasses of Oxfordshire. The nature of existence, he realises, is cyclic, hinging on the repetition of insignificant acts of joy and loss, stretching out ad infinitum. Each person merely acting out the role bequeathed by their birth. There were a hundred, thousand other lives which might have been his. He thinks of Hannibal crossing the Alps; of the Advent of the Saxons; of the barricades of 1872 Paris. He might be in Rome; in Mumbai; in Buenos Aires. He might even have been born here-- and then what? A thousand other selves, but he, here, now.

A gated enclosure rises from the dirt ahead of him. At first he does not realise what it is, but he spots the muddied plaque of some derelict monument, and stills his pace. He cannot make sense of the writing, the text is in cyrillic, and only things which he can discern are the dates: 1912-1913, and 1939-1945. In a different, more familiar world, it would be dedicated to the glorious dead of the world wars, but the dates do not match up, and the meaning is lost upon him. One of the gates is half open, so he squeezes his way through. It is clear from the sea of dead grasses and plastic wrappers that it had been undisturbed for an age. He stands, and then sits along the edge of the walk where brambles tear at his bare arms and cling to his jeans.

Why he sits there, he cannot answer, only knows that some desperation has torn at his insides. To do something, anything, is preferable to doing nothing. So he looks up at the memorial which looms before him. It is all sharp edges, jagged and painted-orange; too modernist for him to grasp any of its meaning. At one time it must have been pleasant, if not particularly beautiful. There are untamed rose-bushes which run between the broken beer bottles at his feet. This duplicity unsettles him. The thought of the grandeur of some past so at odds with the decay of the present. Who remembered it? Few, he thinks. And then only in the late hours of the night after too many drinks. There would come a day when it would all fade out, all the memories and hurt; the fondness and the loves. All of this would be relegated to the footnotes of a history text, if they were lucky. The essence of individuality would be lost, all the laughter and desire stripped away to a bare name on a solitary gravestone.

The sun dips slowly across the sky, skirting behind Cesare’s back until his shadow smothers the yellow of the roses. Until now, his every action, both the moral and morally unsound had been calculated, carefully, meticulously, to ensure the safety and security of his family. And yet, now he is unsure that they had ever serviced anything beyond the well-being of familial ambition-- his father’s ambition. It might once had been different, in some other place, some other time; the family had splintered but its pieces remained. Lucrezia had grown, had forged a life for herself independent of him. She was fierce, he knew that, but he had missed the strength of her resistance and had been paternalistic when he need not have been. She did not need his protection, not now, and perhaps never had. She had not loved him for his work, but something apart from it. For something which he had never been able to see in himself.

He hesitates, and then from his pocket draws out the photo that had lay tucked at bottom of his sock drawer for years. He had avoided it, being unable to confront this effigy of the past. He holds it gingerly now between his fingers and feels the sharp prick of despair. He was eighteen when it was taken, sunburned, holding a dove; Lucrezia with her face pressed against his shoulder in laughter; Juan, his jaw still round with childhood, smiling and caught in the act of calling out to their mother off camera; Joffre, age ten, playing with dolls in the grass at their feet. It was months after the divorce, Giulia Farnese sitting to the side with their father, but even despite that they had still been a family.The memory is not painful in itself, but the months that followed had sullied it with some grim foreboding. He remembers Juan, grown paranoid, a fact that he had tried to conceal with an increased bravado and arrogance. All this while Cesare had retreated within himself; had become a shadow plagued by nightmares; had become serious and cold. He had no cried after Djem, any feeling he may have had had been scraped away that evening until he was left a husk.

He had been happy in this photo, but had not been properly happy since. The closest he had come were these past months, and now those memories too were corrupted. At eighteen he still thought the future impossibly vast, filled with possibilities. He had never felt the same since, he had moved forward, to be sure. He had spent more hours in the office than anyone else, had devoted himself completely to his work. Not that it was to any end. Everyone had moved on, his mother back to Spain with Joffre and Giovanni. Lucrezia had left and grown into herself apart from him. He, Juan, and his father remained, but it was only Cesare who had not changed. He himself who had been caught in the monotonous rhythm of moving forward, but whose mind and life had never moved passed that fixed point in the years past. Like the monument before him he had grown rusty before his age, going through the motions of time without meaning. Lucrezia had lifted the burden of the years for a brief moment, had reminded him of his former life and former self. He did not think these shards could ever again be reconciled. Time, he thought, was a series of fractures, the pieces of one’s life drifting apart. Sometimes the pieces collided, and for a brief moment the disparate halves touched, melded, formed new halves to be parted. He no longer knew where he stood.

He wishes that he could place a stopper on time, give pause so that he can breathe. But the sun has set beyond the ridges of the mountains opposite, and he stands up in the faint shadow and turns to leave. He moves forward, and squeezes back out through the gate. A weather-beaten man and women stare at him from the front of a horse-drawn cart laden with hay. How many lifetimes had passed much the same on this road? They disappear around the bend into darkness, and he moves onward to the main street, his limbs stiff with inactivity. Back past the same yards and the same shop. Near the hotel he is forced to pause to let pass a herd of sheep. He stands in the shallow ditch, and does not immediately return to the road. Has looked up and found himself bowed beneath the weight of multitudinous stars-- far more than he ever seen before-- stars which stretch out exceedingly bright above him, unimpeded by the haze of the city. They form an impossibly vast awning, and he feels suddenly both very small and very afraid. The world, he now understands, is what one makes of it.

When he returns to the room, the door opens without protest. It smells artificially clean after the farms and petrol of passing tractors; of lemons essence and lavender. The white of the sheets contrasts with the grittiness of his clothes and exposed skin. Something about the orderliness grates at him. He feels the sense that something minuscule had been changed, the bed moved a few inches to the right, or the overhanging lamp twisted to a different angle.

In the shower he scrubs himself clean. Rubs shampoo into his hair and watches the rivulets of muddy water trickle down the porcelain until they circle the drain. In bed, he sleeps, and wakes, sleeps fitfully once more, and then wakes again. He cycles through pseudo-memories of once lovers- Ursula, Charlotte, women whose name he only half-remembers; Micheletto skulks in the background; the closest thing he has ever had to a friend; and Lucrezia is there, always, dancing just out of his reach. The muddle of memory and dream leaves him sweaty and shaken. He dreams of Lucrezia at thirteen telling him that she will never love anyone more than she does him. She slips into his arms, but when he looks to his hands, he finds them stained red. Juan laughs from somewhere in the shadows. He sleeps fitfully and then wakes and spend the evening hanging out of the window watching the progression of the moon across the sky.

The trip back, as the trip there, is recalled only in parceled memories.

At the airport, Machiavelli does not get out of the car, only bows his head in goodbye and says: “You are far more, what should I say-- capable, than your brother, Cesare Borgia,”

Cesare does not respond. Once this would have pleased him, frustrated him perhaps. Now nothing.

The documents weigh on his mind as he waits in the queue to check his baggage; he thinks of sending them off to the press, destroy the Sforza credibility once and for all, but the flight back to Heathrow only increases his despondency. He begins to feel the tug of indifference. Once he would have done it, quickly, without thought, consequences be damned. Now he advises the driver to swing by the offices where he proceeds to throw down the file on Ascanio’s desk. He cannot face his father.

Back at his flat he draws the curtains and curls up in front of the television, the muscles in his jaw twitching. He turns up the volume until the sound rings in his ears.

He has known vengeance, has known anger and fear. He had always focused on the movement forward, but can no longer will himself to it. Cannot see a future which is untainted by these corruptions, of the transgressions which he has heaped around him. He feels a child once more, ten years old and fearful after a burst appendix, he longs for his mother, for her firmness and wisdom-- so so unlike the machinations of his father-- so without the severity of expectation.
He wants to phone her, but what is there left for her to say? He is undeserving of the absolution.

He knows he is wallowing in self-pity, but cannot bring himself to go into work the following day. He does not go the day after that, or the one which follows that. He ignores the phone calls, first from Ascanio, then from his father. When his phone dies, and the calls cease, he cannot bring himself to recharge it.

He thinks about feigning illness, but he can see Rodrigo in mind’s eye tapping a finger to his lips before growling out: “Yes, but we have need of you here, Cesare.” And he knows that he would acquiesce. This childish rebellion would be cut short and he would have allowed himself to be dragged back into the rituals of industry. There is no doubt.

Instead, he spends days without showering, watching mindless television which fails to drown out the torrent of thoughts.

He is without course. Cannot envision a way out of the bedlam. He does not bathe until the smell becomes repulsive to him. He has never felt so disgusted with himself.

The muesli runs out. The milk has soured and turned lumpy, but he cannot bring himself to pour it down the drain, so it remains on the topmost shelf of the fridge.

He orders takeaway: Chinese, Indian, Pizza, anything, until the greasy smell begins to turn his stomach. This is madness, he thinks, but is unable to break free from it. It is pathetic, and pitiful, and a million other things which arouse in him equal parts disgust and anger, and yet he still cannot not stop himself.

One day passes and he spends it drinking coffee, and rubbing his nervous hands against his thighs. On the second day need and hunger finally break his will and he pulls a jacket on over his t-shirt and jeans over rumpled pants.

The act of leaving the flat is daunting. Weariness overwhelms him as he pulls the door shut. The stairs suddenly seems overly taxing; the walk there an insurmountable obstacle. He is struck by a desire to laugh at his own absurdity, but doesn’t. The effort would be too much, and any delay would weaken his resolve. Instead, he takes the two flights down and opens the front door only after a moment’s hesitation.

Outside it is exceedingly bright, unnatural after the darkness of his flat. It hurts his eyes, and he blinks for a few moments dazedly.

“Cesare!”

He turns at the sound and registers the violet dress billowing out in the wind before he takes in that it is Lucrezia, laden with shopping bags and balancing a paper cup in one hand.

His stomach gives a jolt, and he cannot think what to say. Stares at her and then calls out

“Tea, sis?” she hates it.

She does not respond immediately, only looks at him across the boundary of the street. Once he would have run to her and lifted her into the air, but now he feels a mixture of uncertainty and fear. The past, he knows now, can never be repeated, nor can it be reclaimed, or reenacted. The past was a dead land littered with fickle memory.

“I thought-- I thought,” but she cannot finish her thought, and things are suddenly both uneasy and awkward. “I bought groceries. I tried to phone you, but when it went to voice-mail I tried to catch you as you left work, but when that didn’t work either I went in to speak to father. He told me he hadn’t heard from you in nearly a fortnight.”

The words wash over him. He is silent for a moment before he is able to speak, deliberately, carefully.

“You went to father?”

“Yes, I was getting desperate. I was worried.” her face hardens, and she is both remote and unknowable and familiar and reproachful.

He grits his teeth together because the cannot think of an answer to this, the enormity of this small act is overwhelming.

She too is silent for a few moments, before her eyes soften and she adds: “I have missed that face,” it is said with the barest breath of a laugh.

She crosses the breadth of the street as he turns back to unlock the door.

When she enters the flat, she takes it in with appraising eyes. Looks to the nest of blankets on the couch, and the huddle of mugs of half-drunk coffee; looks to the dishes heaped in the sink, and the bin overflowing with takeaway containers, before turning her eyes to the finger-paints that he’d let stay on the mantelpiece. There is a flicker of fondness on her face, and then something distant.

“Cesare,” she starts, turning to him. “Well, this certainly isn’t clinical-- but I’m not sure that it is much of an improvement. I won’t bother asking you to show me your knuckles, I’m sure they’ve cracked from washing.”

He can handle anger, can handle frustration or disappointment, but not the intimation of pity. He is ashamed and looks to the side, anywhere where he can avoid catching her eye. He can hear his father stressing that the appearance of weakness begets weakness.

“Come on then,” she says when it is clear that he will say nothing else.

She nudges him around, the veg drawer is rid of mouldering tomatoes and the heaped tissues collected from beneath the coffee-table. It’s ridiculous, that at twenty-five he should need someone to hold out a bin for his rubbish, and yet her presence, her surety and guidance succeeds in tempering some of the raging thoughts. He is not well, but he is not at his worst. She smiles, and he feels overwhelming gratitude, both for her presence and for her simple act of being.

Dinner is premade microwavable Indian, and in the midst of of nursery-related chatter she pauses, and very briefly looks uncertain. It was never an emotion which he had associated with her.

“You don’t have to say anything,” he tells her, as much for her own benefit as for his own. He is afraid.

But she does so anyway.

“Cesare, I don’t know that I can forgive you, because it is not something that is in my power to forgive.” she struggles, the fingers of her right hand reaching up to tug at those of her left. An old habit. “It is in the past, no matter how much you might wish it, it can’t be changed. You must, I think, learn to forgive yourself.”

The tension eases, a minute amount, but not enough to lend him the courage to meet her eye. The words sit heavily on his shoulders. When she reaches out to touch her hand to his face, he pulls away, not trusting the strength of his own resistance.

There a thousand things he thinks to ask. Questions of circumstances and action, and where they all now stand. But he feels it is no longer his place. A murderer of an estranged brother. No right at all.

So he stays silent, and she reaches to her handbag.

“Mama sent me this,” a photo is placed gingerly into his hands.

He looks, and for a few moments can make no sense of it. Then dim recognition floods in and he sees Joffre, no longer the awkward child of twelve that he had been when Cesare saw him last. His hair had been shorn short and the roundness gone from his cheeks. He looked exceptionally like their mother. The plump blond child had to be Giovanni.

“Good god,” he says.

He has missed this; had somehow along the way slipped out of the progression of birthdays and school and all the other partial fractions which when viewed from afar comprise the entirety of one’s life.

Lucrezia somehow understands, or else has misinterpreted an understanding and says that she can’t believe how much they’ve grown either.

But he knows she had kept in touch, had visited every summer while had he been shut up in a maze of air-conditioned cubicles. She could not know, but perhaps she did.

“I’m going to visit soon, perhaps in July,” she tells him, and it is near enough a whisper that he cannot help but look to her. There is an implication, something searching and tinged with hope. Her fingers fold over his bony-expanse of his wrist.

“Do you regret it?”

He wishes he could take back the words when she meets his gaze with wet eyes. But her voice, when she speaks, is strong and unwavering.

“Everyday, but what was there that I could do? Eighteen-- god. That’s too young for me to have given him any sort of proper life. I couldn’t put him through that, I couldn’t put myself through that.”

He has exhausted his boldness for the evening. If it were anyone else, but it is not, so he holds his tongue and allows her to curl up against his side.

When she excuses herself to go to sleep, he asks “Are you staying, then?”

She looks puzzled.

“Would you rather I left?” she laughs.

“No, no, of course not.”

It is something, if not quite a leap into the limitless unknown. There is both a break and a beginning. He sits with his hands on his knees .

He turns into bed himself shortly after and spends an age twisting the sheets into a knot as he tries to ease the tangle of worries in his mind. He has never felt so unsure of himself. He thinks of what she has said, of Giovanni, and of regret. Is that all there is to be in life-- simply regret upon regret? But she had managed to move past it, or moved forward despite it. It is a novel thought: to carry the past without thinking it a burden. There are fields of unimagined possibilities which people the world, and he has only now begun to discern their shapes. Somewhere, amongst the snowdrops and rue, he drifts off into sleep.

Outside the rain falls soundly on pavements and over the boughs of newly-leafed trees. It pours into the Thames, where it mingles with the current, and is born off into the spring night. He is not roused from the depths by the squeaking of the floorboards. Only wakes when she has settled herself on the edge of his bed, her hand trailing over the edge of the blanket.

“What are you doing?” he breathes out, sleep-addled and uncomprehending. Tries to look anywhere besides her bare legs.

“I didn’t phone you that evening solely because of Alfonso.” she pulls her feet up beside her on the bed.

His heart hammers in his chest.

“Then why?”

“I missed you. I could have phoned someone else, but I missed you. I tried to forget you, I thought it would be easier, with you away. But it wasn’t, you were always the standard against which I compared every other man I met, and they never measured up,” she reaches over, her hand trailing a burning path over his shoulder. “I don’t know if you remember, god, I must have been twelve or thirteen, I told you that I’d never love any other man as much I loved you. And it’s true, I haven’t. It just seemed so-- natural.”

He could shove her away, could deny it were true, that he did not feel the same. But he cannot, is too far gone.

“What about Alfonso?” he asks.

Her hand reaches his jaw, soft and familiar. He exhales a shaking breath.

“You cannot force someone to change,” her voice wavers. “I felt unloved.” is the only response which he receives. Her touch is firm.

She moves until she hovers over him, with eyes that are intensely blue in the light of the lamp. He can look nowhere else, only reaches up a hand to steady her. When he does not move away, she cups his face in her hands.

“Lucrezia, you shouldn’t,” he says, but the objection is half-hearted, even to his own ears.

“Why deny it any longer?” she regards him tenderly, searching for some answer or objection.

He cannot think of anything to say. A thousand times he had pulled away, always for her benefit, for her protection. He cannot now.

She pulls him nearer before touching her mouth to his. Her lips are hesitant, moving against his gently. When she pulls away to look at him, she is smiling.

He is intensely aware of the the red of her mouth, and the crinkles around her eyes. She brushes his hair back from his face. When he reaches for the hem of his shirt, she bats his hand away; wrinkling her nose in amusement as she does it herself. He will never love anyone as much as he does her.

He kisses her once more.

Later, she will lift her head from his chest and whisper to him: “Cesare, I think that you should get help.”

And he will whisper back “I know,”

Later he will reflect that life is a series of disparate halves. Of duplicities loosely connected by diaphanous threads. One made and remade the connections of memory at will. Now a new theory of time, now a new understanding of self. But perhaps, he will think, the understanding of these connections was in their impermanence, each merely a seed caught in the wind. The halves could never be entirely reconciled and one’s understanding of self was never absolute. Living was a process that demanded no resolutions. Sometimes it was better to leave the breaks unmended.

But for now there is only the soft expanse of her back beneath his hands and the sound of her warm laughter mingling with his own. And for a moment, the briefest of moments, he is secure in the knowledge that he loves and is loved in return.