' Troy,' I said, then stopped. There was nothing to say; everything.
I expected that, when I said that, my mother would start crying the way I had and I could hold her and we could avoid talking or thinking for a while, but she continued just looking puzzled. My father came and sat opposite me and looked very calm.
'Was this a surprise?' he asked.
I almost screamed at him that of course it was a fucking surprise and then I thought of my mother and father and their lost child and I said, 'Yes.'
'Should we have seen anything?' he said.
'We've been seeing things all his life,' I said. All his life. The meaning of words had changed. Mum started to speak as if she were talking in her sleep. She spoke about Troy in the last few weeks, about how he had been bad, but she thought it had been getting better. There had been worse times before and he had always recovered. She'd been trying and trying to think if there had been some signal or warning, but she couldn't. She talked of Troy when he had been younger. These weren't reminiscences. They would come later. We had all the rest of our lives for that. She talked about what they had done for him and how they had failed and wondered over and over again if they should have done it differently. She didn't sound self-pitying or bitter. Just genuinely curious, as if I or my father could provide an answer that would satisfy her.
Dad was business-like, in a mad kind of way. He made tea for us all and then found some paper and a pen. He began to make a list of everything that needed doing and it appeared that there was a lot. There were people to be told, arrangements, decisions to be made. So many. A whole side of paper was covered with his precise, square handwriting.
On top of the horror, it was a strange situation. The three of us were sitting in my flat. My mother hadn't even taken her coat off. My father had made his list. There was so much to do, but there was nothing to do. Nobody wanted to eat. Nobody wanted to go anywhere. There were people who would have to be told, but not yet. It was as if we needed to sit there together and hold the secret to us a while longer before letting it out into the world. So there was nothing to do except talk in fragments, but if there was any awkwardness, I wasn't aware of it. I was still glowing with the awfulness of what had happened. I felt as if I'd jabbed my fingers into an electric socket and the current was just pulsing through me over and over again.
Hours went by like this and it was just before nine when I heard a noise downstairs and voices and laughter on the stairs, and then Brendan and Kerry burst into the room, arm in arm, laughing. They were cheerfully startled to see us.
'What's up?' asked Brendan with a smile.
CHAPTER 22
It was damp and weirdly warm. In less than four weeks it would be Christmas. Every high street in the city had its lights up, the Santa Claus, the swinging bells, the Disney characters. Shop windows glittered with tinsel and baubles. There were already Christmas trees outside the greengrocers' shops, leaning against the wall with their wide branches tied up with string. Some doors in the street where I lived had holly wreaths on them. The shelves in the supermarkets were loaded with crackers, mince pies, Advent calendars, boxes of dates, vast tins of chocolates, frozen turkeys, bottles of port and sherry, little baskets of bath salts and soaps, CDs of seasonal music, humorous books, crappy stocking fillers. The brass band played 'O Little Town of Bethlehem' outside Woolworth's. Women in thick coats rattled collection tins in the cold.
What would we do this Christmas? Would we put up a tree in my parents' half-demolished house or in my living room, where nine days ago Troy had killed himself? Would we sit round a table eating turkey with chestnut stuffing and sprouts and roast potatoes and pull crackers, put silly hats on our heads and take it in turn to read out the jokes? What would we do, what could we do, that wouldn't seem grotesque? How do you ever return to normal life, when something like this has happened?
Troy 's funeral wasn't crowded. He'd been a lonely boy and a solitary young man. His few friends at school had fallen away after he'd left, although a couple of them turned up with the deputy head and his old physics teacher. His tutor came too, and several family friends who'd known Troy since he was tiny. There was Bill and Judy and their kids, and my mother's sister Kath who'd come down from Sheffield with her family, and then there were the relatives my parents saw once or twice a year, and the ones they barely ever saw but exchanged Christmas cards with. A friend of Kerry's called Carol came; and Tony and Laura.
We were there of course: Mum and Dad, me and Kerry. And Brendan. Brendan looked more stricken than anyone, with his red eyes and a faint bruise on his forehead turning yellow. Even I had to admit that he'd been wonderful over the past week: inexhaustible, indispensable, solid. 'Wonderful' in quotation marks, though. There was more to Brendan than I'd seen before. I didn't understand it, whatever 'it' was, but he was good at it. Resourceful, energetic, committed to each moment, persuasive, cooperative, endlessly aware of other people's needs, feelings. He had a radar for what everyone around him needed just at that very instant.
He'd offered to make all the funeral arrangements himself, to take the burden off the family, but Mum had told him quietly that it helped her to be busy. He'd answered the phone, filled out forms, made pots of tea, gone shopping, shifted his and Kerry's stuff into my parents' house again, so I could move back in to my flat. They were moving to the house I'd found in just two days.
A week after the death, we talked about the wedding. Kerry wanted to postpone it, but my parents said that love was the only thing that would get us through. Brendan nodded at that and held Kerry's hand, stroking it and saying in a wise, reflective voice, 'Yes, yes, love will get us through,' his eyes shining. At any other time it would have driven me insane with irritation. I still knew it was irritating, but now there were layers of numbness between the irritation and me.
'Here you are, better than tea.'
Bill pushed a tumbler of whisky into my hand and stood beside me while I took a large, fiery mouthful. We had all come back to my parents' house and were standing in the draughty living room, drinking mugs of tea and not really knowing what to say to each other. What is there to say, at events like these?
'Thanks.'
'Are you all right?'
'Yeah.'
'Silly question. How could you be?'
'If he'd died in an accident, or of an illness or something, that would have been one thing…' I said. I didn't need to finish the sentence.
'Marcia's going to spend the rest of her life asking herself where she went wrong, what she did wrong.'
'Yes.'
'That's what suicide does. The fact is, she did all she could. You all did.'
'No. He shouldn't have killed himself.'
'Well, of course not.'
'I mean, I don't understand it. Mum keeps saying she thought he was getting better. And he was getting better, Bill.'
'You never know what's going on in someone's head.'
'I guess.'
I took another gulp.
'He was a troubled young man.'
'Yeah.'
I thought about Troy giggling, making stupid jokes, grinning up at me. I kept seeing his face when he was in his happy phases and energy seemed to shine out of him, making him beautiful.
Bill refilled my glass and took the whisky bottle across to Dad. I wandered out of the crowded living room, into the building site that used to be the kitchen, then through the hole in the wall where once there was a door and into the soggy garden. Ripped, splintered floorboards and pieces of the old kitchen units were heaped up against the fence. I leaned against an old bit of shelving. It was slightly misty, every outline just a bit blurred, but maybe that was the whisky.