Just Last Night(27)

Gobbing away on Twitter or posting bikinis on Instagram were inconsistent, she said, with her being something senior and respectable in finance, which meant she spent half the week in London and earned twice as much as the rest of us.

I press the keypad of her phone with exaggerated care and the screen ripples into the small square tiles of a rainbow of apps. Oh God. I feel the high of successful access, and the prickle of intrusion without permission.

I reassure myself—I’m here for one reason only and that’s her brother’s phone number. I won’t snoop. I’m the guardian of Susie’s world in here, and it’s a responsibility I take very seriously.

I scroll down to Contacts and go directly to “H.” There are a few family members in there, but no Fin, and no one who sounds like a nickname for Fin. Somehow, I don’t think she ever called him Brenda.

I try “F.” Nothing there either. “B,” for brother? Nope. I’m at a loss. Does she hate him so much she erased him from her phonebook?

I feel sure she hadn’t taken that step (unless there’s been a huge, game-changing fight, but she’d have likely mentioned such a thing). I recall every once in a blue moon her seeing a message, Susie’s lip curling and her saying: Ugh Fin, he can wait.

However disliked her brother was, not knowing it was him when he called would’ve only put her on the back foot.

I’m out of ideas about where he’s been hidden, so I scroll manually through her list, starting with Annie Butler, Aveda Salon, and Andy Wightman.

I think about the ripples in the pond from this news, the many people who need to be told. I have one person to inform and I’m already failing at the task. I’ve started to give up hope, having scrolled from A to Z, when I trip over, second time around in the B section:

My Wanker of a Brother

Oh. Oh. It’s obviously him: followed by a row of digits for a mobile phone number, with the international code in front. I write it down carefully on a notepad and switch Susie’s phone off. She’s only on four percent battery—or, she was?

The absence keeps winding me, the surreal idea these items are without an owner. I’m worried that if her phone dies and can’t be revived, even though I’ll never browse its contents, I’ve lost a part of her. I plug it into my charger and watch the lightning bolt appear over the battery icon. If only bringing other things back was as easy.

My Wanker of a Brother. The residual anger that sizzles from her inability to even give him his name.

It’s not as if it’s news to me that she didn’t get on with Fin, but this level of antipathy is still an unwelcome surprise. Susie was plenty open with the three of us about most things in her life.

The two subjects she was tight-lipped about were her dad’s illness and her relationship with her brother. She’d tell me the basics, but in a clipped, obliged, “so you know the score and we can move on” sort of way, making it implicitly clear it was not something she found easy.

She never went into detail about Fin, but gave me to understand he was wantonly nasty to her parents, emotionally frigid toward her, and a disruptive influence in an otherwise happy home. I was upset when Kieran emigrated; she was merely glad to see the back of Fin.

Susie had so few sensitive spots, she was so raucous and confident, that the ones she did have seemed acute and important.

I add Finlay Hart to my phone contacts—I can’t call him from Susie’s phone for obvious reasons, and I don’t feel right calling him without the respectability of a number using his title.

Susie, I wish you were here to tell me what to do. Though I have an uncomfortable suspicion she’d tell me that Fin didn’t deserve to be told. He can stick a row of broken heart emojis on Facebook like every other hypocrite who didn’t actually like me.

The rift after the death of their mum was profound.

She said to me: “Put it this way, I found the bottom of the bucket. If someone doesn’t care about their mother dying, what do they care about? No point thinking anything’s going to mend it now.”

I take a swig of wine, breathe deeply, and hit the phone icon. It takes a while to connect and then rings in that slightly tinny, distant-sounding way of a phone on another land mass. I haven’t practiced what I’m going to say. Possibly stupidly, I feared rehearsal would amplify my nerves. Plunge in. As Ed said, there is no good way to say it.

Eventually, a click, and I get a voice mail. The message is British-accented, and efficiently brusque.

Hi, it’s Finlay, I can’t answer right now, obviously. Leave a message and a number for me after the beep if you want a call back.

Voice mails produce performance anxiety at the best of times, and I flap and feel clammy before blathering: “Hi, this is Eve Harris. I am a friend of your sister, Susie. Please give me a call back when you get this on this number.” (Pause.) “It’s important.”

As I put my phone on the coffee table, Roger settles next to me on the sofa, curled nose to tail in the shape of a furred croissant. I stroke him and feel the comfort of a nonverbal and contented companion.

“Susie’s dead, Rog,” I say, to his back. “Susie died. Can you believe it? I can’t believe it. I want her back so much. I want it to be yesterday, so much.”

Exhausted tears start to pour forth from me again and my nose runs, adding to a sense that I am at primary school with a skinned knee, wailing for my mum. Mum. I should tell her. But I don’t want to tie up the line if Fin calls back. I can imagine him being irritated, busy businessman on the East Coast, hearing the blip-blip and the caller knows you are waiting, and being irritated with me by the time we’re connected. None of that will help.