Chapter 15
Cian’s ears are red with exertion as he opens the door. He leans on his crutches and says, ‘I hate baking and it’s far too fucking hot to have the oven on all day.’
‘Hello to you as well.’
He manoeuvres himself around, while huffing.
‘I feel bad making you hobble all the way here to let me in.’
‘I don’t hobble,’ he bites. A bunch of coats fall off the rack as he brushes past, and I pick them up behind him.
We go through to the hot kitchen, which smells more of egg than cake and Cian puts his injured leg up on the chair in front.
Does he even own a pair of trousers or is he rolling out these increasingly short shorts to mess with me?
‘It’s a furnace in here,’ he says as if to excuse the vast amount of skin he’s got on display. ‘I made a green smoothie, top shelf.’
‘No thanks.’ When I go in the fridge to get him a drink, I find a twelve pack of Coke. ‘Did you get these for me?’ I ask while cradling them in my arms.
Cian shakes his head disapprovingly. ‘You’re going to get diabetes and no, it was my dad. Crazy, I was never allowed fizzy drinks growing up.’
‘I don’t blame him. You’re too high energy for caffeine.’ There’s a pan levelled with something pale and bubbly behind the glass window of the oven. ‘Isn’t it meant to rise?’
‘It is rising.’
We both look at my phone in response to its buzzing. As I grab it, he says, ‘For someone not on social media, you’re on your phone a lot.’
Mum: I have an idea for a fantastic family day out. Two words: laser quest
Followed by links to a dozen things I will never click on. ‘Is laser quest back in fashion?’
Cian seems surprised by the turn in conversation. ‘I once got groped at a laser quest.’
‘Did you have those shorts on?’
He smirks for a second. ‘Stop objectifying me.’
Mum: Or bowling?
‘That’s the saddest ever reaction to a text message,’ Cian says.
‘My parents are trying to plan something fun.’
‘Again, your parents sound like arseholes.’
I turn the phone over in my hands. ‘They like forced fun. Bowling, bingo, funfairs, karaoke.’
‘You do karaoke with your parents?’
‘Sadly yes. Twice a year. Though it feels more often.’
‘I love bowling with my dad. It’s the one thing I can consistently beat him at.’
Why does the image of them bowling make me soft? I bet Cian delights in his glory and Brendan sulks.
Cian hops over to a cupboard to grab a bowl; it’s the first time I see him cross a room without crutches. ‘You’re moving around easier now.’
‘Another week like this and I’ll be ready to make it to Tesco and back.’
‘The big Tesco?’ I ask.
He pouts at me. ‘Why are you shitting on my goal? I’m talking about the little Tesco up the road.’
‘Sorry.’
‘I saw you there once. Months ago. Before we met. You were with another girl.’
‘Kasie?’
He shrugs as he sits back down. ‘I don’t know. She wasn’t from Chat. Short girl. Long plaits. Black.’
He’s seen her. It’s weird and I don’t know why. ‘I can’t believe you saw me with Kasie. When was this?’
‘Around Christmas. Everything was decorated. I recognised you from work but didn’t know you to say hi or anything. Are you creeped out that I’m mentioning it now?’
‘No. Well, yes, kind of.’
Kasie and I were at that little Tesco so often, trundling about in loungewear and no make-up, as if the rest of the world didn’t exist. Sometimes we went for essentials, other times simply to get our steps in after a day working from home.
Kasie was obsessed with hitting ten thousand, while I was gleeful if my average hovered around three thousand.
‘What’s wrong?’ Cian asks.
‘Nothing,’ I reply, abruptly aware of how everything is too warm and too close.
‘Zoe?’
‘It’s nothing. I’m not in a great mood. Maybe I shouldn’t have come over.’
He pulls his arms behind his head and grimaces at the stretch. The undersides of his arms are paler than the rest of him. ‘Of course you should have come over.’
‘I’m meant to come over here and make you laugh. Not bring you down.’
‘When was that decided? I thought the unspoken deal here was we’re both being angsty and depressed together.’ His face breaks into a full smile.
‘Oh my God.’ I cringe. ‘Is that what we’re doing? Two sad sacks hanging out at your dad’s house, like moody teenagers.’ I sweep the dustings of flour into a pile and grab the box of icing sugar.
‘I get that you’re a whole person,’ Cian says, matter of fact.
The text on the box blurs as I try to read it.
‘Besides,’ he says, ‘you’re not the funny one here. I am.’
As I begin to cry, he taps my leg with his own. ‘Why are you suddenly upset?’
Loss sits at the bottom of my heart every minute of the day, though when I’m distracted, I can live with it. It doesn’t stop me. Until it does. There’s a tissue in my pocket and I turn away from him to blow my nose.
‘I feel like I’ve said the wrong thing,’ he says self-consciously.
‘Kasie died in May. She, uh—’ I want to tell him, though search my head for too long trying to find the words.
‘We don’t need to talk about this. Change of topic,’ he says, playing up the boredom in his voice. ‘Do you want to see my X-ray pictures? They’re disgusting. Or we can watch Up and cry together.’
‘Kasie died in May. She was my closest friend, and she died. She was twenty-nine.’ There, it’s out.
‘Zoe, that’s terrible.’
I try to focus on something that’s not him, or his eyes, or the timbre in his voice when he says my name, because any one of these things will crush me.
‘That’s why you were off work.’
‘When it happened, I didn’t take any time off.
I kept going. Completely normal. Then one day Nicole found me freaking out in the corridors and took me home.
When I went to my doctor, I was embarrassed because I thought I was wasting her time.
I got signed off for a week. Then two. I was referred for bereavement counselling.
I’ve never been good at talking about things, then I was expected to talk to a stranger.
’ I wipe my nose with the back of my hand.
‘The irony is not lost on me, that I don’t talk about things, yet I’ve just blurted this all out to you. ’
Cian gives me a small, closed-mouth smile. ‘How are you doing now?’
‘Not sure. Most of the time I think I’m okay.
I can get on with things. Get through the week.
It’s getting easier. Though, it scared me, being so lost in myself.
I felt like I’d become someone else, someone too raw to be out in the world and I’m scared of it happening again.
Because I still can’t get my head around the fact that she’s gone, and I miss her so much. ’
He shuffles his chair to a drawer, shuffles back with a great amount of noise, then puts a handful of brown napkins, the kind you get from fast-food outlets, on the table in front of me. After a few moments he asks, ‘How long had you been friends?’
‘Since secondary school.’
‘That’s a long time.’
‘She’d moved from South London and she was quite shy. Our form tutor put us together. Said it would help Kasie to be with someone outgoing. After a few days of me dragging her around, she admitted she found me irritating, said I was a show-off.’
‘You?’ Cian mocks gently. ‘No way.’
‘I was so stung by it. I wanted her to like me. I went on a full charm offensive after that, desperate to impress her. It worked, because despite how different we were, we became friends.’
‘You were different how?’ Cian asks as he leans one elbow on the table. ‘She wasn’t a flirtatious party girl?’
‘No.’ I try to clear my eyes. ‘Not at all. She was sensible and homely. Would much rather stay in than go out. She loved gaming and cooking and she was always making me watch some cheesy American TV series from the noughties. Last year she qualified as an optometrist; she wanted to have her own clinic one day. Kasie had so many setbacks, yet also this incredible strength of mind. Maybe it was because she was quite religious or maybe it was just her.’ I stop and glance up at the ceiling. ‘I’m sorry. I’m going on.’
‘You can talk about her. I like hearing about your life and your friends. But if you want to stop, stop.’
‘My mum hates when I talk about her.’
‘Why?’
‘Because it’s sad. She also hates that I’m still living in the flat.’
Cian nods as if he’s worked something out. ‘You lived together. That’s why Eric is with you now.’
‘I still send her text messages,’ I say, because a part of me needs to confess this and hear it’s not right, that I shouldn’t be doing it.
‘Every time I want to tell her something I write her a message. Then get upset when they go undelivered.’ The brown napkin begins to disintegrate with my tears.
‘Does this all sound completely unhinged to you? Still living in the flat, still messaging her?’
He studies me and I wait for the judgement; instead he says, ‘May was not that long ago.’
I wipe my face a final time and hope the crying is out of my system. Sometimes it’s like this, it needs to come out and then I’m done; though other times it goes on and on till I feel there’s nothing left in me.
‘It’s so shit you lost her,’ Cian says plainly.
It is. It really is. ‘I think I’m ready for that change of topic now.’
‘You’re still crying.’
‘Cian, please.’
‘Distract you? Right. Okay.’ He smacks his palms against the table. ‘Do you want to do some colouring-in with me? I have Marvel mindfulness, Disney villain mindfulness, naturist mindfulness.’ He gets up slowly and stumbles over to the oven using one crutch.
‘Do you mean nature mindfulness, because naturist is the nudist movement.’
He rests on the counter to check his cake. ‘Yeah exactly, it’s like outlines of penises dancing through fields and stuff. For an old Irish lady, my aunt is super liberal.’
‘That would definitely cheer me up.’
Cian watches as I get up to put the napkins in the bin.
‘This is why I don’t like talking,’ I say, conscious that he’s now keeping an eye on me. ‘It always ends in tears.’
‘You know what my dad says to do when you don’t want to talk?’
‘Bench-press two hundred pounds.’