Chapter 4
FOUR
And so, here we were. Sixteen years later, sixteen years older, in another nondescript pub in a different part of London. It was late morning now, not evening. It was January, not November. Rowan’s then-boyfriend Paul wasn’t with us and nor was Matt’s brother Ryan; they’d been replaced in Rowan and Kate’s lives by Alex and Daniel.
Zara wasn’t there and of course nor was Andy.
It was by no means the first time all of us had been together; it was only the latest in a series of countless meet-ups – the second Wednesday of every month had become the regular date for what we’d come to call the Girlfriends’ Club; there’d been birthdays and pre-Christmas drinks and weekends away and, of course, weddings.
But this was the first funeral. A shiver passed over me as it occurred to me that it wouldn’t be the last – but even that could barely darken my gloom.
I was gloomy enough in the present without thinking what the future might hold.
‘We should’ve got them to put some booze in this coffee,’ Kate said, wrapping her hands around her mug.
‘It’s shit, isn’t it?’ said Abbie.
‘The coffee?’ Rowan sipped hers gingerly. ‘It tastes like it’s been brewed from burnt sawdust.’
‘The coffee, and also – you know – everything.’ Kate bit her lip. Her lipstick was a deep plum colour to match her dress.
‘Funny that we’re talking about booze, in the circumstances.’ Abbie tried to smile but it came out more like a grimace.
‘Hey,’ I argued. ‘Remember, it’s what?—’
‘Andy would’ve wanted,’ finished Rowan.
We all tried to laugh, but Abbie’s turned into a sob and Kate wiped away a tear, carefully angling her finger so as not to smudge her mascara.
‘Andy wouldn’t have just been talking about it,’ she said. ‘He’d have been getting a round of tequila shots.’
‘And then another,’ I agreed.
‘And we’d all have been so shitfaced we’d have missed the funeral,’ said Rowan.
‘If there’s anyone capable of missing their own funeral because they were getting bladdered in the pub, it would’ve been Andy.’ Abbie tipped sugar into her coffee, stirred it, sipped and winced. ‘If you know what I mean.’
‘Back in the day, sure,’ I said. ‘Damn it, though, why did this have to happen? Like, why? It’s so unfair.’
‘Life’s not fair,’ Rowan said. ‘Like I tell Clara all the time.’
‘He was clean for so damn long.’ Kate’s sadness was mixed with fury. ‘So long. We tried so fucking hard. He tried so fucking hard. And then that car accident in Turkey, and the drugs they gave him there, and it all kind of spiralled.’
‘Even after that.’ Abbie pushed her cup away. ‘He relapsed and then he was okay again. We all thought it would be all right.’
‘Until it wasn’t.’ Kate finished her coffee, drinking it down like she wasn’t tasting it. ‘Daniel and I went to visit him in Manchester, like we’d been doing every couple of weeks, and we just knew, as soon as we walked in the door.’
We all knew the story. We’d heard it many times before – she’d told us as soon as it happened, desperate for some idea, some miracle suggestion that would make everything okay again. She looked over at Daniel now, standing in the cluster of men, all of them solemn and upright in their suits and purple ties. It was like she hoped he’d overhear and move over to her, laughing, and tell her off for going on about that mad, upsetting dream she’d had a couple of months back.
‘That first time – it wasn’t like before, when he quit the drugs the first time. Back then when he was using his flat was like a shell; he’d sold everything. This time he was still living almost normally, going to work and stuff.’
We all nodded, letting her talk it out.
‘But me and Daniel knew. Andy was expecting us – we’d got into a kind of routine with visiting him. He’d found this gelato place down the road and he was obsessed with trying all the flavours, which would’ve taken forever because they kept introducing specials. We’d even been discussing on WhatsApp how we were going to try the pistachio and lemon that weekend. But then when we got there he said he wasn’t hungry. And we just knew.’
‘It’s not your fault,’ Abbie said gently. ‘You tried to get him to go to a Narcotics Anonymous meeting, remember? You even took him there and waited outside for him.’
Kate nodded sadly. ‘He didn’t go to the meeting. He fessed up afterwards – he locked himself in the toilet and watched old episodes of The Simpsons on his phone until it was time to come out again. It was like he thought we’d think it was funny.’
‘I remember,’ I said. ‘It wasn’t one bit funny.’
I could feel the weight of Kate’s guilt and the load of our shared grief spreading over us, darker even than the lowering clouds outside.
‘Remember when Andy bought that teddy bear?’ I said to break the silence.
Abbie looked up, a reluctant smile on her face.
‘He thought he’d be like Sebastian from Brideshead Revisited ,’ she said. ‘All charming and whimsical, carrying it everywhere with him.’
‘Except he didn’t,’ Kate chipped in. ‘He kept losing it. He left it in a pub one time, and I put a call out on Facebook for it, and some sweet couple brought it round to my flat. They were so proud they’d found my little boy’s comfort object, and I was like, “Actually, he’s thirty-two.”’
I looked at my watch and saw it was ten to twelve. Time to go. Somehow, we seemed to have mustered enough courage between us to get this done. Around the table, my friends shuffled their feet. Rowan and Abbie got up, wordlessly, and went to the toilet. Kate took out a compact mirror from her bag and topped up her lipstick. I pulled a comb through my hair, more for something to do than because I thought anyone would or should care what I looked like.
Then Patch came over to our table and laid a strong, warm hand on my shoulder.
‘We should probably head over,’ he said. ‘Daniel and Matt are already there, doing the meet and greet thing outside the church.’
Church. I felt myself flinch at the idea, but it had been the one thing Andy’s mother had been insistent on, Abbie had told us on WhatsApp.
Abbie:
Matt tried to suggest that something secular might be a bit more – you know…
Kate:
What Andy would have wanted.
Abbie:
Exactly – apparently she reacted like we’d suggested we chop his body into bits and feed it to our cats. So church it is.
And church it was – the one across the road from the pub, a hulking neo-Gothic building which I supposed would have appealed to Andy’s sense of the dramatic even if he deplored the spirituality it represented.
Together, we all left the pub and crossed the road. The rain had stopped and a thin winter sun was beginning to brighten the cloudy sky. The road was wet and the wind cut through my coat and the gap where the zip of my purple dress was held together by a safety pin.
People were trickling through the arched wooden doors: some I recognised from various parties Andy had thrown over the years, but most were strangers – family, I guessed, or friends of his mother’s, or perhaps even people he’d met at the twelve-step programmes he’d attended before he stopped attending any of them.
As we approached the doors, a long, shiny black vehicle pulled up outside the church.
‘Oh my God,’ Kate muttered. ‘I can’t watch this bit. Let’s go in and leave the boys to do their thing.’
‘Let’s,’ I agreed, reaching over to squeeze her hand. It was icy cold.
‘Are you worried about your reading?’ I asked.
She shook her head. ‘That’ll be fine. I’m scared of lots of things, but not that. It’s just… you know.’
‘Everything,’ said Abbie.
‘Yeah.’ Kate sighed. ‘That. It’s fucking grim, isn’t it?’
‘All of it,’ agreed Rowan.
‘Mostly not seeing him again, ever,’ said Abbie. ‘I mean, that’s been a done deal for a while, obviously. But this kind of makes it official.’
‘Come on,’ I said. ‘Let’s get this over with.’
‘Then we can go and get drunk.’ Kate managed a smile.
And so, at least, we were all half-smiling when we entered the church and found seats near the front, a pew to ourselves, guarded by Ryan.
I hugged him briefly. ‘Don’t drop the coffin.’
‘We should’ve let Patch carry it on his own,’ he whispered, then turned and walked back down the aisle, towards the waiting hearse.
I could barely watch as the wooden box containing what was left of our friend was carried on the shoulders of my husband and the other men to its place by the altar. Each breath I took felt painful, as if my body was resisting being alive. When Patch, his duty performed, slid in next to me and took my hand, the relief was overwhelming.
I focussed my eyes on the brim of Andy’s mother’s black hat in front of me, but I could still see the coffin, topped with a wreath of violet orchids. And beyond that, the pale, grave face of the vicar – his funeral face, I supposed, perfected by years of practice.
He intoned a few words of welcome, something about brothers and sisters and the memory of a life well lived, then the organist began to play Dear Lord and Father of Mankind , and everyone stood up and sang as best they could.
Then Matt, looking taller and more stooped than ever, slipped out from the end of the pew and walked to the lectern, white-faced. Abbie had told us he’d wrestled for hours over his eulogy, and in the end it was briefer than it was meant to be, because he started to cry and couldn’t stop.
And then it was Kate’s turn. Looking almost regal, her chin held high and her eyes dry, she walked gracefully to the place where Matt had stood, cleared her throat and began to recite.
When I come to the end of the road
And the sun has set for me
Her voice was perfect – low and slow and carrying, each word seeming to come out exactly as the poet had intended it to sound. She carried on through the first stanza and second, unfaltering.
And then something weird happened. At first I thought it was to do with the acoustics in the church, but seconds before everything had been fine. Then I wondered if Kate had rigged up a recording of the poem and was reading along to it through an earpiece, which had malfunctioned somehow.
But the echo wasn’t coming from the front of the church. There was another voice, almost but not quite in time with Kate’s, saying the words.
For this is a journey we all must take
And each must go alone.
It's all part of the…
I couldn’t help it – I craned my neck and looked behind me. And there she was, silhouetted in the doorway against the winter sky. Although I hadn’t heard her voice for several years, it was instantly recognisable, carrying through the space as clearly as the clock that had chimed midday a few minutes before. Although the veil on her hat half-obscured her face, it couldn’t hide the way the light from the stained-glass windows reflected off her hair, creating green and purple highlights on the jet black. Even the sound of her heels, like twin drums on the stone floor, was familiar.
It was Zara.