Chapter 5
Since Ronan and me only saw each other in school we hadn’t been to each other’s houses or met each other’s parents properly, but my mum and dad said I talked so much about him that they felt like they knew him already.
I wondered if Ronan was any different in the real world outside school.
It was only on non-uniform days twice a year that I got to see him in his normal clothes: usually a sports T-shirt and tracksuit bottoms that had stripes down the side and white trainers.
He would give the same annoyed speech every non-uniform day that he couldn’t wear his Liverpool jersey because the school didn’t allow football colours to be worn.
Ronan not only looked the part of the star sportsman, he acted it too.
He won the Best Sportsman of the Year Award four years running on Prize Day.
On weekends Ronan played football with non-school friends and I worked at the funeral home, but every Saturday and Sunday night we talked for hours on the phone until one of our parents forced us off.
The longest time we’d go without speaking was the summer holidays because Ronan went to Boston with his parents to spend time with family who lived there and didn’t come back until the end of August. So on the first day of term back at school there was loads for us to catch up on.
If you added up the time we got to spend together it was probably quite a lot – six hours a day in school, five days a week for nearly ten months, for four years: that’s what amounted to a friendship; our friendship, at least.
In all that time there’s one thing that was guaranteed: Ronan was always in school no matter what.
Whatever the weather, even if he was sick or there was bad traffic on the way to school, he was always there.
Along with the Best Sportsman Award he also got the One Hundred Per Cent Attendance Award four years running and I knew he was going for the full five-year record.
I got the bus into school every morning and Ronan was dropped off by his mum or dad usually five minutes after I’d arrived.
But on that September morning of our final year I was still waiting for him when the bell rang for assembly and the streams of students started to flow past me like I was a boulder in a river.
Ronan had never been that late before, he’d never missed assembly.
I didn’t want to walk away with all the other students, but I had no choice when Miss Hackett ushered me along.
I glanced back at the gates but there was no sign of Ronan.
In the assembly hall we stood in lines according to year group.
Now that we were in fifth year, the oldest, we stood at the back.
The people in my year I stood with felt like strangers to me when I didn’t have my best friend beside me.
Even after four years I felt like I didn’t know any of them and they definitely didn’t know me.
Kevin Sherry, who I last saw at Feeney’s Funeral Home in the summer, was standing with his girlfriend Leanne further along the line.
I could hear him laughing loudly. When I leaned forward to look up the line he caught my eye, his face dropped and he gave me that same hard look he had given me at Feeney’s yard.
Except this time he didn’t look weak or small because he was in school, acting his over-confident self again.
I felt bad that I didn’t get to say to him that I was sorry for his loss, but something about the way he looked at me said I better not even try or else he’d tell everyone that I was a weirdo who worked with dead bodies, even if that wasn’t true.
The rumble of voices was silenced by Principal Pickereen appearing on-stage at the front.
He began talking, something about welcoming all the new faces and something about all the old faces, but I wasn’t hearing him properly, I was only thinking about where Ronan could be.
As Principal Pickereen continued speaking, Mrs O’Neill silently walked down the line, ticking off her register as she came to each face she knew so well.
She ticked and ticked as she came along and when she came to me she paused with a look in her eyes I had never seen before; it was hard to place but I knew when she ticked me present that the next mark she made was for Ronan, marking him absent.
When assembly ended the noise erupted once again with everyone spilling towards the double doors. I stood on tiptoes to see Mrs O’Neill at the side of the hall by the climbing rungs talking with a few other teachers. I was wading my way towards her when I got shoulder barged.
‘All on your own?’ said Kevin Sherry, not linked to Leanne’s arm for once.
‘No one to talk to?’ I just looked at him with my eyes screwed up like I couldn’t make sense of him, which I couldn’t, not him or anyone else in my year except for Ronan.
I was about to say I was sorry about his granda’s passing but he stopped me.
‘Don’t,’ he said with his fist at my chest, ‘alright? Don’t.
’ He stared at me and then walked off to join his group of football friends, laughing and roughing each other in headlocks.
Groups like that were a mystery to me. I was never in one, having just one really good friend was enough for me and it was enough for Ronan too.
We didn’t need anyone else. But if I did have a group of friends like that, I’d like to think I’d trust them enough to tell them that my granda had died over the summer and that they’d be good enough friends to support me.
That’s what Ronan did for me when Granny died.
But it was clear that Kevin didn’t want his friends to know.
I was glad I didn’t have friends like that, I bet it’s even more lonely than having no friends at all.
I switched my focus back to Mrs O’Neill now that the crowd had cleared and I headed straight for her.
‘Mrs O’Neill.’ She turned to look at me. ‘Ronan isn’t here today,’ I said. She excused herself from talking to Mr Maxwell and took a few steps along the wall towards me.
‘No, Brendan, unfortunately not,’ she said. Her voice had a natural kindness to it and it sounded even kinder that morning, which, combined with her hazel eyes in her perfect oval face, relaxed me just a fraction because of how comforting she was to be around.
‘Will he be coming in later, Miss?’
‘Have you not been speaking to his parents at all, Brendan?’
‘No, Miss … because …’ I felt embarrassed because I thought I didn’t need to explain anything to Mrs O’Neill, I thought she knew everything about me and Ronan and the type of friends we were.
My heart sank when I realised that I probably wasn’t as known by her as I thought I was.
She looked at me with that sympathetic gaze.
‘I think you’d better get to class, Brendan.’
It wasn’t like her to be so distant. I was too confused to push any further, so I wandered off to my first class of the year, Maths with Mr Wilson.
All through class I kept thinking about the last time I saw Ronan; it was the end of June when we broke for the summer holidays and I knew I wouldn’t see him again for eight long weeks.
On that last day of school I watched him running towards his mum’s car with his backpack straps over both shoulders, his blazer pulled up over the top of his head so that when he put his arms out straight like airplane wings he looked like some sort of superhero in schoolboy form running towards his summer.
The next time I saw him wasn’t the 1st of September like I’d expected, it wouldn’t even be in October. The next time I saw Ronan was in November.
‘November,’ Mr Feeney always said, ‘is the beginning of the busy season.’