Chapter 13
13
I don’t recommend the sensation of emerging from fitful rest, face so sodden with tears that you have wet collarbones, momentarily wildly elated that your best friend dying violently was only a disturbing creation of your subconscious. Before the murky world of four fourteen a.m. on your digital alarm clock swims into focus, and you remember that she has.
Ed looks as tired as I feel when he knocks on the door.
“Morning,” he says, balefully.
“Hi. Coffee?”
“I want to get going with it, you?”
“Same.”
We exchange sleepy monosyllables on the way there, lulled by the familiar drive. Everything’s the same and everything will always be different.
“I suppose in the modern world we should each of us nominate someone to do this,” Ed says. “Wipe our browsing history. Get rid of the secret shoebox we’re directed to under the bed. Without opening it.”
“Hah. Yes.”
“I’ll be your nominee if you’ll be mine,” Ed says, smiling, and I say, “OK, deal,” while squirming at how it reminds me of his ill-fated letter. Also, why isn’t his fiancée that person to him?
Why indeed.
“Hester wanted me to give you her love, by the way,” Ed says, flipping the indicator.
“That’s nice of her,” I say, blandly. “Say thank you for me.”
“I will.”
“She and Susie clashed antlers from time to time, but Hester was very fond.”
Like hell.
“Yes, of course.”
“I didn’t want to say on the phone, I don’t know why, but—Susie liked recreational pharma sometimes, didn’t she. With her sister wives.”
“Huh?” I say.
Ed swings a look at me. “Lauren? Aisha? Jennifer-Jane? Who has two forenames outside the mid-West, that always got me, such a snob.”
“Oh, the cokey idiots!” I say. “The Teacup Girls.”
Those nicknames for Susie’s work friends are Justin’s. The former is self-explanatory (Justin loves his ironic revival of exasperated dad words) and the latter—the Teacup Girls—is because he said they’d had so much Botox, if they want to express amazement they’d have to drop one.
Susie kept this gang entirely separate from us, and only dipped in and out of it herself, not a core member of the cast, a guest star.
They all had cosmetic work, huge kitchen extensions, white off-roaders they drove to the hairdressers, handbags with logos, wealthy husbands, took skiing holidays in Whistler, and drank rosé when the kids were in nursery. And sometimes they put on things covered in sequins to get smashed on champagne cocktails, get off with men who weren’t their husbands, and do lines in the bathroom.
Susie would tell us about their antics, and we’d revel in a good gasp and tut. She gloried in their excesses and, sometimes, she partook in the Class As.
“Any idea if she has any in the house, or where she’d keep it, if so?”
“I don’t think she bothered unless someone else brought it to the party,” I say. “I’d be amazed if there was any in the house, honestly.”
“Hmmmm.”
I was the keeper of Susie’s secrets, and she was the keeper of mine. All bar one.
W HEN WE ROUND the corner by the cricket ground, nearing her house, Ed inclines his head and says: “It was there.”
I twist around to see an otherwise unremarkable street corner, a tree with a gash in its trunk and some cellophane cornets of carnations lying at its base, in a modern shrine. Who are the people who do that? I can’t imagine Susie even knows her neighbors.
I imagine the scene, the sound of it, the squeal of tires and the startled cries of people loitering outside the fish and chips shop opposite as the vehicle came off the road, trying to warn Susie. Wrong place, wrong time. The sickening thump of a human body on the bumper, the crack of Susie hitting a hard surface at speed. Her lying prone, like a toy thrown across the room in a tantrum.
“Why did she get out of the taxi on the main road?! If she’d been dropped at her house, she’d be here now. This was so meaningless,” I say, suddenly furious again, this time, with her. The phrase banging your head against a brick wall has more meaning now than I ever want it to.
“She’ll have been vaping,” Ed says, who’s obviously thought about this as much as I have, albeit from different angles. “Dying, for the sake of those bloody tampon-holder things and Skittles-flavored steam. Mr. Kipling fog.”
“Ohhhhh,” I say. Of course. We’d applauded Susie moving on to e-cigarettes in our late twenties. Good to see you taking your health more seriously, we agreed. It was still going to kill her.
“I wish I’d smacked it out of her hand,” I say, trying to keep the ragey hopeless tears back.
“Well, not to be Mr. Logic from Viz ...” Ed glances at me as he pulls in to park. “You still read Viz ? But she’d have stood there like a chimney with real cigarettes too.”
“Oh. Yeah. Duh.”
He turns the engine off.
“I’ve started doing this too,” he says, into a quiet that seems larger than it is, with the sudden absence of engine noise. “Playing variables, worrying about what if Hester and I hadn’t got engaged, we’d have left the pub earlier. We can’t, Eve. We’re going to go mad if we do. What happened, happened, and our only job is to live with it. Which is enough of a fucking job, frankly. Not beat ourselves up.”
“Yeah, you’re right.”
Ed squeezes my shoulder before we get out of the car and I’m so grateful I at least have him and Justin to share this loss with. No one else can understand.
I contemplate how hard it’ll be to be in Susie’s house, without Susie, as we walk up the path. Her home can seem like nothing much to the untrained eye, but I promise you that solid red-brick Victorian semi-detacheds in this postcode are a pretty penny.
Not a starter property in an area with “drinkers’ pubs,” petty crime waves, and trash bins with Wite-Out warnings like “ No. 22s!!!! (DO NOT FUCKIN ROB AGAIN TWATS.) ”
“I want an investment and Dad’s not getting any younger, it’s walkable to his,” she said, back in our twenties. I think she was rationalizing that she felt more comfortable among her own, MacBooks in Caffè Neros and Marks and Spencer’s nearby. After all, she didn’t walk to her dad’s, she got in her racing-green Mini Cooper, with 6 Music cranked up high. (Her Mini, that we averted our eyes from as we passed it outside: how is it here, when she’s not here? It will have to be sold. She’s going to be raging when she comes back and finds out it’s gone.)
I use the key and let us into her narrow hallway, pushing against a small drift of mail that’s already built behind her door. On the other side, the familiar smell of Susie’s house, the pungent laundry detergent she used, blindsides me.
“I’ll take those to the kitchen table and look through to see what needs canceling, utilities, et cetera,” Ed says.
“I think you need a death certificate for that?” I say.
“You might be right.”
I’m not sure how I know this. Standing in her house, discuss ing registering her death. Surrounded by Susie’s décor choices, her things, so many coats of hers I remember nights out with her wearing, hanging limply on the back of the door. Soon to be decorating the local branch of Oxfam, on plastic hangers with handwritten price tags.
I’m choked. This is the most difficult thing I’ve ever done. Second most, after the hospital.
Why are things, abandoned things, so hard to bear? They didn’t have that quality before. And compared to the living thing you’ve lost, they’re without value.
When I was a teenager, the family cat, Horace, died. He was a grumpy old bruiser, prone to biting the hands that petted him, and my “complacent young person” grief wasn’t great. Yet a while after the vet’s trip where my parents returned with an empty carrier, I noticed a fur-covered moldy grape by the television stand. He’d been rolling it around and jealously guarding it, for weeks prior. Horace had a thing about grapes. All other small spherical objects were ignored, but grapes were his fetish.
At the sight of the fur-covered moldy grape without its protector, my heart cracked.
I HAND E D the sheaf of letters and say: “I’m going to see if there’s anything needs ‘tidying up’ in the bedroom.”
I have something particular in mind. During the KonMari craze for banishing clutter, I told Susie I’d completed the “sorting personal mementos” hardcore level for the aficionados.
“I could never do that,” she said. “I’ve kept all my diaries and all my letters. Every last one. I’m anal like that. Not many people ever wrote to me, though. I am not the love letters type.”
“You kept diaries?” I said. Susie didn’t seem the diary-keeping type either.
“Yeah, I gave it up eventually but when we were younger and into my early twenties. I was being precious. They’re full of trash, obviously. Wah wah I’m so fat wah wah my brother’s being mean. Wah wah my mum won’t let me buy a crop top. The usual.”
Something I know, as I heavy-tread up the stairs and think about when she made me rub thick swatches of a dozen near-identical oatmeal fabrics to choose this carpet, is: I will never read these diaries.
Telling myself I have the right to because she’s no longer here to stop me, to “feel closer” to her somehow, would be an ultimate betrayal. If she’d never been moved to show me them alive, there’s no cause to think she’d want the contents shared now she’s not.
What I can do for her, though, is stop other people reading them. I push open the door to her bedroom with trepidation. Susie’s taste was very different to my love of dark walls, big plants, and kitsch trinkets. Her bed is a white four-poster and the whole space is a symphony of neutrals, and order. The bed is unslept in, neatly made, pillows plumped. I stare at it.
Imagine if Susie had known when straightening that duvet that she’d never be in that bed again. That she’d come back not to this room, with her foam earplugs on the nightstand and her pajamas folded on that chair, but instead would be wheeled, flesh chilly, into a morgue.
This lack of warning is another aspect of it that I can’t accept. Susie didn’t know her last day was her last day. She got no ceremony, no sense of occasion. Life life life... and in an instant, dead. Like a brutal edit in a film, a jump cut. Over. Finished.
I see now why those who lose loved ones young become risk-takers. They’re not reckless, they just see the stakes differently from the rest of us. More clearly. They don’t have the same blithe trust in tomorrow that we all do, they know it’s all up for grabs. Ignorance is bliss.
I tentatively open her built-in wardrobes, sweating like a burglar, and riffle through the clothes, trying not to look at any one item, not able to cope with the tsunami of memories they’ll unleash. For a second I stop, paralyzed every time I get a stab of recognition, a specific memory attached to a particular coat or a dress.
There’s odds and ends in the bottom of it, pieces of empty luggage, and a box, made of a felt material. It has a lid, and holes in the sides for handles. I drag it out, put it on the bed, and open it.
Well, that was easy. Praise be to Susie for being so organized, and, this box aside, no sort of hoarder. Inside are several small bundles of letters, fastened with elastic bands, all of them still in envelopes, and addressed to Susie at her rented flat back when she lived in the Lace Market. And underneath those, girlish diaries with pastel, patterned, foamy covers, the kind with clasps but not locks.
A quick poke about in a set of dresser drawers with glass handles, and a sweep under the bed, turns up absolutely nothing sensitive whatsoever.
I pick my way carefully back downstairs, box balanced on both arms, and find Ed in the kitchen.
I announce: “I’m taking this. I’m not going to pry through anything in it, on my mum’s life. But it’s old letters and diaries, exactly the sort of thing she’d want gone.”
“And I’m taking this, but not in the sense I’m taking it.”
I lean my head around to see what he means, and Ed’s flapping a tiny packet of white powder at me.
“Where the hell was that?!”
“In the spare teapot. Which looked like she’d inherited it from a granny. Susie’s in heaven right now having to explain herself.”
I laugh, while feeling ever so slightly perturbed that as her best friend and keeper of her secrets, I wasn’t the one to predict its presence.