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carelessness had got them thinking about the side of Ross’s head, the thickness of the bandage unable to disguise the fact that there was a bit missing.
    Had some of my brother’s brain spilled out into the snow? I wondered. Had the rescue party covered it up with more snow? And when the snow melted in the spring, were there still fragments
of skull on the mountain?
    If this holiday was an attempt to move on, it hadn’t been a great success. The last time we were on holiday, Ross was with us. A winter holiday, so very different from the sticky heat of
Florence, but a family holiday nonetheless. When you remember holidays you think about the sights and the weather, but somehow you always forget the confinement of being together, meal after meal.
Ross used to dominate the conversation, bantering with my father and joshing me while my mother gazed at him adoringly. Now, his absence made him seem almost more present.
    You know that expression, ‘the elephant in the room’? You’re the elephant, Ross!
    I thought he’d quite like that description. Occasionally, I found myself speaking to my brother in my head even though we hadn’t had that kind of relationship when he was alive. I
was surprised in retrospect how much we’d had in common just by virtue of being in the same family. Ross was the one person who would have understood how pitiful my parents were in their
grief, and yet how annoying they still managed to be.
    ‘You have to deal with reality,’ said my father eventually. I wasn’t sure whether it was intended as a reprimand to me or an instruction to himself. ‘You have to get to
grips with what’s in front of you.’
    What was in front of him now was the giant steak, charred and leaking blood onto the wooden board on which it was presented.
    My father looked up at the waiter.
    ‘We’d like Chef to cook it for us if that’s not too much trouble!’ he barked.
    I pictured the chef’s face as the waiter returned to the kitchen. During my summer job I’d learned that customers who sent their steaks back to be well done were even further down
the hierarchy of contempt than pot washers.
    When the steak was returned to us, it was pale brown all the way through, as if it had been given ten minutes in a microwave.
    My father doled out the leathery slices.
    ‘How many for you, Angus?’
    ‘Just one.’
    ‘One?’
    ‘Angus has never had a huge appetite,’ my mother reminded him.
    Ross had an enormous appetite. Was it over-sensitive of me to hear an unspoken comparison?
    I was completely different to Ross. My brother was dark, handsome and built; I had inherited my mother’s willowy height, and, although my hair wasn’t orange like my father’s, I
had enough of his freckly complexion to be called a ginge at school.
    Ross had been captain of the rugby and rowing teams and Head Boy; I enjoyed football and had never been considered for the prefect body. Ross’s summer job after leaving school had been a
lifeguard at the local open-air swimming pool. Being a lifesaver was something to boast about, unlike being a kitchen boy. Not that Ross ever actually saved a life, although plenty of girls
pretended to be struggling in the hope of being manhandled by him. Ross had starred in his own version of
Baywatch
. In Guildford.
    I was never sure whether the truth was that my parents weren’t very good at disguising their obvious preference, or that I was in fact pretty mediocre compared to Ross. It wasn’t
something you could talk about without sounding like a whinger, so I never did, except occasionally to Marcus, who knew what Ross was really like. Was it Ross’s sporting prowess that had made
the teachers at our school so willing to turn a blind eye to his other activities, we’d sometimes speculated, or had they too lived in fear of him? Perhaps Ross and his acolytes kept a record
of punishable offences committed by the staff as well as the lower-school boys? I’d never know, because nobody said