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For the funeral, Charles had to borrow a suit jacket.
He didn’t have one of his own, not one that fit him anymore. He had plenty of shirts with stiff collars and ironed sleeves that itched his wrists, shirts that he only wore when his mother insisted, shirts he hated. A childhood spent in t-shirts and race suits bred a hatred for formal clothes that spread through his bones. To be rid of it, he’d have to cut it out like a cancer.
He had proper trousers, only worn once or twice, and a number of starched white shirts, and even a tie that his father helped him with when his own hands shook too much.
But a suit jacket. He had to wear Lorenzo’s.
It was just slightly too big on him. If he scrunched his hands up, folded his knuckles inwards towards his wrists, he could hide his trembling hands from anyone who looked at him.
He didn’t notice the cameras at the funeral. For one of the worst days of his life, he doesn’t remember much of it; he remembers crying, and crying - and then, not being able to cry at all anymore. It was only days later, when he dared to pick his phone up, when he saw the footage of his godfather’s funeral circulating, when he saw his own face as he stood beside Jules’ coffin.
He doesn’t recognise himself at first. His hair is all messed up, even though he thinks he remembers his mother fixing it for him before they left the house, and his skin is translucent, like he hasn’t seen the sun all Summer. He looks gaunt, he looks sick, he looks-
He looks half-dead.
He feels half-dead, too.
In his borrowed suit jacket and his mussed up hair, the boy in the video isn’t him. He understands now; he must have died with Jules, because the boy in the video isn’t him, it’s not him, it’s not-
Back in Monaco, he knocks over a glass in the kitchen. He could have caught it, probably, if he tried, if he was alive, if he was the boy in the video, if he wasn’t dead already.
Charles watches as the boy in the video watches, as the glass explodes into pieces on the kitchen tiles. He doesn’t feel anything, and neither does the boy in the video. The boy in the video doesn’t care, even though he is still alive, but Charles does - if he doesn’t clean up the mess, his mother will have to, or Lorenzo will, because Arthur walks around in bare feet and he might cut himself if they don’t clean up after Charles.
He nicks his finger while picking up the shards, and he doesn’t mind that either-
There’s blood on his fingertips. He thinks about shaking Jenson Button’s hand, Nico Rosberg’s hand, everyone’s fucking hand, why will no one leave him alone, what fucking good is a handshake, it won’t bring Jules back, why do people keep trying to shake his godforsaken hand-
Then he rinses the blood off, and he dries his hands on his t-shirt.
The cut on his finger is thin and shallow. In a few hours, it has already closed over. His family doesn’t notice. After dinner, after he’s pushed his food around on the plate and smashed it together enough that it looks like he’s eaten some of it, he tells his mother that he’s going for a walk. He drinks a bottle of wine in the harbour.
His mother is worried about him. She doesn’t hide it well; he can tell by the way she hovers around, always half-reaching for him, like he is about to slip through her fingers if she doesn’t ruffle his hair or ask how his day was or give him a bigger portion at dinner.
At times, he wants to get angry.
At times, he wants to scream in her face that Jules is fucking dead and Charles is not the boy in the video and everyone acts like he’s alive but he can’t convince himself that it’s the truth. It would sound insane if he tried, so he doesn’t.
One morning, he tells his mother that he’s heading out. He gets the train from Monte-Carlo into Nice and, seconds after stepping onto the platform, he sprints for the bathroom to vomit.
He is in Nice for twenty-five minutes. Then, when he’s certain he won’t be sick again, he boards the next train to Paris.
Three days later, he returns to Monaco, ashamed and hungover. His mother doesn’t speak to him for the rest of the evening. She starts to cry every time she looks at him, so he goes to stay with Pierre for a week; he only leaves because Lorenzo threatens to drag him back to Monaco by his hair, so he goes.
His mother goes back to hovering again. It’s better than when she cries, so he lets her ruffle his hair and tells her that his day was fine, quiet, I’m just tired, I didn’t sleep well and he eats everything on his plate at dinner.
He doesn’t want to make a mess. Arthur still walks around with his feet bare, and he doesn’t want his little brother to get hurt when their mother and Lorenzo finally tire of cleaning up after Charles.
The grief passes. It’s no longer a constant feeling of agony and mourning, when he finds himself in Formula One, it finally settles to something quieter, something akin to suffocation. He reads what people say about him online, how obsessed they are with the way in which he suffers. After every terrible race, he sees pictures of the devastation on his own face.
People like to see when he cries, it seems, as if there is something mythical about the way his eyes shine when he pulls his helmet off, when his car crashes into the barriers again. Maybe, he thinks, it’s better than the truth. Maybe it’s better for them to confuse his rage with devastation.
It’s more common now, for him to be angry.
He sometimes misses being kind.
Max makes him kind.
Charles will let the Tifosi fall in love with how he suffers. It’s easy to be angry at Max. He doesn’t know if the two things are mutually exclusive. Is he angry at Max because he makes him kind, or is he kind to Max because he can be angry with him, or is it neither of those? He feels lost, sometimes, he feels adrift, and somewhere between the curve of Max’s arm around him on a podium and the wave of Max’s hand when they discuss a race, he feels at peace.
He isn’t the boy in the video, but maybe he’s more alive than him now.
It’s 2022 and he places first in Austria. It isn’t even his first win, yet he will forever remember the champagne, how it’s sticky and warm when Max sprays it over his back and, for the first time in years, he can’t feel the oppressive weight of grief in his chest. Max seems to be happier that Charles came in first than he would have been if he placed first himself. It’s better if Charles doesn’t analyse it, so he doesn’t.
He lets himself laugh and shakes his head, almost in disapproval, at Max when the stream of champagne stops. Then, they clink their bottles together and drink at the same time. He can’t be angry at Max now because, for the first time in years, he feels so fucking alive.
He isn’t the boy in the video, but he isn’t not him either. He broke a glass in Monaco that his brother could have hurt himself on but, at the same time, he didn’t, because he cleaned it up afterwards, and he ran to Paris for three days, and to Rouen for a week, but he came back too, and he both is and is not this person.
Maybe, he is something new, someone new.
He is the smell of burnt rubber around a hairpin, braking late and holding the racing line at his own peril. He is the hurried shift in gears in his own car, when Arthur grips his seat as he roars with laughter and the engine roars underneath them, when Charles knows exactly where the biting point is in the clutch but he risks it, dares to rev the engine a little harder before he shifts gears, and he knows it will work. He is the curve of Max’s arm around him, and the pressure of Pierre’s hands on his shoulder, and the slap of Sebastian’s palm on his back, not so long ago and, at the same time, decades ago. He is the scream of the crowds in Monza and he is the red smoke in Imola.
He is Charles, and he is no longer Charles.
Maybe, he is something new, someone new.