Page 54 of So, I Met This Guy . . .

‘If you love art so much, why did you drop out of art college?’

There was a pause and Maggie uttered four words.

‘Because my brother died.’

How can four words describe the magnitude of such an event?

It wasn’t the answer Flick was expecting and she turned to Maggie. ‘Sorry, I had no idea.’

‘It’s OK. It’s a long time ago now. Motorbike accident.’

Short phrases. Keep it simple. Even now, all those years later, the feelings threatened to come flooding back. The knock on the door. The policeman. Her mother dropping to her knees, howling.

‘My parents needed me.’

Her brother’s bedroom, kept exactly the same as the moment he left to go back to university that term, never to return. The duvet cover freshly washed each week. The faded posters. The silence. The blame. Her parents’ marriage never recovered. Had any of them? Funny, sweet, clever, reckless Charlie. He was twenty-one, just a year between them. Her big brother. Motorbike mad. Skinny-hipped, biker jacket, patchouli oil. Even now she couldn’t smell that scent without thinking of him ruffling her hair and feeling the weight of his fingers on her scalp.

‘So, have I changed your mind?’ Forcing herself back to the present, Maggie turned to Flick. ‘Does it mean anything now?’

Flick nodded. ‘Yeah. Maybe.’

‘OK, I’ll take maybe.’ Maggie smiled.

‘And I admit, it’s a very good painting.’

‘I’m sure Michelangelo will be pleased to hear that.’

Flick grinned and went to pull out her iPhone from her bag to take a photo but was stopped by a security guard who spoke a torrent of Italian and waved his arms.

‘No photos,’ translated Maggie.

Flick quickly put away her phone.

‘You’ll just have to remember it. Like we used to do when we’d travel before smart phones and we’d run out of film for our cameras.’ Catching Flick’s horrified expression, Maggie laughed. ‘Take a photo with your eyes instead.’

‘Like how?’

‘Like this.’ Maggie stared up the ceiling without blinking. ‘Imagine you’re going to have to describe it later to someone, notice the colours, the use of light and perspective, then really focus on the details, look for the surprising ones, hidden away, like little jewels for you to uncover.’ She paused, her eyes searching them out.

Flick watched her. Transfixed. She’d never looked at art like this before. No one had ever explained or talked about it in this way. On school trips, she would race around art galleries, bored. She remembered once when she’d gone to Paris and seen the Mona Lisa. She just remembered how small it was. How disappointing. Couldn’t see what the fuss was all about.

But this. This was different.

‘Think about how it makes you feel, how it inspires you or takes you out of yourself into something bigger; think of all the people who have stood where we’re standing now and looked up, all their dreams and aspirations projecting onto the ceiling above.’

All those people who won’t ever get to stand here and see this, thought Maggie, an image of her brother swimming before her eyes. And suddenly she was right back in that space in between. Between throwing her arms around his neck in a casual goodbye and the sound of his voice – ‘Bye, Mags, see you in you the summer’ – and the knock on the door.

They were so close and yet so different. The joke in the family was that she got all the looks while he got all the brains, but that wasn’t true. He got both. While she failed every A-level except art, Charlie excelled at school. He was studying medicine to be a doctor, just like their dad and grandfather before them. He would tease her that he was taking one for the team, so she could pursue her life as an artist. In the three decades since he died she’d been seeing art for him, looking at it with her eyes and wishing he could see it too.

‘OK, I’ve got it.’

Flick’s voice caused Maggie to zone back in.

‘It’s saved to the memory bank. Better than a photo.’ She grinned. ‘No carbon footprint from data storage using up all that energy in some building out in the desert somewhere.’

‘Er, right, yes.’

Before coming on this trip, Maggie had thought doing your bit for the environment meant recycling and reusable carrier bags, but sometimes being with Flick felt like being on holiday with Greta Thunberg. It was both educational and terrifying. That said, Greta would have never got on a plane, so there you go.