requiem.

Words, I have discovered, can haunt you more than memory.
My mother named me Adrien, after her father, and I am haunted by him to this day. I still hear his ragged breath or the chink of the ice cubes in his glass. When I was young we would play for hours in his house that sat in a supple curve on the coast, the waves lapping at the shore and the cry of gulls perpetually above, circling our heads. Both he and that house smelled of old, aging cloth and the pungency of alcohol, the whispers of the past seventy years trapped within the garish walls.
In the backroom my grandmother would hold my hand in her gnarled one, the coarse fingers grazing my pert skin, and whisper stories of a time that seemed dead to me, a world too beautiful and brilliant to be associated with our own. I would climb in to Vivian's bed at night and when he was too lazy to push me away, I would confide in him, tell him that I believed she was a gypsy, a witch. She would peer in to our palms and sometimes, when the light twinkled brightly in her clouded eye, she would tell us our future. Ten years later, her predictions became reality. Her husband died, at my hand, no less.
I remember the limp whiskey glass in his greying hand, laced in his breath, the dewy gossamer of spittle that clung to each lip as he parted them, as my grandfather muttered in an airless whisper his everlasting words in broken French. With me, solely, he disclosed a secret that narrowly escaped the grave.
It's a shame for him, however, that Vivian and I knew already of his wife's dark talent.

As I score my hand along an adjacent tombstone the moss peels off in a dusty clump, scattering upon the stretch of tired grass below it. A fleck lands upon the polished surface of my shoe, and hesitantly I brush it off, loathing each moment I have to stand beside the open grave, gaping like a missing tooth in the earth. The coffin sits at the bottom and I watch a woman weep as she tosses a scatter of soil in to it. My mother stands stoic beside her, make-up perfect, a faint breeze tugging at the veil spread like a web across her face. My father is standing behind her her, trying not to look bored, whilst he persistently fidgets.
Vivian is the furthest away, hands casually placed in the thick pockets of his unnaturally shiny suit, facing the church at the bottom of the hill. His dark eyes loom over the spire and his mouth twitches faintly. I almost didn't recognise him when we met at the dinner last night. Gone were his rich blond curls of childhood, like my own. His hair was a mass of black that made his lily skin starker, sharper, than it used to be. It matched his vile tongue.
A silver crucifix dangles from one ear lobe, a clipped ring in the other. His lip is curled as he listens to the priest, similar to an hour earlier, when my mother delivered her eulogy. As much as he would like to deny it, he and my mother are very similar; in fact, I wouldn't be surprised if I was the child of my late aunt Francoise, and we had been switched in our cradles as mewling babies.

After the ceremony is over I breathe a silent sigh of relief, and am about to follow the dawdling line of my relatives as they mutter to one another, when I spot Vivian hesitating at the edge of the grave, one hand outstretched. I give him a curious look but he doesn't see me. He drops something in to the grave and moves away, quickly, as the men hired to fill in the grave approach wearing soiled overalls and churlish, solemn faces. I wait for him as the family move on, ignoring the glance my mother gives me as she passes, an arm draped awkwardly around the sobbing woman's shoulder. He doesn't look at me but draws to a halt where I stand.
"Hello," I say in our mother tongue, and he nods, rolling his eyes.
"You don't think it's appropriate to speak French at Grandmère's funeral?" I ask him. He snorts and fishes in to his breast pocket for a packet of cigarettes. He breaks the seal and lets the stringy film flutter through his fingers.
"I think funerals are a joke," he says in English and I attempt a smile.
"I didn't know you were going to be here," I struggle. "After..."
"After?" He looks at me coyly.
"After aunt Francoise... Mother told me you live with your other grandparents now."
He lifts his shoulders in a shrug and utters something like a laugh, yet it sounds beaten and hollow, like knuckles rapping on an empty wooden box.
"Why should we talk about these things as though they were yesterday?" he grins without humour. "It's been at least twelve years."
I watch as he lights a cigarette with a grimy silver lighter, clamping it between his fingers and taking a heavy drag. The smoke curls and my eyes water lightly. I fan it away though it doesn't seem to bother him.
"I came... to make sure she was dead."
My throat tightens. "Vivian, I'm so sorry--"
"Don't be."
He says this with a weighted conviction. I immediately shut my mouth. My eyes swim and touch his face, and my heart jumps when I notice he is looking directly in to my face, his oily pupils glittering suspiciously. He is, and always has been, devastatingly beautiful, tall, strong and intelligent, favoured by my parents, therefore being the bane of my existence for an endless number of years. But now he stands alone before me, as he always has, smoking his unfiltered cigarette as the sun above us catches its sweep in a dull cloud. I'm glad the ghosts of our conjoined past are dead and buried.
"Would you like to join me for a drink, later?" I ask.
"I leave tomorrow afternoon," he says with a smile. "I don't see why not."
Currently, he is staying in the guest bedroom in the chateau my parents own, one of the many houses I grew up in. This one, however, has been my favourite. My room leads out on to a small sliver of veranda from which you can see the vineyards and the spray of the ocean beyond the cliffs.
I often recall myself, four years old, lost among those high ropes of vine, whilst the chime of Vivian's laughter filled my ears like treacle.
Now there is only the soft whistling howl of the sea in the distance, rasping against the shore.