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Five
    Simon
    Dammit. He should have kept his eye on the breakfast instead of phoning Dad. Smoke was billowing out of the grill, which called for action before the fire alarm went off and woke Carmela. He opened the back door, pelted outside and scraped the burned edges of crumbed fish into the compost. There. Good as new.
    Nico was sitting on a stool, running a toy Jeep up and down the kitchen bench. ‘Did you burn my fish?’ he asked, as Simon produced it with a flourish.
    ‘I chargrilled it, just to add a little flavour. One for you, sir, and one for me.’
    Nico looked at his plate with dark wide-open eyes. There was no doubt about that child’s paternity. People often commented on how much he took after both Simon and Luke: compact, with a smile that made strangers coo over him. Shame about the pudding-basin haircut, though; it made him look like a girl. Simon had complained to Carmela, but she just laughed. ‘He’ll be a bloody macho pain in the arse soon enough,’ she said, ‘and then he can have a six-pack and an American military flat-top, but can’t he be pretty now, since he’s only four years old?’ Simon had shrugged, and given up.
    ‘And one for Mummy?’ Nico asked now.
    ‘She prefers yoghurt.’
    ‘Yum.’ Nico picked up a bottle of ketchup and squeezed it with both hands. Nothing came out. He squeezed harder, his tongue sticking out, until a jet of red shot onto his pyjama top. ‘Oops.’
    Simon laughed. ‘Your pyjamas were hungry,’ he said.
    Nico stuck his finger into the largest blob and licked it. ‘Is Granny your mummy?’ he asked.
    ‘She is indeed.’
    ‘And she’s Aunt Kate’s mummy too?’
    ‘Well done.’
    ‘Mummy calls her Eyelash.’
    Simon kept his face straight. Nico was very alert to being patronised or laughed at; that was something else they had in common. ‘So she does. That’s your granny’s name. Eilish, actually. A bit like Eyelash.’
    ‘And what’s Grandpa’s name?’
    ‘Grandpa is called Luke. Shall I cut up your fish for you?’ Simon made the mistake of leaning across to help, commandeering the child-sized knife and fork.
    ‘Grr!’ roared Nico. ‘I can do it!’
    ‘Okay, okay. Keep your hair on.’
    It was painful to watch the slow mangling of that fish. How did Carmela cope with this kind of thing, day after day? Nico smashed it to a pulp with his fork before stirring in liberal dollops of ketchup. It didn’t even look like food anymore. Simon had heard some of Carmela’s friends—including the two house husbands she hung out with—complaining that they had put on weight because they couldn’t resist eating their children’s leftovers. Simon found this incomprehensible. He would have to be starving—literally, crawling across the desert with vultures circling overhead—before he popped one of those mushed-up, masticated, ketchup-smothered delights into his own mouth.
    Coffee was a much better idea. He made himself a perfect cup with the new espresso machine, revelling in its rich and bitterscents as crema settled in a white film across the top of the black. Simon took coffee-making extremely seriously. Holding the cup in one hand, he slid onto a stool and pulled the newspaper closer. Ah, this was the life. He didn’t ask for much—family, work, a decent cup of coffee, and enough time in the summer for cricket. A bat had been put into his hands as soon as he could walk, and his first memory was of him and his dad playing with it on the lawn of his grandparents’ farmhouse.
    He leafed through the paper. War, sanctions, a row over import tariffs. The test match at Lord’s. Nico was chattering, but to Simon it was just background noise. He carried on reading, murmuring mmm and wow at what he hoped were the right places.
    ‘Bruvver or sister?’ Nico was asking. ‘Dad! Bruvver or sister?’
    ‘Mm?’
    ‘What will our baby be?’
    The Aussies were two hundred and five for nine at close of play. ‘ Human, I hope.’
    Nico kicked his