Suzy Suzy

by William Wall

  I tried Serena’s birthday and it worked. The startup sound was like an electric shock. It came alive in my hand. I didn’t know what to think. I knew from Maths that in a group of twenty-three (like my class) the probability of two people sharing the same birthday was 50%, but what was it for sharing the same year?

  That old iPhone home screen. I knew everything about it. It is designed to warm your heart. There were twenty-seven text messages and forty-one missed calls. The calls were all from one number. I looked at the text messages.

  There were eight from the day he died.

  Where are you?

  Anser FFS im waiting for u at the house

  Ur late??!!

  Fuck u.

  Why dont u anser?

  R u ok?

  Tell me ur ok

  Matt?

  I wanted to text back: I’m fucking dead bitch. But I didn’t do it. I scrolled back and back. They were mostly making dates.

  See you at 7?

  Yay

  How about 7.15?

  CYA then

  Delayed at meeting

  Fun

  I kept going back. Who was it? There was no name. The address book was empty. His Mail didn’t link to any email. The stocks app was just the standard stocks. They were all down. The FindPhone was blocked for data. It didn’t want to be found. There were no Voice Memos. The App Store was showing seven updates. He never bothered to update anything. There were no Notes. The Calendar was blank. My dad was a bitch Calendar addict. On his business mobile he got alerts about his morning coffee and when it was time to collect his suit from the cleaners and when the rents were due and when a court case was coming up and when he had meetings and when he had golf and when he was having drinks and when Mam’s period was due even though she’s in early menopause or whatever. On the period days he would always be working late lol. I know the feeling but that option was not available to the rest of us. The Fitness app said he did an average of three thousand steps a day. They say ten thousand is what you need for a healthy heart. Lol. My dad’s heart. The steps peaked between five and nine in the evening. The rest of the time he was sitting in the car or in his office. The phone was probably in the envelope. I never saw my dad walk. Maybe the one time he pissed on the Castlemartin project.

  The texts had been going on for months. He never cleared any of them. They were all the same. Where are u? or Going to be late. Once or twice she said: I want u. And he’d reply: Me too baby. Or he’d say it and she’d say: I want u 2. How did I know it was a she? If my dad was gay would he have given his life trying to save our family from homosexuality?

  So an affair came down to this. Like a bus timetable. Come to Clarinda Park my dear, fuck and go home, cya, ttyl, I want u, me 2. It was pathetic. It was sad. Like we did Romeo and Juliet. These violent delights have violent ends, And in their triumph die, like fire and powder which, as they kiss, consume. My fucking life I swear.

  What did I think of my dad? I didn’t think he had really any interest in human beings. I didn’t know whether to be happy or sad. I knew he had a heart because it killed him, but I didn’t think it felt anything.

  I checked the number in my address book and it wasn’t there. It definitely wasn’t Serena’s number which was a relief. I decided not to tell my mam or Tony but I decided to check Mam’s Huawei when she wasn’t looking. I put the phone in a drawer and got down to my revision. It was the first properly hot day of May. It was also almost the last day of May. June and exams were like something hard in my belly that I wanted to throw up but it wouldn’t come. I would go to university in four months. And then my life would really begin. Even now I felt like a different person idk some sort of different girl to the me that was around for the previous eighteen years more or less. Maybe not having a dad does that to you.

  80

  The bitch wasn’t on Mam’s phone either and she wasn’t on Tony’s for sure. There were like four girls on Tony’s and maybe five hundred men. Definitely some of them were complete strangers, maybe from Grindr or something. But Páraic was the only guy he called. It felt weird to be looking at my brother’s life all tied up in a set of telephone numbers that nobody but himself knew anything much about. It was like the iceberg. All that ice below the water. I saw it on a Titanic documentary. Except my guess was it was fire for Tony. Since he started seeing Páraic he was even studying. I’d say Páraic would keep his nose to the grindstone. Teachers right?

  So I was coming round to the idea that I should ring her up. Except no way she’d answer to a mobile call from a dead man. Like imagine if they accidentally buried the phone with him and he started ass-calling. I don’t know if they get a signal down there.

  Same difference for texts. Holly wanted me to do it. She thought it was hilarious. She wanted me to to say the thing about Lazarus from ‘The Lovesong of J. Alfred Prufrock’, the one about coming back from the dead and telling everything. It would probably kill her and I didn’t want to kill anyone. If my dad liked her idk maybe I would too, maybe it’s genetic. But I wanted to hate her straight up no shit, I wanted that all right. She would be the first person killed by Prufrock. My guess was he wasn’t up for it either.

  I didn’t sleep for a week. Like I’m a bad sleeper anyway. Me sitting on my bed crying. And my mam sitting in Dad’s study crying. Three o’clock in the morning at my house.

  81

  The day before my exams I phoned her. I couldn’t go into a court of law and swear that I recognised the voice. Like do you know that or do you believe it, as the policeman said.

  Me: Hello?

  Bitch: Hi…?

  Me: I’m on my Dad’s phone.

  Bitch: Oh…

  Me: Yeah… so…

  Bitch: Yeah…

  Me: So… I didn’t tell my Mam.

  Bitch: Oh…? thanks. I guess…

  Me: Ok bye.

  And I hung up. I was shaking so much. I had to sit down. I was afraid she would ring back so I powered the phone down. Then I powered it up again and I had to put Serena’s birthday in. And there I was again thinking: How did he even know Serena’s birthday? I was supposed to be revising but I couldn’t get my head around any of it. Tomorrow was English Paper I and there was nothing you could revise for that anyway. I took The Dog for a walk. We went down Regan’s Glen, it was my first time back since the purse incident. Followed by the murder incident and all the other incidents. It was dry but there was a low grey cloud. The air was electric. There were bees idk bumble bees maybe, going crazy. It was one of those busy quiet days. I went right down to the river. It’s like deep-sea diving. The further down you go the closer you get to silence. Except you hear small things like a bird moving in a brake of briers or a billion bees getting high. And anyway deep sea diving is kinda noisy idk you hear your own bubbles all the time, in the movies anyway. There was a flat stone down there, maybe the start of a bridge one time, or maybe my grandad was thinking of a dam or something. And I sat on it and took my shoes off and put my feet in the water while The Dog went looking for another dead person’s purse. The water in that stream looks brown but when you take your feet out they’re the same colour as before. It must be an optical illusion. And I started messing with the phone and idk why I never swiped the home screen before but there was a second page and it had WhatsApp and there were photos.

  82

  So this is really the history of how I grew up. Or at least the history of how I turned into a History student. I’ve left out bits. Like the history of how I lost my virginity to a biochemistry second-year. Or the history of how I did my first essay, which was a history of calamity. All the histories. Holly and Serena, Mam and Tony and Tosser and Páraic too.

  Serena is in some sort of institution that cures people who need to be cured. Maybe in America. They have a cure for everything over there, even if you’re not sick. They’re going to need about forty different therapies for Serena, including dinosaur onesies. I asked her Mam if I could write to her and she said the institute was in
sisting on no outside contact. So that was that.

  Holly is doing languages. She is planning an Erasmus already. She’s going to Italy. She has fallen in love with one of the Italian lecturers. She has completely changed her image. She dresses like a bitch fashionista from idk maybe Milan. High boots and tight jeans and blouses. The lecturer likes her idk I think they’re a couple, which is legit not what I expected. The lecturer dresses the same way except she wears skirts. Holly, of course, speaks Italian like an Italian after only five months. I don’t know how she does it. She like absorbs languages.

  Tosser is an actual frigging engineer now. He texted me on John Brown’s anniversary. We miss him. And I miss Tony, he’s in London working on the next big thing, which is something the internet has every morning at eight o’clock. And Páraic went too. He’s teaching in Hackney. Idk if they do Science through Irish there, probs not. And it looks like my mam will hold onto the house. We have declared peace, or at least remorse and regrets, and we miss Dad the way you miss a gale of wind after a long calm spell. He was the noise in our lives after all. But I don’t think his tenants miss him, or maybe they do.

  And still every night Holly texts me: Best year worst year favourite food? And I text back: 2013 2015 omelette ☺. And Holly replies: Marry me babe. Goodnight sleep tight ☺. Holly and me, still best friends forever.

  Idk. Maybe.

  About William Wall

  William Wall was born in Cork, Ireland. He is the author of five previous novels, including This is the Country, which was longlisted for the 2005 Man Booker Prize, four collections of poetry and three volumes of short fiction, including The Islands, which won the 2017 Drue Heinz Literature Prize, the first European author to do so. He has received many awards and prizes including the Virginia Faulkner Award, the Patrick Kavanagh Award, the Writers’ Week/Ireland Fund Poetry Prize, and the Seán Ó Faoláin Prize and he has been short-listed for many others including the Irish Book Awards, the Raymond Carver Prize and the Manchester Fiction Prize. His work has been translated into many languages and he translates from Italian. He holds a PhD from the School of English, University College Cork.

  An Invitation from the Publisher

  We hope you enjoyed this book. We are an independent publisher dedicated to discovering brilliant books, new authors and great storytelling. Please join us at www.headofzeus.com and become part of our community of book-lovers.

  We will keep you up to date with our latest books, author blogs, special previews, tempting offers, chances to win signed editions and much more.

  Get in touch: hello@headofzeus.com

  www.headofzeus.com

  @headofzeus

  @HoZ_Books

  Head of Zeus Books