Just Last Night(32)

Not a starter property in an area with “drinkers’ pubs,” petty crime waves, and trash bins with Wite-Out warnings like “No. 22s!!!! (DO NOT FUCKIN ROB AGAIN TWATS.)”

“I want an investment and Dad’s not getting any younger, it’s walkable to his,” she said, back in our twenties. I think she was rationalizing that she felt more comfortable among her own, MacBooks in Caffè Neros and Marks and Spencer’s nearby. After all, she didn’t walk to her dad’s, she got in her racing-green Mini Cooper, with 6 Music cranked up high. (Her Mini, that we averted our eyes from as we passed it outside: how is it here, when she’s not here? It will have to be sold. She’s going to be raging when she comes back and finds out it’s gone.)

I use the key and let us into her narrow hallway, pushing against a small drift of mail that’s already built behind her door. On the other side, the familiar smell of Susie’s house, the pungent laundry detergent she used, blindsides me.

“I’ll take those to the kitchen table and look through to see what needs canceling, utilities, et cetera,” Ed says.

“I think you need a death certificate for that?” I say.

“You might be right.”

I’m not sure how I know this. Standing in her house, discussing registering her death. Surrounded by Susie’s décor choices, her things, so many coats of hers I remember nights out with her wearing, hanging limply on the back of the door. Soon to be decorating the local branch of Oxfam, on plastic hangers with handwritten price tags.

I’m choked. This is the most difficult thing I’ve ever done. Second most, after the hospital.

Why are things, abandoned things, so hard to bear? They didn’t have that quality before. And compared to the living thing you’ve lost, they’re without value.

When I was a teenager, the family cat, Horace, died. He was a grumpy old bruiser, prone to biting the hands that petted him, and my “complacent young person” grief wasn’t great. Yet a while after the vet’s trip where my parents returned with an empty carrier, I noticed a fur-covered moldy grape by the television stand. He’d been rolling it around and jealously guarding it, for weeks prior. Horace had a thing about grapes. All other small spherical objects were ignored, but grapes were his fetish.

At the sight of the fur-covered moldy grape without its protector, my heart cracked.

I HAND ED the sheaf of letters and say: “I’m going to see if there’s anything needs ‘tidying up’ in the bedroom.”

I have something particular in mind. During the KonMari craze for banishing clutter, I told Susie I’d completed the “sorting personal mementos” hardcore level for the aficionados.

“I could never do that,” she said. “I’ve kept all my diaries and all my letters. Every last one. I’m anal like that. Not many people ever wrote to me, though. I am not the love letters type.”

“You kept diaries?” I said. Susie didn’t seem the diary-keeping type either.

“Yeah, I gave it up eventually but when we were younger and into my early twenties. I was being precious. They’re full of trash, obviously. Wah wah I’m so fat wah wah my brother’s being mean. Wah wah my mum won’t let me buy a crop top. The usual.”

Something I know, as I heavy-tread up the stairs and think about when she made me rub thick swatches of a dozen near-identical oatmeal fabrics to choose this carpet, is: I will never read these diaries.

Telling myself I have the right to because she’s no longer here to stop me, to “feel closer” to her somehow, would be an ultimate betrayal. If she’d never been moved to show me them alive, there’s no cause to think she’d want the contents shared now she’s not.

What I can do for her, though, is stop other people reading them. I push open the door to her bedroom with trepidation. Susie’s taste was very different to my love of dark walls, big plants, and kitsch trinkets. Her bed is a white four-poster and the whole space is a symphony of neutrals, and order. The bed is unslept in, neatly made, pillows plumped. I stare at it.

Imagine if Susie had known when straightening that duvet that she’d never be in that bed again. That she’d come back not to this room, with her foam earplugs on the nightstand and her pajamas folded on that chair, but instead would be wheeled, flesh chilly, into a morgue.

This lack of warning is another aspect of it that I can’t accept. Susie didn’t know her last day was her last day. She got no ceremony, no sense of occasion. Life life life . . . and in an instant, dead. Like a brutal edit in a film, a jump cut. Over. Finished.

I see now why those who lose loved ones young become risk-takers. They’re not reckless, they just see the stakes differently from the rest of us. More clearly. They don’t have the same blithe trust in tomorrow that we all do, they know it’s all up for grabs. Ignorance is bliss.

I tentatively open her built-in wardrobes, sweating like a burglar, and riffle through the clothes, trying not to look at any one item, not able to cope with the tsunami of memories they’ll unleash. For a second I stop, paralyzed every time I get a stab of recognition, a specific memory attached to a particular coat or a dress.

There’s odds and ends in the bottom of it, pieces of empty luggage, and a box, made of a felt material. It has a lid, and holes in the sides for handles. I drag it out, put it on the bed, and open it.