Don’t You Forget About Me(60)
Before, it was wounded pride, aching heart, knowing it was so significant to me and not to him. I felt like I deserved my misery. Now, I realise I was other things too. Petty, self-important and ridiculous.
I expected him to care about someone he tapped off with during the last summer of A-levels. While he’d been dealing with the love of his life, dying.
As I fully expected, she’s beautiful. I mean, was beautiful.
Staring into Niamh’s deep-set brown eyes, mine following her as she cavorts through holidays, weddings and mimes fake surprise at office Secret Santas, I think, I didn’t know her and yet I can’t believe she’s gone. It’s not as if death was ever easy to accept, but this vibrant and informal digital afterlife we have now makes it even more incomprehensible. Dad would hate it.
I’ve wasted no time finding Niamh online.
I got in from The Wicker, and scanned my latest Karen love note:
? SHARWOOD’S GARLIC NAAN (1) – MISSING
? AMOY LIGHT SOY SAUCE – ONE QUARTER MISSING AND CAP BROKEN
? QUAKER PORRIDGE, SYRUP FLAVOUR – PACKET STRANGELY DAMP: ANY IDEAS??
So many ideas, Karen, involving you accidentally self-immolating while making your blueberry Pop Tarts.
I went upstairs, hauled my laptop onto my knees in bed, opened Facebook and searched Niamh McCarthy (even the name is gorgeously musical).
Straight away, I found a public memorial page. I could see the posts, read the tributes. I think I’m right that Lucas has no online presence because I see no tagging. And there’s no sign of him in the many pictures posted either, which seems slightly odd.
It’s the right Niamh though, of that I’m sure – not only do the dates match, but every so often, someone refers to Lucas in passing, saying he’s in their prayers and so forth.
Lucas’s late wife has high cheekbones and a ribbon of a mouth with a pronounced Cupid’s bow, constantly curled in amusement. The profile photo is one with her brown-black hair in tendrils, whipping round her rosy face as she laughs, caught in an unguarded moment while doing something healthy up a hill. There’s a vast gallery of photos and I click through them, fascinated and voyeuristic.
When looking at a photo with enough dark space, I see my own face reflected back in the laptop. I look like a looming ghost. It’s me, Cathy …
An eight-week illness. He must still be reeling. I can’t imagine.
I found out about Dad in one terrible phone call from Esther, as she stood outside the Royal Hallamshire Hospital and I stood in the university library, saying ‘What?’ on repeat, because she’d just said something so obscene and absurd it couldn’t be true. Esther later told me she was going to say Dad was ‘critical’ so I wasn’t alone when I found out, but she couldn’t bear to give me the false hope. I don’t really remember my train journey down from Newcastle. But losing your parents is still something you expect to go through, someday. Losing your other half at thirty isn’t.
Niamh was a ‘podiatrist by day, poet by night’ apparently. Born: Galway. Lived: Dublin. Thirty-three. Thirty-bloody-three. There’s a photo of her petting Keith. Comments underneath about him being the love of her life.
There’s none of her looking sick – I guess she wasn’t sick for long enough.
Instead, she’s holding a stein of beer in Berlin, one thumb up to the camera. In a flowered, strappy dress, hair swept up, head on one side. Caption: ‘Tara and Terry’s wedding.’ Cuddling someone’s baby, her lipsticked lips puckered and pressed against its chubby little jowls. Caption: ‘Rupert loves his Aunty Niamh already!’ Round for dinner at someone’s house, the ‘before we tuck in’ picture, her superior bone structure peeking out of a row of grinning people, poised around a platter of lamb kofta.
Why no Lucas? Does he hate the camera? I don’t think it’d hate him.
Wait, buried in a set of five, captioned: ‘@ Dun Laoghaire’ – here he is. My stomach lurches at the sight of Lucas, personal and off duty, which is ridiculous, given he’s no one to me. And vice versa.
He’s sat looking up at the lens, arm on the back of a sofa. It has peach, plushy, slightly dated upholstery that says it’s a parental or even grandparental house. Niamh is next to him, in a striped top and jeans, legs crossed, beaming. Lucas’s expression is polite acquiescence, but there’s some sort of resentment behind it. I get a peculiar sensation of the telepathy he and I once shared, age eighteen, when I felt I could read his thoughts. Hah, but you couldn’t, I remind myself.
God, but he’s stunning. I feel almost irritated that I was the first to notice the luminous quality of his skin, the inkiness of his hair, the intensity when he fastens his sight on you. A cult band I once loved is now at Number One and my status as Biggest Fan is now lost in a sea of admiration.
Since he’s become suddenly single and wreathed in tragedy, it’s possible he had to leave Ireland to stop himself being mobbed.
I completely recalibrate my recent judgements of Lucas’s behaviour, in light of this horrible bereavement. To think I’ve been cheeky about his lack of joie de vivre. I almost physically cringe.
As I read about the vivacious, popular Niamh, the light of his life, the light gone out in his life, there’s something unnatural I’m feeling. Something weird and ungenerous and irrational and appalling, and eventually I admit it to myself.