A Slow and Secret Poison

8 February 1923

WE PUT CHARLIE in the ground today.

It seems heartless to write, but I could not move myself to cry, even as I cast my parting handful of dirt on to his coffin.

I think I lost the ability to grieve over the past decade.

Perhaps some things are diminished through practice, rather than grown.

This was true of the number of mourners: there were barely ten of us present in all.

Just compare that to the two hundred or so people who descended on Harfold for my parents’ funeral.

If only someone had warned us then that we would need to ration them out for what was to follow.

Then again, who among us would have believed such a warning?

Not Charlie. Cheerful, optimistic Charlie.

Even when I read the signs so clearly, he refused to listen; shrugged his shoulders or looked at me with concern, as if I were the one who should be worried.

I wonder if he changed his mind in those last moments, or if – even as he came off that bloody horse – he still thought it all unconnected.

I will not make the same mistake as you, my sweet brother.

Poor Morry managed a few tears. He has always been such a tender soul.

He will probably cry when we shoot the wretched horse, too.

Mr Allen wants to sell it, but I cannot stand the thought of the thing getting away scot-free.

Not that it is the horse’s fault. The Reaper was always going to come calling for Charlie, and the creature just happened to be his instrument on this occasion.

I wonder what he will send to collect me.

It did not really dawn on me until the both of us were standing there in the graveyard, Morry honking into his handkerchief while I held the umbrella, that we are the only ones left. Our whole family tree stripped down to two little twigs. How lonely we have become.

‘There’s mine,’ I told him, nodding to the bare patch of earth next to Charlie. ‘Then yours, after me.’

The church tower seemed to look down on us – waiting, no doubt, to watch us go under. I can’t stand to look at the thing any longer.

I keep imagining ways that I might die, from the improbable to the mundane. Will it be a falling tree? A sudden cancer? A smouldering cigarette thrown carelessly into the wastepaper bin one night?

Beneath my show of bravado, the truth is that I am terrified.

As much as I try to tell myself that it is inevitable, that I must make my peace with it and wait in resignation as the hourglass fritters itself away, I do not want to die.

It is as simple as that. So I must cling to my one consolation: I am not like Charlie, or my other brothers, or our parents, because I know what is coming.

I see the distant headlights on the road.

If there is any chance to avert their path, then I swear on Charlie’s grave that I will take it.

I am so very tired of funerals.