by Luca Veste
‘I don’t,’ Chris snapped back, and I could see his grip tighten on the steering wheel. Next to him, Nicola tensed up, but didn’t look up from her phone. ‘And now he’s gone, we never have to talk about it again, do we? We have to move on, right? We can’t change the past now. I wanted to say something at the time, remember? But none of you agreed. Now, it’s far too late. I know we’re all trying to ignore what might have driven him to take his own life, but we all know the reason. Let’s not dig around in the past and make it even harder on ourselves.’
‘I guess you’re right,’ I replied, turning away and staring out of the window at the passing countryside. ‘I was just worried about Michelle, that’s all.’
‘Yeah, well it’s unlikely we’ll see her again any time soon.’
The music was turned up and I could see Nicola’s jaw tensing as she continued to stare at her phone. I wondered if the two of them ever spoke about what happened. Whether they had gone back to a normal relationship since. Chris and I didn’t tend to talk about that side of his life all that much. Usually he was simply listening to my woes, rather than talking about his own. If he had any.
‘It was good to see Alexandra though,’ Nicola said, turning to Chris and smiling a little. ‘I’m guessing you thought the same?’
I shifted uncomfortably on the backseat. ‘I’m not so sure about that. Lot of water under that particular bridge.’
‘I’ve spoken to her a lot over the past few months. She always talks about you.’
‘Yeah, but that doesn’t really say all that much,’ I replied, shaking my head and pulling at a stray thread in my black trousers. ‘I’m sure Chris will have told you that I don’t talk about much else either. Doesn’t mean I think we will or should get back together.’
‘It took you a long time to get together in the first place. You had the few years in school, then it was what? Seven or eight years after we went to university?’
‘Something like that.’
‘And we all know you wanted to be with her for all that time in between. You love her.’
‘Sometimes love just isn’t enough.’
Chris smiled sweetly at Nicola, who reached across and squeezed the hand he had resting on the gearstick. ‘You’d be surprised what love can get you past.’
‘Yeah, well given what happened, I don’t think it’s surprising. Not all of us have what you two have.’
I was glad of the silence that followed. I didn’t want to think of Alexandra and me being failures for not being able to survive together. I caught Chris’s eye in the rear-view mirror and looked away.
‘Are we ever going to talk about it?’ I said, still looking out of the window. The words were out of my mouth before I thought about it and I could almost feel Nicola tensing again in the front passenger seat.
‘What’s there to talk about?’ Chris replied, the tone of his voice betraying him. ‘What’s done is done.’
‘Is it though? Especially after what’s happened now?’
Chris shook his head, shot a look towards Nicola who had buried her head into her chest and was breathing heavily. ‘It’s not a good idea to dredge up bad memories. Best we just get past it. Keep moving on.’
I clenched my jaw and placed the flat of my right palm against my thigh, moving with it as it bobbed up and down. I knew Chris wanted to talk about it more, but Nicola wouldn’t have any of it. I wondered how he had dealt with being involved in a murder – because that’s what it was – and never being able to talk about it. I could imagine Nicola wasn’t willing to share her own feelings at all. I thought about Chris, wanting to talk about what we had done but not being able to. I made a pact with myself that I would catch him alone and make sure he knew I would be willing to listen.
‘He’d been acting weird for a long time,’ Chris said finally, changing the subject a little, towards Stuart. ‘Even before . . . you know. He couldn’t settle. Was always bouncing from one job to the next. Travelling here and there. He wasn’t exactly the type to just have a normal job, a stable relationship, or a house of his own.’
‘You spoke to him more recently than me. How did he sound?’
Chris sighed, another glance askew towards Nicola. ‘He was hyper. I think he was on something, looking back at it now. This is with the knowledge we have now, of course. Could have been nothing, for all I know. Thinking about it, he wasn’t himself, that was for sure. Talking a mile a minute, like he was on coke or something.’
‘He had form for that,’ I replied, remembering the numerous times back in university when Stuart would still be the life and soul of any party. Even when the sun was coming up and everyone else was ready to stop. I could picture him instantly – jaw moving, eyes wide and his gums showing as he grinned wide. It was difficult to have a normal conversation with him in that state, but I remember the laughter. ‘It’s not like we’ve always been clean though. We did our fair share.’
‘Yeah, but that was a long time ago. We’ve all grown out of that now.’
I hummed a response, thankful that those days were behind us. Didn’t mean there was anything odd about Stuart possibly still dabbling. There had been enough moments in the past year when I’d felt like drifting away on some kind of high – leaving reality behind for a few minutes at least. It would make things easier to deal with for one.
‘Anyway, he wasn’t himself,’ Chris continued, slowing down at a junction carefully and craning his head forward to see that his path was clear before pulling away again. ‘I didn’t think much of it then, but I’ve been replaying that conversation over and over in my mind since.’
‘What was he saying?’
‘Nothing really. He was talking in circles. I tried to have a conversation with him, but it was pointless. Maybe it was a call for help? I don’t know. All I do know now is that I wished I’d listened more. Maybe asked the right questions? If I’d known what was on his mind, there’s a chance I could have done something, I think. He used to listen to me. Sometimes.’
‘I’m sure you did what you could,’ I replied, knowing it would never be enough for Chris. It wouldn’t be enough for any of us. We would all have to live with the knowledge that we could have done more for Stuart.
I pulled out my phone and finally did what I’d put off doing since I had found out about Stuart.
I googled the news reports and found the place where he had been found.
1994
I took turning thirteen seriously. I was a teenager now. That meant things were different.
I was the last of the five of us, but that just meant we could celebrate in style over the summer holidays. I convinced my mum and dad to let me spend the day with the gang and the lot of us went on a day out. It was all planned out – we were going to watch The Mask at the Odeon on London Road, then it was McDonalds after that in town, and then we’d get pick ’n’ mix at Woolies with my birthday money.
It was going to be amazing.
Chris knocked for me early, a present wrapped up for me to open. He knew I’d asked for a Super Nintendo and had bought me an extra controller so he could play with me. We spent an hour playing Mario Kart before we went and got the girls.
Michelle had only started hanging around with us earlier that year. We had just finished Year Eight and things were changing all the time. Things were getting serious in school now. They were already talking about ‘options evening’ when we’d decide what GCSEs we’d study.
‘Definitely not geography or history,’ Chris would say on an almost hourly basis.
We were already planning on which subjects we’d both do, although I was slightly disappointed that he didn’t want to do history.
Chris and Nicola had kissed for the first time four months before my birthday. When I asked Chris what it was like, he’d shrugged, but he’d been smiling ever since. I’d kissed one girl in my life before then: a girl in primary school called Alison. I could still remember how our teeth had clattered into each other the first time. The second time was
better.
Chris and Nicola kissed all the time now.
We were on our way to McDonalds when the boy with the shaved head dipped his shoulder and pushed into my chest. Hard.
I stumbled backwards, not really understanding what had just happened. One second I’m mimicking Jim Carrey, the next I’m trying to stay upright.
‘What are you looking at?’
I knew what that meant. I drew myself back upright and looked at where the shout had come from. Three lads, all in trackies, shaved heads and sneers. My heart rate went up a fair few notches.
Alexandra and Michelle had walked ahead of us, so didn’t see us stop. Chris and Nicola had been holding hands walking in step with me. They had uncoupled now and were standing either side of me suddenly.
‘What’s your problem?’
‘Didn’t say anything,’ I said, taking a step forward. Even as my heart attempted to escape from my chest, I wasn’t going to back down. I never did. ‘Must be hearing things.’
There was a moment when I thought they’d just walk off. I don’t think they ever got anyone talking back to them – I imagine people skulked off and tried to ignore them. Then, they’d be followed for ages, until they found relative safety.
Three lads. Only one of them was the same height as me and I was quite small. The others might have been around our age, but something had stunted their growth.
‘What did you say?’
Thick accents, swagger and senselessness. The one in the middle, who just happened to be the shortest one, actually snarled at me. He closed the gap quickly, but I’d been expecting it.
I had been in fights before. On the playground, where you had to fight back early or you’d always be a target. I wasn’t ever going to let myself be that.
It grew blurry then, as wild punches were thrown from all angles and I ended up on the floor. I heard screaming and it took a second before I realised it wasn’t coming from me. I got a few digs in, but also took some as well. I could hear Alexandra and Michelle, shouting my name. Chris’s name.
Nicola’s name.
The last thing I saw before adults stepped in and separated us was Nicola punching the living daylights out of the biggest lad of the three. She was silent. Focused.
She was dragged off him by Alexandra, who was probably doing the lad a favour.
As soon as we were split apart from them, we legged it. Took a right past the Adelphi and up Lime Street as it became Renshaw Street and didn’t stop until we made it past Rapid’s. The five of us together.
We ducked down another side street and kept walking. I didn’t hear any footsteps behind us and it became clear that we were out of trouble.
‘What the hell happened there?’
I turned to Michelle who was flushed and breathing hard. She’d spoken around inhalations, as she bent down and put her hands on her knees.
‘They kicked off for no reason,’ I said, feeling the beginnings of a stitch in my side. The popcorn and coke from the cinema sloshing around in my stomach. I looked down at the back of my hands and saw reddening on my knuckles. ‘Thank God you were there. They would have battered me if I’d been on my own.’
‘I think if Nicola was there, she would have dealt with it anyway,’ Alexandra replied, and while there was a reddening in her cheeks, she wasn’t breathing hard. She was staring over at Nicola with a look of awe mixed with a little fear. ‘It took three of us to get her off that one lad.’
I looked across at Nicola, who was breathing hard but smiling. She had moved closer to Chris, who had put an arm around her.
Blood was drying on Chris’s nose, the same colour on Nicola’s hands as she flexed them back and forth. ‘Hands okay?’ I said to her, feeling the pain in my own now the adrenaline was beginning to wear off.
Nicola looked up at Chris, moving closer to him as he gripped her tighter. ‘They’ll be fine. They deserved it.’
We started walking away from town then, trying to work out a way back home without going back into the city centre. Once we had calmed down, we were then wary of every corner we turned, waiting for the lads with shaved heads and trackies and sneers and snarls to be there ready to finish the job.
All of us except Nicola.
Sixteen
The house was empty, as it always was. Even my presence wasn’t enough to give it life. It was supposed to be so much more than this, but now the walls were still bare and the furniture scant and practical.
Still, it was better inside than outside. I could finally breathe peacefully.
I slipped off my suit jacket and threw the balled up black tie on top of it. Placed my phone down on the kitchen counter and switched the coffee machine on. My thoughts were of Chris and Nicola, leaving them in the car, so many words left unspoken. I wanted to know how they were feeling. How they were dealing with things. They had each other, which I guess must have helped them, but I still didn’t understand why they hadn’t slipped since it happened.
As the day ended and night fell, I was sitting in front of my computer reading about what happened to Stuart. The scant details, the distance from the reality. Words on a screen, that didn’t tell me what I needed to know.
He would have felt that silence again, I thought. Maybe that’s all he could hear now. Forever.
His body had been found not long after the train hit him. The media reports took great pleasure, it seemed, in not telling readers exactly what had transpired that night. Instead, they allowed you to fill in the blanks.
He was alone.
He was unrecognisable when he was found.
His body would have been a mangled mess.
He lay on the train track and a train destroyed everything I had known Stuart to be.
I closed my eyes and tried to picture him as I’d known him. The smile, the laugh, the way his hair always looked like he’d just simultaneously woken up but also spent hours making sure each strand was positioned perfectly. The glint he would get in his eyes when he was making us laugh. The way his hands would gesticulate as he told a story. The voices he would put on when he was talking about people he’d met.
He was my friend and I’d let him die alone.
I knew there was more I needed to know.
The house was insufferably quiet when I went to bed. I stripped and took a shower, stepping back in it when I realised I still hadn’t washed the funeral from my body. I could still feel the weight of it all on my shoulders, even as I increased the temperature of the water and let it almost burn my skin.
I thought of seeing Alexandra, feeling the old wound reopen anew. I wanted to call her when I’d got home, but had no doubt how the conversation would go. There was too much that had been destroyed between us. I would only be hurting myself again. And her.
Michelle.
She looked so lost.
I hadn’t thought about her that often in the previous few months. How she’d been, or how she was. There was always a little niggle of worry in the back of my mind that she would eventually crack and tell someone what we had done, but I doubted the idea she ever would. Self-preservation was a strong factor in all of this. With every passing day, the judgement became worse. She wouldn’t be lauded for coming forward now.
Still, she didn’t look like the Michelle I’d known for over twenty years. We were never really close – she had always been part of the group, but we were on opposite sides of it. More friends of friends, who just happened to be together almost constantly.
It was because of Stuart, of course. They had been on and off for years. That’s all it was. She was hurting and probably blamed all of us for making sure they would never end up together.
And now, it was really over.
I knew Michelle loved Stuart. That at some point they would stop playing games and settle down. We all did. Then, that fractured memory of a night occurred and changed everything.
There was no real chance of sleep, but I still went through the motions. Lying in bed, flitting between playing music, playing t
alk radio, watching ASMR videos on YouTube. None of it worked.
Still, it kept the quiet away.
I heard a noise downstairs. A shift of something. The television settling or the fridge making a clunk in the night. I could feel my heart beating a little faster, as I imagined someone walking through my house. Opening up drawers, trying to find something valuable. It didn’t matter that I knew for certain that I’d locked up correctly and that they would have to make a lot more noise getting in than I’d heard.
I listened for anything else, but nothing came. A tap on the window from the branch of the tree that was outside my bedroom, as it moved in the wind. That was it.
I closed my eyes to it all. Light crept its way through the curtain. Low winter sun rising in the hidden sky. I counted down the hours of sleep I had left until it was morning proper. Tried to will myself to sleep, even as I felt those hours slipping away.
The next morning, I made a rough estimate that I’d perhaps fallen asleep for as long as two hours. As I was standing in my kitchen, waiting for the coffee machine to kick in, I checked the back door and then the front door, just to make sure no one had been in the house. Everything was exactly how I’d left it the night before. Not a mark on either door.
I drank my coffee, then got dressed. I had made the decision to go without thinking too much about it.
The train tracks where Stuart had been found were a half-hour drive from my house. Forty minutes, tops. A Saturday morning, I thought it’d be closer to forty-five, trying to get through town and then further south of the city, but it wasn’t as if I didn’t have the time.
I had all the time in the world. What else was I going to do?
It took me forty-five minutes to finally leave the house. Standing in the hallway, staring at the front door, wanting to stay inside where it was safe. Before, finally, I thought of Stuart dying alone and not being there to help him.