Chapter 10
10
On the evening of the day Susie has died—words I am still reeling from stringing together, let alone grasping the concept—something she once told me comes roaring back to me.
Her mum, Jeanette, had a short illness, ovarian cancer that wasn’t treatable and well advanced on diagnosis, that left her and her dad shellshocked with the speed of her departure.
We were thirty that year, and Susie was the first of us to lose a parent. As her friends, we thought it was a big, scary grown-up brush with mortality, at the time.
“The strangest thing, Eve, is you don’t know how to talk about what to have for tea,” she said, when we all gathered at my place, in the week before the funeral. (The quiz wasn’t the right mood.)
I was baffled.
“You still need to have your tea, don’t you?” she explained. “But it’s not seemly. In any other crisis you’d still discuss practicalities like that, they’re a relief. And you do talk about funerals and death certificates, all the death admin. Deadmin . But on the day you lose someone, you can’t go”—she mimed checking her watch—“mmm, six o’clock, who’s for a takeaway? Or I think there’s leftover chicken in the fridge? It feels so flippant, and like you’re drawing a line. As if it’s already diminishing in importance if you can think about your appetite or picking one food over another.”
“I see what you mean,” I said. “You can’t be something so trivial as hungry?”
“Not even that. It might only be a Domino’s pizza, but the act of choosing toppings feels so frivolous. It’s like a statement that life goes on. You’re not ready for that statement. You can’t find the moment, or the words, without it seeming tasteless. How can they be dead, and you’re still preferring pepperoni to ham.”
Eventually Justin said: “So what did you have for your tea?”
“Microwaved burgers from Co-op.”
“That seems more of a statement that life doesn’t go on.”
We shrieked, tutted, and laughed, and I knew we were a huge comfort to Susie, in that time. I was the female sympathy and shoulder to cry on, Ed was the calm organizer and steadying backbone, Justin the irreverent clown, puncturing tension.
As Ed and I sit, once more in my small front room with the half-burned pillar candles in the fireplace and the red velvet sofa that Roger has scratched till it bled, we are without Susie, and waiting nervously and miserably for Justin. My stomach growls and as soon as I think: Should I bother to raise eating? Is it an inappropriate thing to say? I remember Susie. I wasn’t meant to find out what she meant, this way. I want to tell her, I ache to tell her. I can never tell her anything again. It’s inconceivable.
There is a Susie-less space torn in life—and it’s only been hours. How do we handle this forever?
The doorbell goes and I feel nauseous. Seeing People for the First Time Since is frightening. It’s like having to experience being told, all over again. I stand up slowly and Ed senses my hesitation and answers it.
Justin walks in—my front door opens into the sitting room, I can’t afford anything as fancy as a hallway—and says nothing, throws himself into Ed’s arms. They stand there sobbing, Justin with his head on Ed’s chest, and I think about how I’ve never seen them cry before. I don’t know what to do with my arms, until Justin says to me, indistinctly, “Don’t just stare, join in!” and I grip them in an awkward huddle.
The room is silent but for the sound of our weeping. It’s quite eerie.
When we break apart, I see Roger in the doorway from the kitchen, ears cocked, frowning in confusion. Noisy humans.
“Fucking hell, Suze,” Justin says, when it abates, sitting down heavily. “Always a show-off, that one. Has to be the center of attention. Has outdone herself with this.”
We laugh weakly and slightly hysterically, laughs that are half sobs.
“I did not see that coming. And neither did she, clearly.”
I wince, while being able to hear Susie’s delighted shriek in my imagination. She was the biggest fan of Justin’s taboo-breaking. I have a flash mental image of her on that gurney, not laughing. Not moving.
I glance over at Justin, out of habit—he always grins at his own jokes—and instead see him slumped, devastated.
“You saw her?” Justin says. “... What did she look like?”
I understand this is a way of asking about her injuries.
Ed opens his mouth and nothing comes out. He looks at me, stricken.
“Exactly like Susie and absolutely nothing like Susie,” I say.
“That is... well, Eve has always been good with words. Spot on,” Ed says.
He looks at his knees. I sense that I needed to see Susie, as difficult as it was, to accept it. Ed found it harder.
“Do you want to see her?” I ask Justin and he shakes his head, emphatic.
“God no, no, thank you. I have seen my share of bodies at the home.”
We run through the minimal information we have about the accident and soon stop, because no better answers about what happened will bring her back to us. It makes us think about that moment on the hundred yards from the taxi drop-off to her house, Susie digging in her bag for her house keys, and a hurtling box of metal coming into view behind her. I swallow hard and my heart races, picturing it.
I can’t go back, push her out of the way, shout at her to move.
The text. If I had replied to her text, and she’d stopped to read it, or texted me back? It’s very hard to absorb that I will be thinking and “what-if-ing” about last night’s events for the rest of my life. It has an instant permanence, like looking at a fresh wound and knowing the scar it leaves will always be a part of your body.
If thirty-four is still some superannuated version of youth in our era, I’m aware I’ve aged exponentially in the space of a morning. That my life has bifurcated into a Before and After and the innocence that I didn’t know I had has gone. I’m disorientated by it.
“We should check on her dad too,” Ed says. “The hospital couldn’t make him understand what happened.”
“I’m relieved in a way,” Justin says. “Because with Alzheimer’s there’s a worst of all worlds where you understand what’s being said and then forget, so you keep reliving finding out, forever.”
I fall silent, aghast. No one has ever described hell so vividly to me before.
“What about her brother, has anyone told him?” Justin says.
“Shit, Finlay,” I breathe. I’d totally forgotten about him.
“ So have I, and I share DNA with him, so I wouldn’t sweat it ,” Susie says to me, so swiftly and clearly I wonder if there’s such a thing as an audio-haunting.
Recalling Susie-isms used to make me laugh out loud in the street and now, I guess, they’ll always make me cry. A fat tear rolls down my cheek and I wipe it away.
“The hospital had no contact details for him. I explained he’s in the States,” Ed says. “Is he still in New York?”
“I think so,” I say. “She didn’t talk about him much, did she?”
Ed shakes his head. We three understood that, conversationally, Finlay Hart was a permanent no-fly zone. Susie wasn’t really one for gale-force expressions of feeling about people, be it positive or negative, so her vitriol in regards to her brother always took us aback.
“Her phone,” Justin says. “He must be in that? Have you got her mobile?”
“Yup.”
In the corner of my room, we have a plastic, standard-issue hospital bag I can barely bear to look at. It contains: Susie’s tan Radley handbag, a battered oxblood Mulberry wallet full of bank cards that need canceling (What if she needs them?! What if? She’s going to be fuming when she returns), her keys, a pair of stud earrings that I know will be real gold (“As my mum says, I’m allergic to cheap metals and cheap men,” she once said, going full Raymond Chandler dame, aged twenty), a roll of hairbands, and a Charlotte Tilbury lipstick, shade “Pillow Talk.”
Plus, a white iPhone 8 with a shattered screen that, nevertheless, appeared to be operational when we pressed the power button. Her wallpaper is the four of us, at a music festival, faces posed on top and beside each other, like a Beatles album cover. It had provoked a new wave of sobbing on the drive to my place. As Ed said: she’s not here, but a sodding glass computer the size of a piece of toast survived.
“Unfortunately Apple makes them impregnable even to the CIA,” Justin says. “Probably the way Suze would want it, to be fair.”
“I know her passcode,” I say.
“Woah, seriously?” Justin says. “Women are mental!”
“Only by chance.”
It feels spooky. As if it was intended by some higher power. I’ve only known it for a fortnight, maximum. Susie wanted me to take a photo of her with a fan of tail-on prawns as a starter in a seafood restaurant. As she was already gripping the rim of the plate and practicing her grin, she gestured with her head at her handset on the tablecloth.
“It’s my year of birth but backward,” she said. “Don’t give me chins.”
“I don’t need to know your passcode to take a photo, the camera opens automatically,” I said, as I wiped my hands of chip grease and picked it up, and she said: “Oops. Don’t browse my nudes, will you.”
I feel intensely protective of her phone, whether she’d been joking about the nudes or not.
“Someone should ring him, he must be in her contacts,” Ed says, and given Ed has broken this news to me and to Justin, I don’t think it’s fair he calls the brother too.
“What’s he called again? Flynn?” Justin says.
“Finlay,” I say. “Fin. I’ll do it. After you both go.”
They both mumble about “not leaving you on your own,” and I tell them forcefully that I will be fine and they have to. I don’t want them to, but artificially delaying being alone will be worse.
“Tell us how it goes with the brother?” Ed says, as they linger on the doorstep. “I’ll call you later.”
He looks at me and leans in for a hug, and I hold him for a moment, burying my face in his shoulder. We’ve always been close but, after today’s hospital visit, we’re welded.
There is no “later” for Susie and me, I think, as I close the door. I still haven’t accepted it. She is just over the brow of a hill, to be glimpsed around a corner. I will never tell her the failed one-night-stand, bald-ballsack story and feel gratified at her gurgling laughter. She will never give me her voluble and welcome scathing opinions on the “atrocity” of Hester’s proposal, and soothe my suffering.
I’ve lost her standing shoulder to shoulder with me, in a matching dress, holding an identical bunch of flowers. The problems I had only hours ago were so minuscule.
You usually say old people are a “comfort” to each other. But that’s what Susie and I were, I can see that so clearly, the secret formula: each other’s comfort and joy.
The eternity of the silence overwhelms me. The line between us buzzes with monotonous static, a line never to be busy again.
The only word I can think of that comes close to how I feel is: desolate.