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the full drama of what had happened, and it wasn’t until we returned to school the week after Easter that the story began to emerge and develop, when Fabián turned up with a dramatic plaster cast encasing his right arm. The celebrity conferred by a glamorous injurycan, in the right circumstances, be considerable, and Fabián milked the situation for all it was worth.
    My mother had just dropped me off and I was walking towards the classroom, preparing a daring adaptation of my encounter with the French flower dealer’s daughter for the benefit of Fabián – and of anyone else who would listen – when I was out-trumped before I’d even had the opportunity to begin. Verena Hermes collared me in the corridor and gave me the news.
    ‘Have you seen Fabián yet?’ she demanded.
    ‘Not yet.’
    She seemed pleased to hear this. Her multiple earrings jangled, and a wave of her scent engulfed me as she leant forward conspiratorially. ‘He’s had a terrible accident. Fabián was right in the middle of that earthquake, and he broke his arm saving a little girl who was about to get crushed to death in the crowd.’
    ‘Sounds very heroic,’ I said.
    ‘He’s so cool,’ said Verena. ‘But he doesn’t like to talk about it too much. So you go easy on him, okay?’
    ‘I’ll try,’ I said to a swaying, tinted bob of hair as she turned her back on me and flounced into the classroom.
    Fabián sat at the centre of an admiring throng, gesticulating wildly with the plaster cast even as some members of his audience tried to sign it. I noticed as I drew nearer that Verena had already scrawled her own name in thick red marker pen on the most prominent location.
    ‘I hear you don’t like to talk about it,’ I said.
    ‘I don’t,’ said Fabián. ‘It brings back too many memories. Now shut up and listen. Andrea, thank you, what a lovely signature. So, if you guys would care to make your way over here to the model skeleton, I will show you where the breakage occurred. These are called the radius and the ulna, and my ulna is broken both here, and here. A smallportion of this bone will always be adrift inside my arm – a reminder of the cost of being a hero. Please don’t weep, ladies. You know I would have done the same for many of you. I guess some people are just in the right place at the right time …’

THREE
    Unlike Suarez, my parents weren’t equipped with an adventure playground of a house, so when Fabián came to stay with me we would spend most of the weekend at the Sporting Club, a sealed New Town compound where expats could paddle safely up and down the deep blue Olympic rooftop pool towards the volcanoes on the horizon, take an aerobics class or, more likely, enjoy a lightly grilled cheese sandwich with their Campari and soda.
    Fabián and I would maraud around, making the place less relaxing for others by openly appraising budding daughters in bikinis, messing around in the bowling alley or attempting elaborate formation dives into the pool. My mother, meanwhile, would rain earnest sweat on to the clay tennis courts as my father made polite conversation with fellow club members in the library – a room which couldn’t have been further in spirit from its namesake at Suarez’s. This one qualified for the name on the grounds that it had panelling, a couple of yellow paperbacks and the Herald Tribune on a table, and I can confidently assert that not a single interesting word was ever uttered within its walls. To me, at that time, my parents seemed so crushingly predictable that I could never understand why Fabián sometimes seemed to covet them: a fine illustration of how the comparative glamour of the world he lived in blinded me to its downside.
    We were due to go to the Sporting Club that weekend, but the trip was called off at the last minute because of Fabián’s arm and no contingency plan was made in its place. Secretly this was a relief to me, because it prevented Fabián from performing his latest and