Just Last Night(25)

We shrieked, tutted, and laughed, and I knew we were a huge comfort to Susie, in that time. I was the female sympathy and shoulder to cry on, Ed was the calm organizer and steadying backbone, Justin the irreverent clown, puncturing tension.

As Ed and I sit, once more in my small front room with the half-burned pillar candles in the fireplace and the red velvet sofa that Roger has scratched till it bled, we are without Susie, and waiting nervously and miserably for Justin. My stomach growls and as soon as I think: Should I bother to raise eating? Is it an inappropriate thing to say? I remember Susie. I wasn’t meant to find out what she meant, this way. I want to tell her, I ache to tell her. I can never tell her anything again. It’s inconceivable.

There is a Susie-less space torn in life—and it’s only been hours. How do we handle this forever?

The doorbell goes and I feel nauseous. Seeing People for the First Time Since is frightening. It’s like having to experience being told, all over again. I stand up slowly and Ed senses my hesitation and answers it.

Justin walks in—my front door opens into the sitting room, I can’t afford anything as fancy as a hallway—and says nothing, throws himself into Ed’s arms. They stand there sobbing, Justin with his head on Ed’s chest, and I think about how I’ve never seen them cry before. I don’t know what to do with my arms, until Justin says to me, indistinctly, “Don’t just stare, join in!” and I grip them in an awkward huddle.

The room is silent but for the sound of our weeping. It’s quite eerie.

When we break apart, I see Roger in the doorway from the kitchen, ears cocked, frowning in confusion. Noisy humans.

“Fucking hell, Suze,” Justin says, when it abates, sitting down heavily. “Always a show-off, that one. Has to be the center of attention. Has outdone herself with this.”

We laugh weakly and slightly hysterically, laughs that are half sobs.

“I did not see that coming. And neither did she, clearly.”

I wince, while being able to hear Susie’s delighted shriek in my imagination. She was the biggest fan of Justin’s taboo-breaking. I have a flash mental image of her on that gurney, not laughing. Not moving.

I glance over at Justin, out of habit—he always grins at his own jokes—and instead see him slumped, devastated.

“You saw her?” Justin says. “. . . What did she look like?”

I understand this is a way of asking about her injuries.

Ed opens his mouth and nothing comes out. He looks at me, stricken.

“Exactly like Susie and absolutely nothing like Susie,” I say.

“That is . . . well, Eve has always been good with words. Spot on,” Ed says.

He looks at his knees. I sense that I needed to see Susie, as difficult as it was, to accept it. Ed found it harder.

“Do you want to see her?” I ask Justin and he shakes his head, emphatic.

“God no, no, thank you. I have seen my share of bodies at the home.”

We run through the minimal information we have about the accident and soon stop, because no better answers about what happened will bring her back to us. It makes us think about that moment on the hundred yards from the taxi drop-off to her house, Susie digging in her bag for her house keys, and a hurtling box of metal coming into view behind her. I swallow hard and my heart races, picturing it.

I can’t go back, push her out of the way, shout at her to move.

The text. If I had replied to her text, and she’d stopped to read it, or texted me back? It’s very hard to absorb that I will be thinking and “what-if-ing” about last night’s events for the rest of my life. It has an instant permanence, like looking at a fresh wound and knowing the scar it leaves will always be a part of your body.

If thirty-four is still some superannuated version of youth in our era, I’m aware I’ve aged exponentially in the space of a morning. That my life has bifurcated into a Before and After and the innocence that I didn’t know I had has gone. I’m disorientated by it.

“We should check on her dad too,” Ed says. “The hospital couldn’t make him understand what happened.”

“I’m relieved in a way,” Justin says. “Because with Alzheimer’s there’s a worst of all worlds where you understand what’s being said and then forget, so you keep reliving finding out, forever.”

I fall silent, aghast. No one has ever described hell so vividly to me before.

“What about her brother, has anyone told him?” Justin says.

“Shit, Finlay,” I breathe. I’d totally forgotten about him.

“So have I, and I share DNA with him, so I wouldn’t sweat it,” Susie says to me, so swiftly and clearly I wonder if there’s such a thing as an audio-haunting.

Recalling Susie-isms used to make me laugh out loud in the street and now, I guess, they’ll always make me cry. A fat tear rolls down my cheek and I wipe it away.

“The hospital had no contact details for him. I explained he’s in the States,” Ed says. “Is he still in New York?”

“I think so,” I say. “She didn’t talk about him much, did she?”

Ed shakes his head. We three understood that, conversationally, Finlay Hart was a permanent no-fly zone. Susie wasn’t really one for gale-force expressions of feeling about people, be it positive or negative, so her vitriol in regards to her brother always took us aback.