Just Last Night(58)

She’s not here, worrying about anything. Her problems, old and new: the Ed secret, the antagonist brother, even her vulnerable father, they’ve all been left to me. She died “intestate,” as the wills and probate guy told us, but that only referred to who inherited property and money. Maybe I don’t want these burdens, Susie? Maybe I didn’t deserve them? Can’t I push the responsibility aside, like you all did?

I think these thoughts as a form of self-harm, taking a vicious comfort in the intentional cruelty. I’m angry at Susie, I realize, and not only about Ed. For not glancing the right way up a dark street, for not moving fast enough, and leaving me with this much pain. For just leaving me.

After I’ve wallowed in this, I dislike myself.

If my life was a box-set drama, I guess this would be the moment a portion of the audience would say: I tried to get into it, but she was so self-pitying, you know? Ugh, your friend is killed, but you’re the unlucky one? (Or maybe they’d have bailed after HasPubesGate. “Can’t cope with cringe comedy, two stars out of five.”)

I’m seized by an urge to do something destructive and definitive . . . The letters and diaries? Eighty-five percent of me says: yeah do it, get rid of them. Fifteen percent of me whispers nervously: you can never undo this decision.

The eighty-five percent bellows back: yeah there’s a lot that can’t be undone, haven’t you noticed that? At least if this is a mistake, it’s one I bloody chose and controlled. Instead of being Fate’s pin?ta.

She said she thought you were in love with me and it would destroy you.

There you are, she was prepared to destroy me, never mind some of my sophomoric doodlings.

Before I can change my mind, I place Rog to one side, bolt upstairs, and grab the box. Once back downstairs, holding it, I realize incinerating the contents presents a problem. People only have metal bins—trash cans—for burning things outdoors, in American films. Our plastic pedal versions aren’t fit for this purpose.

Wait, instead of fire, what about water? I have a deep trough of Bristol sink that cost me an arm and a leg. My mum observed its installation with the words: “Isn’t it odd how we end up fetishizing the ordinary things our grandparents had? That said, I never wanted their outdoor loo.”

I upend the box into the basin, grateful the cursed letter is on top, and will therefore be at the bottom. Now I’m looking at the jumble of envelopes, like a tombola, what I’m doing becomes real. Susie’s words, her thoughts: about to be lost forever. I twinge, I wonder if I should sit here, read and commit their contents to memory.

Then when Finlay has me tied to a chair in a garage, holding a petrol can, I can spit out a mouthful of blood and say: If you kill me you’ll never know.

The diaries present a different problem, with their protective spongy covers. I have to open them and brutally rip the pages out from the glue of the spine, so I can’t avoid seeing the sloping script of Susie’s girlish handwriting in blue pen, catching stray words even though my brain doesn’t want to. Mostly excitable, context-free adverbs and “chicken nuggets for tea!” (supporting Justin’s theory, and Susie’s claim, that there’s no creative loss to the world here). I pause, only for a moment, when a shredded piece bears the word “FINLAY!!” in capital letters, underlined, with a face.

Not my business. Not his business—Susie would’ve writhed at the thought of him picking through this.

It has to be done. Temptation needs removing, privacy needs protecting. Is that really why you’re doing this? a voice asks. Or is it revenge, Evelyn Harris?

I turn the tap on and watch the water gush out onto paper, ink melting and blurring, the paper becoming transparent, fragmenting, making a dun-colored soup. When I turn the tap off, the remains can be squidged into a strange, soggy snowscape.

I pick up handfuls of now-unintelligible correspondence and chuck it into the bin with a damp thud.

Roger wanders in and lets go a pealing mew of confusion, which I interpret as: but what are the legal ramifications of destroying the hotly contested artifacts?

“Dunno,” I say to him, thick with wine, triumph, and defeat.

A stray memory—a few birthdays ago, Susie got me some nostalgic joke gift extras, some Vogue Superslim Menthols, a bottle of Dolly Girl perfume, and a bag of mini Daim bars. Kitschy “what were we like!” talismans of times gone by, insights only old friends have.

I find them in a hat box in my bedroom, scooping them up before the memory can hit me—recalling her expectant face as I unwrapped them in a Greek restaurant, in that giddy past, where we didn’t know we were born, and that she was going to die.

I come back downstairs, dump the haul on the counter and spray the perfume at my collarbones, open a Dime and gnaw on it. God, that’s face-twistingly sweet. Susie and I used to eat bowls of vanilla ice cream using the Dimes as scoops. It’s a wonder we have any teeth left.

That I have any teeth left. If you identify people who died in fires by their dental records, what do crematoriums do with teeth?

I unwrap the cigarette packet and light one with a kitchen match, dragging, inhaling, exhaling, and coughing. Oof, this is horrible, did I really used to do this?

Badly, I hear Susie say.

The rain’s abated, so I open the back door and sit hunched on the soaked concrete step in my tiny yard, water seeping through the seat of my dress, blowing plumes of smoke into the damp air.