Though at the same time… you can’t deny it’s romantic, writing her name with his last breath. Like in a way that girl is so lucky – most women won’t ever experience anything even close to as romantic as that. She wonders what he was like. Daniel Juster. She imagines the annoying Seabrook boys that crowd in here at lunchtime, and him standing apart, different, sort of quiet and wistful and melancholy… Life is so sad, and love is so unfair. She wonders if Zhang has a girl he’s in love with back in China. Maybe he’s saving up to go home and marry her. Maybe he misses her and that’s why he’s so grouchy. She temporarily feels sorry for him and she marks him as twelve out of twenty on the Product Information section even though he has actually scored a zero.
‘Zhang, let’s talk about the other night. How are you feeling? Are you feeling all right?’
He looks back at her blankly.
‘I mean, after what happened. With that boy?’ Hallo, Earth to employee! Remember, he took about five hundred painkillers? Died just over there by the jukebox? You were holding him at the time? ‘We’re just wondering if you’re experiencing any after-effects. Trouble sleeping, flashbacks, anything like that? Perhaps you’re finding it difficult to fulfil your work duties, maybe you need some time off?’
He draws a rasping breath, pulls his head back. ‘You wan’ cuh’ ma owas?’
God, he’s so obnoxious. She releases a light, fluttering laugh. ‘No, we don’t want to cut your hours. We just want to make sure that, although the company holds no responsibility for the events of last week, you don’t feel yourself adversely affected such that continuing to carry out your responsibilities here as per your contract might now or at some future date result in anxiety, depression or similar conditions. Also that you’re satisfied that the company has made available to you such time and resources as you might need in the course of making a full recovery.’
Suspicion gives way to the blank look again. Lynsey takes a card from her personal organizer. ‘If you do feel the need to talk to someone, this is the counselling service available to all company employees. It’s a special low-cost line.’
He flips the card between his fingers. It’s hard to be sure he’s taking any of this in. But it doesn’t look like he’s planning on milking them over the Tragic Event. She can go back and tell Senan to relax, and the relief and pleasure she imagines flooding to Senan’s face at this inspires an unexpected wave of sympathy and gratitude for Zhang. She promises him a prompt response on his appraisal, and as she leaves she is thinking that even if it hasn’t occurred to him to sue them (God, if it’d been an Irish guy behind the counter that night! €€€!) she may bump him up to Level Two anyway. It’s only twenty euro extra a month after all.
Halfway to the door she pauses, imagining she can see a trace of strawberry syrup still there on the floor tiles, and she disappears into a little daydream about Senan writing her name there – but instead of dying getting up, and staring deep into her, Lynsey’s, eyes, and unscrewing his wedding ring and tossing it over his shoulder… They’d have a house in Ballsbridge near the park, and another in Connemara by the sea, and three little boys who Senan would drive into Seabrook College every morning. But she wouldn’t let them come in here. Once you find out what’s in those doughnuts they’re actually really disgusting.
The intervening days between the ‘Tragic Event’, as it’s become known, and the funeral mass in Seabrook parish church are a dreamlike mixture of chaos and odd, affectless serenity, like watching a riot on television with the sound turned down. Classes are suspended, and in the ensuing vacuum reality too seems on hold, the boundaries and precepts that ordinarily govern the schoolday, that had seemed until now like fundamental laws of the universe, simply no longer there: the ringing of the bell at three-quarter-hour intervals just a meaningless sound, the corridors full of people wandering around like drones in some computer simulation.
As if to compound the weirdness, parents keep bursting through the double-doors at every hour and charging up the stairs to besiege the Acting Principal. From their expressions, blending the implacable determination of the irate customer with a touching, infant-like helplessness, one might think these parents, many of whose sons are not even in the same year as Daniel Juster, to be more upset than anyone else. And maybe they are; maybe for them, Howard thinks, Seabrook College really is a bulwark of tradition, stability, constancy, all of the things it says in the brochure, and so in spite, no doubt, of their best intentions, they can’t help viewing the Tragic Event, the suicide of this boy they do not know, as a hostile act, a kind of vandalism, a swear-word wantonly scratched into the sleek black paint of their lives. ‘Why would he do such a thing?’ they ask, over and over, wringing their hands; and the Automator tells them the same thing he tells the newspapermen and women that appear at the school gates, outside the doors, skulking down Our Lady’s Hall – that the school is conducting a full investigation, that he will not rest until an explanation is found, but that the number one priority for all of them now must be the care and reassurance of the boys.
On the day of the service, the school chapel being deemed too small for the purpose, the entire year of two hundred boys, accompanied by Howard and five other teachers, makes its way crocodile-fashion down the perimeter path and out the gates to Seabrook village. Ordinarily, this type of operation would be a logistical nightmare; today they march the mile to the parish church with barely a sound. The boys’ faces have the same pasty, just-scrubbed, vaguely otter-like look they have when they’ve just got out of bed, and they flinch as they cross the church threshold – as if the coffin were not sitting there inertly between the aisles but hanging over them like a rod of untold power, a splinter of something supermassive and implacable that’s come spinning down like that inscrutable black slab in 2001 from somewhere dread and ulterior to call time on their flimsy Wendy-house lives.
Just before the mass begins a contingent of girls from St Brigid’s is led in by a nun. Heads turn and a restrained but audible murmur of displeasure indicates that the girl at the heart of the affair is among them. Howard identifies her from the newspaper pictures – though slighter than she looked there, and younger, hardly more than a child, delicate features rhythmically appearing and disappearing behind a veil of black hair. The story going around is that Juster, improbable as it seems, had some kind of romantic entanglement with this girl, which on the fateful night, less improbably, came to an end. She certainly has a face custom-made for heartbreak; still, Howard struggles to reconcile this melodrama with the nondescript boy who sat in the middle row of his History class.
The organ sounds and the boys rise in unison: Tiernan Marsh leads the choir into the hymn that opens all Seabrook College ceremonies, ‘Here I Am, Lord’. While they sing, Howard surreptitiously scans the rows of young faces, staring deliberately ahead, muscles tensed against any expression of emotion; the hymn is so beautiful, though, and the choir’s voice so sweet, that even as he watches, the fault-lines spread, eyes redden, heads drop. At the end of one bench he sees tears coursing down Tom Roche’s cheeks; it is shocking, like seeing your dad cry. Turning away he finds himself looking right into Father Green’s eyes. He bows his head hastily, and they sit again.