Now
Alexa is here again, talking to Greg about me, about you, and the dramatic intertwining of our pasts.
They are not quite out of earshot, and though they speak in lowered voices, I can hear every word.
I try not to listen, I try to fixate on the garden outside, the greens and greys and browns, the unchanging backdrop to my newly tiny world.
But your name, each time I hear it, cuts through with the clarity of ice.
‘Catherine was hated at university. It must have been so hard on her.’
‘For breaking up with Lucian?’ Greg says.
‘Surely break-ups happen the whole time.’
‘Not like this one. She didn’t explain why she left him and she refused to ever see him again.
He just lost the plot.
And everyone stopped talking to her, all our friends, lots of other people too.
’
Yes, I remember it well.
Doors closing on me, one by one, another shrinkage of my world.
In the library, I couldn’t bear the stares and the whispering so I simply stopped going there.
The old union coffee shop was obviously out of bounds, a mecca for you and your friends despite the dreadful coffee.
I couldn’t risk pubs or parties, not that the celebratory environment of either suited my permanent heartbreak.
There was no respite anywhere and I existed within the walls of our little house in St Paul’s, watched over by Liv first and later by Sam.
‘Catherine just retreated,’ I hear Alexa say.
‘None of us ever saw her again. I thought it might somehow be important. For the way she is now …’
I hear Greg saying something about the events preceding my descent into mutism.
Some of them I recognise, some of them I don’t.
The word that electrifies, though, like a lethal administration to the heart, is ‘suicide’.