Just Last Night(24)

She’s there.

Susie’s lying on a gurney with a dark blue sheet pulled up to her neck, her long hair pooled around her head, some of it spilling over the edge, her eyes closed.

I expected Susie to look asleep, as much as I could picture this at all.

She doesn’t look asleep. She looks like a sallow waxwork of Susie, with a slack expression. Like someone has made a model of Susie Hart from plaster of paris, like something they might put in a modern art gallery.

I’ve never seen a dead person before and I didn’t know that I’d know they were dead, if that makes any sense. If I’d suspect a heartbeat hiding under that sheet. But I can tell for sure Susie is dead, that this is what death looks like. If I’d been the first to find her like this, I’d have understood she was gone. We’re still mammals, we instinctively know.

Her face—her regal, prom-queen face I know every detail and shadow of—is without animation. I can see the edge of a huge spreading purple bruise at her temple. I guess they have shown us her this way around so it’s at the far side.

I turn to the doctor, who’s standing with his hands behind his back and his chin respectfully on his chest.

“That’s her,” I say, voice full of water, and pain. “That’s Susie.”

The doctor nods.

“I’ll give you a moment,” he says, and leaves.

I look back at Susie. This is the last time I will ever see her in person, I realize. I try to take every detail in, the extravagant shape of her nose and lips, the brown-blond treacly colors in her hair. I always envied those thick handfuls of her hair, and now it’s going to waste? Parts of her are still perfect and she’s going to be . . . thrown away? How can her body not be in use, and of use? We’ve not been asked and I’m not going to ask.

I see her in my mind’s eye, in the pub last night, raising her eyebrow at me. Sardonic, witty, unstoppable Susie. From that, to this. How?

“This isn’t real, Eve,” Ed says to me. I sense it’s his turn to break down and mine to keep it together. “This is like a fucking nightmare. What is going on? Why did this have to happen? There was no reason for this to happen . . .” His voice breaks. I look at him and he’s crying, screwed-up-face crying.

“It’s not right,” I say, putting my arms around him. “This is not right.”

I am holding on to Ed and Ed is holding on to me and I think we’re holding each other up.

He strokes my hair; the gesture is so clumsy in his distress that he’s catching great hanks of it and vaguely pulling, but I don’t care.

Somewhere outside this building, I think, people are having normal Fridays. But there’s been a switch around: it’s not Susie dying that feels impossible, for as long as we’re looking at her dead body—a corpse, she is a corpse?—but that ordinary world that is the impossibility now.

I gaze at her for the last time. There’s an emptiness to her. The snap-crackle of her, gone, vanished, flown. Her body is a vacated premises. It’s like turning up to a house you know well, and finding it emptied and stripped to the fittings.

Have we had enough time with her, we’re asked. Yes, we have, we say, blankly.

They close the curtains.

If there’s something I am sure of, it’s that I will never think I’ve had enough time with her.





10


On the evening of the day Susie has died—words I am still reeling from stringing together, let alone grasping the concept—something she once told me comes roaring back to me.

Her mum, Jeanette, had a short illness, ovarian cancer that wasn’t treatable and well advanced on diagnosis, that left her and her dad shellshocked with the speed of her departure.

We were thirty that year, and Susie was the first of us to lose a parent. As her friends, we thought it was a big, scary grown-up brush with mortality, at the time.

“The strangest thing, Eve, is you don’t know how to talk about what to have for tea,” she said, when we all gathered at my place, in the week before the funeral. (The quiz wasn’t the right mood.)

I was baffled.

“You still need to have your tea, don’t you?” she explained. “But it’s not seemly. In any other crisis you’d still discuss practicalities like that, they’re a relief. And you do talk about funerals and death certificates, all the death admin. Deadmin. But on the day you lose someone, you can’t go”—she mimed checking her watch—“mmm, six o’clock, who’s for a takeaway? Or I think there’s leftover chicken in the fridge? It feels so flippant, and like you’re drawing a line. As if it’s already diminishing in importance if you can think about your appetite or picking one food over another.”

“I see what you mean,” I said. “You can’t be something so trivial as hungry?”

“Not even that. It might only be a Domino’s pizza, but the act of choosing toppings feels so frivolous. It’s like a statement that life goes on. You’re not ready for that statement. You can’t find the moment, or the words, without it seeming tasteless. How can they be dead, and you’re still preferring pepperoni to ham.”

Eventually Justin said: “So what did you have for your tea?”

“Microwaved burgers from Co-op.”

“That seems more of a statement that life doesn’t go on.”