Chapter 23
Now
Someone’s at the front door and it’s too aggressive a knock to be a Jehovah or the local wayward delivery man. The sight of crumpled tissues at the side of my bed ignites almost enough shame for me to consider shutting the blind and going back to sleep.
I threw on clothes when I got up earlier to make myself a sandwich, hoping it would soak up some of the alcohol and regret I felt. It didn’t and I went straight back to bed with indigestion.
The knocking continues.
I get up to look through the side window and for the briefest moment I see Kasie. Though of course when I open the front door, it’s not Kasie; it’s her mum, Amara. As we stand opposite each other, I see the sadness, the way it’s etched itself across her face and in her posture.
Behind her, Ikenna stands by a car. He’s dressed for church, in a dark suit and a white shirt. He looks impeccably put together, while I most definitely look like a woman who drank nine units of alcohol and cried herself to sleep.
‘I knew it,’ Amara says with a swift point of her finger. ‘You’re not sick. You just couldn’t be bothered.’ Her voice is clipped, as if there’s a time limit on each of her points. ‘Same Zoe as always.’
‘No,’ I try, scrambling to get up to speed with what’s happening, why she’s here.
‘You don’t show up,’ Amara says. ‘That’s your thing. Fair-weather friend. When you needed someone to move into this place, it was Kasie. When you wanted someone to drag to Asia, it was Kasie. No care given to how dangerous that could be for her. It worked for you.’
‘Please—’ I try, though my voice is too insignificant to reach through her anger, her justified rage.
‘My daughter loved you.’ Amara’s voice cracks and Ikenna steps closer. ‘She loved you. Yet in January, she was in hospital for three weeks and you never showed your face once.’
I don’t dare look at Ikenna, because I can’t take seeing him realise the truth about me. That I am not someone worth supporting. That I am someone who didn’t do the right thing when the time came.
‘I tried. I couldn’t.’
‘And then,’ Amara continues, ‘the last time. Those days before she died.’
‘I was scared,’ I say, crushed by the weight of the broken promise. ‘I couldn’t.’
‘I’m glad you had that choice, Zoe. I wish you all the best.’ Amara embraces Ikenna then walks back to her car.
‘Why did she come here?’ I ask him. ‘Why did you let her come here?’
‘I know you’re not trying to put this on me.’
‘You could have warned me you were going to bring her here.’
‘I didn’t bring her,’ he says calmly, as if I’m a child who needs talking down from a tantrum. ‘She wanted to see you. She’s wanted to see you since May.’
When I drop my head, I become aware of my arms trembling.
‘Where have you been?’ Ikenna asks firmly, then pauses for me to answer. ‘Why haven’t you called her?’ He stops talking and I wonder if he sees it too, that my whole body is shaking.
‘Zoe, stop trying to do this alone. We’re all grieving. It helps when we come together.’
‘Why are you giving me such a hard time? I couldn’t face it, okay.
I couldn’t face being around all that grief again, seeing Kasie’s family and friends, all the people I’ve avoided since the funeral.
I know I should have been there. I should have been there today, and I should have been there in January, and I should have been there when she died. ’
It took me a while to stop crying, not helped by Ikenna patting my back and saying, ‘Crying is self-soothing.’ He then, despite it being only seventeen degrees, pulled both sun loungers from the storage box, without ceremony, and insisted we sit outside, claiming vitamin D and fresh air would help.
‘How was it?’ I ask as I put my Coke can on the grass and tighten the fleece blanket around myself. ‘The church service?’
Ikenna puffs on his vape. ‘It was church.’
‘Are you religious at all?’
He fires me one of his sharp-eyed stares. ‘I don’t believe in organised religion. I believe in me, myself and I.’
The smell of artificial banana carries on the breeze.
‘I did try to call you,’ Ikenna says. ‘This morning, I called several times. Amara insisted on coming here. I thought you two would talk. I wasn’t expecting what happened, but then anger is one of the stages of grief. Why haven’t you called or been to see her?’
I was too consumed by my own grief at the start, and then the weeks rolled into months and it felt not so much too late to reach out, more that time had passed, and I’d somehow got away with it.
‘Amara appreciates that Kasie’s friends keep in touch. You were her closest friend. You need to energise whatever guilt you’re feeling and use that energy to make amends and do better.’
‘Amara will never forgive me. And she shouldn’t. I don’t deserve it. I should have been there.’
‘What you need to consider is faith.’
‘You just said you don’t believe.’
‘No, but Kasie did. So does Amara. That whole family, they’re hardcore church people.
Their whole thing is forgiveness and God’s will.
’ Ikenna waves a hand dismissively above his head.
‘Were you aware that both of Kasie’s parents knew they carried the sickle cell trait before they decided to have children? ’
I’m unsure what point he’s trying to make by bringing this up.
‘I was shocked when I found out,’ he says. ‘The idea that you have a chance of passing this thing to your offspring and you leave it up to God. I could never.’
‘Kasie wanted children,’ I tell him. ‘She had names picked out.’
‘That girl, I swear, she never let it stop her doing anything. Alex told me that Kasie wanted to enter the marathon ballot with him once.’
‘No way,’ I laugh.
‘Alex talked her out of it. Shame. It would have been inspiring if she had done it. She could have showed how strength of mind—’
‘No,’ I say, ‘that’s not true. Kasie wouldn’t have been able to train for something like that.
He was right to have stopped her. I know sometimes it felt like she could do everything, and she wanted to believe she could do everything, but the reality was different.
’ It feels like a betrayal, even now, to admit that Kasie was a person with a chronic disease.
‘Do you donate blood?’
Ikenna’s face drops in shock. ‘Of all the ridiculous questions. Zoe, I have Ro subtype blood. Do appreciate how vital it is for me to keep up with my donations. It’s my duty. Unbelievable they only let me do it every twelve weeks.’
The sun briefly goes in, and I pull the cuffs of my jumper over my hands. ‘I don’t know how to fix this.’
‘Amara can be a bit of a hot head, but she’ll calm down. You do need to go and see her, though. Don’t stress. I’ll come with you.’
I’m not meant to be leaning on Ikenna this much, though his offer makes the idea of seeing Amara again a possibility rather than something terrifying I will never face up to.
‘That would help,’ I say, ‘thank you.’
He stops to frown at his vape pen. ‘I know, it’s a disgusting habit,’ he says in response to me staring.
‘You’re allowed a vice,’ I reply.
‘My vice is spending almost five hundred pounds this month on Maximus. The vet thinks he has elbow dysplasia.’
‘Is that a real thing?’
‘Sadly, yes.’ He goes into a pocket for his phone. ‘Let me check my calendar to see when we can make it happen. I’ve got PT sessions most days after work. Thursdays, I have dinner with my grandparents.’
‘How do you fit this all in? I give myself a gold star for showering every day.’
‘Maybe one Friday after I finish with my mentoring.’
‘You’re still mentoring?’
‘I love inspiring the next generation,’ he says without irony. ‘It gives me energy. I’ll ask Amara if Fridays work for her.’
‘Oh. Just like that? We’re going to go?’
Ikenna stares at me. ‘Yes. We just agreed.’
‘We did, but also, let’s wait.’
He takes another puff on his vape. ‘You don’t know what you want.’
He’s wrong, I do know what I want. I want Amara to be nothing more than Kasie’s emergency contact in my phone.
And I want my friend back, right here, sitting next to me on a sun lounger while wrapped in a blanket and making up grisly stories about the old man who lives upstairs.
He’s taking the bodies out, Kasie used to say when he’d bring down his bin bags, the weight in them strangely distributed.
I hated how easily macabre Kasie could be; it never seemed to fit with the rest of her.
‘Don’t nap,’ Ikenna warns as my eyes close. ‘Naps mess up your circadian rhythm.’
‘My rhythm is already messed up.’ I wonder what my ratio of hours spent sleeping to hours spent blinking into the dark is.
Ikenna swings himself sideways on the lounger to get closer. ‘If you want to get better, you need to start treating yourself better. Sleeping, eating, exercising.’
‘Please, not now. I’m fine.’ I don’t add, just hungover and heartbroken.
‘I care about you,’ he says.
‘I don’t need you to worry about me. In fact, I need everyone to stop worrying about me.’
Ikenna narrows his eyes briefly. ‘I said, I care about you. I know we didn’t work out, and I get that in different circumstances we wouldn’t have seen each other again. That’s not our reality. We’ve been through something together. We’re friends.’
The idea of a friend makes me soft. Perhaps I’m lonelier than I realise and all these strong feelings towards Cian are misplaced yearning for a friend.
‘Kasie was also my friend.’ Ikenna cuts away to focus on his fingernails. ‘When they lived in South, I used to go over Alex’s house after school and Kasie was always knocking on the bedroom door, asking us what we were doing.’
‘She was endlessly nosy.’
‘Always up in our business,’ he says fondly. ‘Even into adulthood, constantly needing to know who was single, who was ready to hook up.’
‘I miss her so much.’ It makes me want to scream.
‘I still message her. I write messages, telling her how I’m feeling, what’s happening in my life.
It feels so good when I’m typing them out because it feels normal.
Then I get this undelivered message back and I know it’s coming, yet it hurts every time. ’
His face flashes with surprise then concern. The only other person I’ve told about the texts is Cian. He never made a big deal out of it, but then, I don’t think he understood.
‘Zoe, this is not good for you.’
‘I can’t stop.’
‘You can stop. You will stop. Now.’ He slices his hands in front of himself. ‘Take control.’
It would hurt to let go of this habit, yet I’m also grateful to have someone definitively tell me to stop.
‘I don’t want to lose another friend this year, so don’t expect me to not turn up for you.’
‘Thank you.’
Ikenna smiles goofily up at a large plane in the sky. ‘Check that out, it’s an A380. You hardly see those anymore.’
That night, I lie awake in the darkness of my bedroom.
Kasie used to crawl into my bed when she was feeling rundown, insisting that my room with its cinema darkness and weighted blanket was the only place she could rest. Though she wouldn’t rest; she would keep me up talking in circles about where Schitt’s Creek had lost its way.
I’ve wanted to send Kasie a message ever since Ikenna left.
I want to tell her how monumentally I messed up with Amara, how sorry I am I’ve still never managed to get her to like me.
And I want to tell her about last night, how humiliated I feel at being rejected and how I have no idea what to do next.
I imagine her here, putting her cold feet on my legs till I point out that sharing a bed with a friend isn’t normal, that I grew up in a house where people didn’t hug, never mind climb under one another’s duvets.
‘Kasie,’ I say into the darkness, ‘I don’t know how to do this.’
Whispering into silence feels crazier than when I write and send her a message, so I grab my phone off the charger and switch it on. I won’t message her but perhaps reading through our old exchanges will make her feel close.
There’s a message from Cian, which stumps me as I didn’t expect to hear from him today.
Cian: We had a lot to drink last night. Hope we’re still good?
Is referring to ‘drink’ his way of excusing what happened? Or giving me, or rather both of us, a get-out clause? And what does he mean about if we’re still good? I compose and recompose a reply for ages in my head before finally sending.
Me: You need to learn what a single measure is.
And then:
Me: We’re good.
He sends back the thumb-up emoji, and I want to throw my phone against the wall.