Postscript(66)

We make love and it’s gentle, and deep, and he finds his hiding place in me, and my refuge is wrapping myself around him. We carve our place in the world together. Later, he kisses me gently, eyes searching mine to read how I am feeling, always caring about what’s going on inside my head.

‘Eddie’s hug hurt more,’ I say, and he laughs.

I wish I can spend the night with him, wake up in his arms in the morning, but I can’t, we’re not allowed. Our love is limited and decided by others, the simple but elusive act of waking up together with the sunrise a pleasure for only when ‘they’ say so. My curfew was 2 a.m. and it is already that time when I wave goodbye to Gerry from the taxi.

I’m barely asleep when my mum wakes me and I think I’ve been found out, but the early morning emergency wake-up call has nothing to do with us. Gerry is on the phone and he’s crying.

‘Holly,’ his voice is ragged, sobbing. I panic. ‘Eddie is dead.’

After his party ended in Erin’s Isle, Eddie and his group of friends moved on to a club on Leeson Street. Eddie was falling around drunk and separated himself from his friends in an effort to get a taxi home. He was found lying unconscious on the street. A hit and run. He died before he reached the hospital.

Eddie’s death breaks Gerry. He still works, but he’s a malfunctioning Gerry and I know he’ll never go back to the way he was. I don’t lose him, in fact the opposite happens. All the parts of Gerry that were nonsense disappear and the parts that I love and more, become refined.

I’ll never know if it is because of the moment we made love around the same time as Eddie was living the last hours of his life, when we melted down our old forms and remoulded into something new together, or if it was Eddie’s death. I’m sure it was both. Eddie’s death is such a monstrous event in our lives, who’s to know which event changed which parts of us. What I do notice is that both events bring us closer together, and what I know about me and Gerry is that the more the world dislocates, the more we come together.

There’s the funeral.

And then there’s something new.

We are sitting with Eddie’s parents, brother and sister in the family room, everyone stunned. Gerry is sorry that he wasn’t with Eddie when he was going home; he knows had he been out, he wouldn’t have let Eddie go home alone, he would have guided him to a taxi, put him in the back, brought him home. But what we both know is that Eddie knew that we were in love, Eddie loved that we were in love, he pushed us together, squished us together and sent us off. There’s no guilt to be felt, only a regret that Gerry couldn’t have made it all end better by saving Eddie.

‘If I regret not going to the club with Eddie, then I’d regret what happened between us that night,’ Gerry reasons when we’re alone. ‘And I don’t regret a second.’

Eddie’s mum brings us upstairs to show us the unopened gifts that are still covered in wrapping paper with unopened birthday cards. A pile of wrapped twenty-first presents that Eddie never even had the chance to open. His parents had brought them all home in a bin liner the night of the party.

‘I don’t know what to do with all of these,’ she says.

We look at them. There must be thirty or forty gifts piled high.

‘Do you want us to help you open them?’ Gerry asks.

‘And what will I do with them?’

We look around Eddie’s bedroom. It’s filled with Eddie’s things. Things he touched, loved, things that smell of him, hold his energy, mean something and have a story. Trophies, jerseys, posters, teddies, computer games, college books; the items that carry the essence of him. The unopened presents before us hold nothing of Eddie in them, they never had the chance to absorb his life.

‘Do you want us to give them back?’ I ask.

Gerry looks at me, aghast that I’ve said something so wrong, and for a moment I’m afraid I’ve misunderstood.

‘Would you?’ she asks.

I kneel down and open a small card tape to a wrapped gift, footballs decorating the blue paper.

‘Paul B,’ I read.

‘Paul Byrne,’ Gerry says. ‘Teammate.’

‘You know them all, Gerry,’ his aunt says.

‘All of them have cards,’ I say. ‘We could do it.’ I look at Gerry, who seems unsure. ‘A gift from Eddie back to his friends.’

I don’t know why I say it. I think it’s because I’m trying to sell it to Gerry, because I know it’s what his aunt wants, but after a while I start to believe it. ‘A final gift from Eddie from wherever he is.’

And Gerry clings to that. Over the next weeks we both embark on this mission to return the gifts given to Eddie. To identify the giver, locate them, and return them. And each gift tells a story about the person Eddie was. And the person giving it shares it with us, wants us to know. Why they chose it, the story behind it, and every reason is another moment that Eddie is alive. And even though they’re getting back their own present, they’re getting a piece of Eddie back. And they’ll keep it. It was Eddie’s gift, keeping it will keep him alive, whether it’s a football jersey, stupid novelty boxer shorts, or whether it’s a compass from the uncle for the boy scout nephew so that he’d never again lose his way. Whatever it is, small or big, sentimental or jokey, it represents an acknowledgement of their friendship, and Gerry and I bring it to them, one summer when we’re on our school break. We have part-time jobs but we spend every available hour driving around in Gerry’s dad’s car with Gerry’s provisional licence, just me and him, doing this important adult thing with new-found freedom.