'I feel tired just thinking about it.'
'So I'll be out of your hair soon.'
'I like you being here.'
'You've been fabulous, but I feel in the way. I want to leave before you're wishing me gone.'
'Shall I cook us supper?'
'I'll buy a takeaway,' I said. 'Curry and beer.'
Laura left for work and I cleared up breakfast, put a clothes' wash on and vacuumed the living room. I promised myself that I'd buy her a big present when I left.
I went to Bill's office, just a few hundred metres from his house, and started making phone calls. The family with pets had already arranged for a friend to housesit. The young woman who lived in Shoreditch didn't really want someone she didn't know living in her flat. The couple with the beautiful conservatory had changed their plans and weren't leaving for several months. But the two men with a small house on London Fields were interested. They'd call me back when they'd talked it through.
I started on the accounts while I was waiting. It didn't take long before the phone rang. They were going to America in eight days' time for three months, maybe for longer if everything went well. They hadn't thought of getting someone in, but as it came through a personal recommendation, and as long as the new kitchen was still done while they were away, and as long as Kerry and Brendan paid some rent, kept the house clean and watered the date palm and the orange tree that were in the bathroom, then that would be fine.
'Eight days?' I said.
'Right.'
Their house was lovely, far more spacious than my flat, and overlooking a park. It had a circular bath and deep-pile carpets, and when we'd installed their kitchen it would have a stainless-steel hob and quarry tiles and a large sunroof. There could be nothing that Brendan could find to object to, surely. In eight days I could be back in my flat. I'd paint my bedroom wall yellow and change all the furniture around. I'd clean windows and throw things out.
'That's great,' I said. 'Really, really great. You've no idea.'
I called Troy on my mobile and told him. I could hear him smile.
I arrived at my flat a bit early. There was a light on in one of the windows, though I could see no sign of Kerry's car. I inserted the key in the lock, fumbling in the darkness, and pushed open the door. If no one was there, that would be a relief. If they were in, I could tell them about the house in London Fields and try to talk to Kerry. Yesterday I had felt that she would never forgive me, but today it looked different to me. Nothing had happened, except inside me.
I went up the stairs and there was a smell that made me mutter crossly to myself because it was bad enough them forcing me out of my own home, but the least they could do was keep it clean. Then I pushed open the living-room door. It banged against something that clattered out of the way as I pushed harder.
What did I see? What did I feel? I don't know, really. I never will know. It's jumbled up together in a foul twist of memory that I'll never lose.
Scuff-toed boots that I'd seen hundreds of times before, but a foot above the floor, and then his canvas trousers, stained at the knee, and a buckled belt around the waist. A smell of shit. A chair on its side. Fear a thick eel in my throat. I couldn't look up. I had to look up. His face above me, tilted to one side, his mouth slightly open. I could see the tip of his tongue. Blue around his lips. His eyes were open, staring. I saw the rope that he was hanging from.
Maybe he was still alive. Oh God, maybe he was; please, please, please. I righted the chair and clambered on to it, half falling over, and there I was pressed up against his body, trying to hold him up to relieve the pressure of the noose on his neck and trying to undo the knot. Fingers trembling too much. His hair against my cheek. His cold forehead. The slump of his body. But people can be alive when they look dead, you read about it, bringing them back to life when all hope is gone. But I couldn't undo the knot and he was so heavy and smelt of death already. Shit and death, and his flesh was cold.
I jumped down from the chair, leaving his body swaying there, and raced to the kitchen. The bread knife was in the sink, and I grabbed it and ran back to Troy. Standing on tiptoe on the chair I began sawing at the cord while still trying to hold his body. Suddenly he was free and we fell on to the floor together and his arms were over my body in a ghastly embrace.
I pushed him off me and hurled myself towards the phone. Jabbed the buttons.
'Help,' I said. 'Help. He's hung himself. Please come and help. Please. What shall I do?'
The voice at the other end of the phone was quite calm. It asked questions and I gabbled answers, and all the time Troy lay an arm's length away and I kept saying, 'But what shall I do, what shall I do?'
'The emergency services will be with you as soon as possible,' said the voice.
'Shall I give him the kiss of life? Shall I pump his chest? Tell me what to do.'
I looked at Troy while I was saying it. His skin was chalky white, except where it was blue around the lips. The tip of his tongue protruded. The eyes were open and sightless. The noose around his neck was slack now, but there was dark bruising where it had been. My little brother.
'Hurry,' I said in a whisper. 'Hurry up.'
I put the phone down and crawled across to where he lay. I put his head in my lap and stroked the hair off his forehead. I leaned down and kissed him on his cheeks, and on his mouth. 1 picked up his hand and cradled it between both my own. I did up the middle button of his shirt, which had come undone. In a minute I would pick up the phone and call my parents. How do you say: your son is dead. I shut my eyes for a moment, drenched with the horror of it.
His sweater was draped over the back of the sofa. There was a book on the table, face down. The clock ticked on the wall. I looked at it: twenty-five past six. If you could turn the clock back through the minutes and the hours until it was before Troy had stood on that chair with the noose round his neck and then kicked off, into death. If I'd arrived before, left my cheese and pickle roll and my accounts and my loitering in the warm office, and driven here instead. I ran my fingers through his hair. Nothing would ever be all right again.
The doorbell rang and I laid Troy 's head gently back on the carpet and went to open it. While they were clustered round Troy, I picked up the phone.
CHAPTER 21
Everything was disjointed, skewed, in a strange light, a foreign language. My flat didn't feel like my own flat any more. It was like being out in the street when there has been an accident. People were bustling in and out who had nothing to do with me. There were three people in green overalls, who at first were very urgent and quick and shouting instructions, and then suddenly were slow and quiet because, after all, there was nothing to be urgent about any more because we were all too late. I saw a policeman and a policewoman. They must have arrived quickly. I looked at my watch, but I couldn't make out the time properly, as if the numbers were far away and in the wrong order. Someone handed me a mug of something hot and I sipped at it and burnt my lips. It felt good. I wanted it to hurt. I wanted it to make me feel something, to wake me out of this numbness. I'd talked to my mother on the phone. That had been one of the first things I'd done. Initially I'd thought of trying to break it to her gradually. It felt like the right thing to do. I'd wanted to say something like, ' Troy is seriously ill. Very seriously ill.' I could have made it easier for her, except that I couldn't. He was too cold and dead, his eyes open. So I couldn't say anything to her except that Troy was dead and that maybe she should come, but that they didn't need to because I could deal with things. I heard a gasp and then some fumbling attempts at questions. 'Dead?' 'Are you sure?' And then just a sort of moan. She started to say something about how she had thought Troy was better and I think I cut her short because I couldn't concentrate on what she was saying.