Just Last Night(33)
Well, that was easy. Praise be to Susie for being so organized, and, this box aside, no sort of hoarder. Inside are several small bundles of letters, fastened with elastic bands, all of them still in envelopes, and addressed to Susie at her rented flat back when she lived in the Lace Market. And underneath those, girlish diaries with pastel, patterned, foamy covers, the kind with clasps but not locks.
A quick poke about in a set of dresser drawers with glass handles, and a sweep under the bed, turns up absolutely nothing sensitive whatsoever.
I pick my way carefully back downstairs, box balanced on both arms, and find Ed in the kitchen.
I announce: “I’m taking this. I’m not going to pry through anything in it, on my mum’s life. But it’s old letters and diaries, exactly the sort of thing she’d want gone.”
“And I’m taking this, but not in the sense I’m taking it.”
I lean my head around to see what he means, and Ed’s flapping a tiny packet of white powder at me.
“Where the hell was that?!”
“In the spare teapot. Which looked like she’d inherited it from a granny. Susie’s in heaven right now having to explain herself.”
I laugh, while feeling ever so slightly perturbed that as her best friend and keeper of her secrets, I wasn’t the one to predict its presence.
14
“Ey up me ducks,” says Justin, unwinding a snazzy silk maroon scarf from his neck. Ed and I mumble greetings. “Nice day for it. Anyone want anything from the bar?”
We demur and Justin goes to order his coffee.
Uncharacteristically, I cringe at Justin’s playful manner, in the direst of times. It’s been just over a week since Susie died and we are gathering to discuss her funeral plans. I know he’s nothing but good intentions, I love his general iconoclasm. He gives the impression of recklessness for the purposes of his comedy, but he’s emotionally intelligent.
When we were at sixth form, Justin did work experience at an old people’s home. He took a man in a wheelchair out to see a lake and produced homemade sandwiches and KitKats for them to enjoy alongside the view. The man cried and said it was one of the nicest days he’d had in years, as his family didn’t visit.
“That was that,” Justin said, at the time. “I knew I couldn’t do any other sort of work.”
That’s who Justin is.
However, today I don’t trust a total stranger to realize Justin is entirely benign, and that goes triple when the total stranger is Finlay Hart. I am additionally unusually relieved that Justin left Leonard with his sister today, as I can’t see his yappy interventions being taken as comic.
It’s been just over a week since Susie died and Fin got in touch to ask to meet. I explained it was a group effort between me, Ed, and Justin, and Fin said, “Well, bring them.”
I asked if he wanted to choose a venue and he said, “Anywhere in the city center should be easy for everyone?” and I nominated the Caffè Nero by the Brian Clough statue, as straightforward to find.
“Are you coming in from Bridgford?” I said, not to be nosy, but because I was edgy and didn’t know how best to spin the conversation out to something of conventionally polite length.
“No, I’m staying at a hotel in town,” Fin said.
I didn’t know what to say to that other than “Ah.”
Now we’re here, on a Saturday afternoon, with a gang of twenty-somethings near us bellowing and playing music on their laptops, it feels a lumpenly stupid choice.
Ed and I bump into each other outside, and in the pin-sharp white sunlight I notice how drawn and shadowed he looks, after only a few days apart. Like Ed, but sketched in charcoal. From the way he squints at me before heaving the door open, I suspect I look much the same.
I once again allowed myself to believe the cosmetics industry’s lies that you can cover under-eye circles, and spent a while dabbing on three layers of beige. Then caught my reflection in a shop window and saw a very tired woman with ochre raccoon markings. Her expression is set to “embattled, and vaguely concussed.”
We choose a table upstairs with a view, looking down on the buskers and the shoppers and the people whose lives are continuing. Lucky foolish unwitting bastards. How can they make being alive seem so easy, when it wasn’t possible for Susie to stay that way? Do they not know how precarious this all is?
I feel scared, to the point of being in a secret sweat under my winter parka as I unzip it, even though there’s nothing to be scared of, exactly. I suppose I’m scared constantly, now, of this completely altered reality I’m expected to manage.
There’s something so counterintuitive in planning a funeral—the one person it’s for can’t attend. Dispensing a Lifetime Achievement award, but with no cutaways to their delighted face in the audience.
It’s not for Susie, it’s for everyone else, my mother said.
She made me strong cups of tea, sitting at her kitchen table, and rubbed my back as she said things like “Oh my God, how awful” and “That is no age, no age at all” and “I know you two girls were thick as thieves” and “I am so sorry, darling” at intervals as I heaved and near-retched, talking about what happened. I wasn’t holding my emotions in check for anyone else’s sake, I could let it out with my mum. She talked fondly about how she’d always thought Susie looked like Carly Simon, and I got a bittersweet pang of gratitude at a familiar observation that only days ago would be pleasant but mundane. The value of memories of Susie had shot up, like the hiked price of a rare autograph.