“Brother, fuck!” she said, pulling Andrew into a bear hug. She smelled of something musty and floral. “How the hell are you?”
“I’m okay,” Andrew said.
“Jesus, you’ve grown about twenty feet.”
“Yeah.”
“How’s school?”
“Yeah, fine.”
“You do good in your exams?”
“Yeah.”
“What about girls? You got a new chick yet? Nah, too busy playing the field I bet. Hey, you like my sweater? It’s a Baja. I could get you one if you want.”
No, what I want is for you to come and talk to our dying mother.
“Where’s Spike?” Andrew said.
“He’s stayed out in the States. Gonna go back to him when it’s all, you know . . . over.”
“Right,” Andrew said. So that answered that. “Do you want to go up and see Mum?”
“Um, yep, okay. As long as she’s up and everything. Don’t wanna disturb her.”
“She doesn’t really get up anymore,” Andrew said, heading toward the stairs. He thought for a moment that Sally wasn’t going to follow, but then he saw she was just kicking off her shoes.
“Force of habit,” she said with a sheepish smile.
Andrew knocked on the door once, twice. Nothing. He and Sally looked at each other.
It was almost as if she’d planned to die before the three of them were together, just to make things extra painful.
“Classic Mum,” Sally said later in the pub, though she pronounced it “Mom” and Andrew was very tempted to pour his pint over her head, suddenly no longer in awe of the accent.
Their mother’s funeral was attended by two great-aunts and a handful of reluctant ex-colleagues. It was impossible for Andrew to sleep that night. He was sitting on his bed, reading yet failing to follow Nietzsche on suffering, when he heard the front door click shut. He was suddenly aware of the squawking starlings in the nest on the porch who’d mistaken the security light for dawn. He peered through his curtains and saw his sister, laden down with a backpack, walking away, and wondered if this time she was going for good.
As it turned out, it was only three weeks later—Andrew having spent the majority of that time lying on the sofa wrapped in the duvet from his mum’s bed, watching daytime TV—when he came downstairs and found Sally once more standing by the sink. She’d come back for him. Finally, something had gotten through that thick skull. When Sally turned around Andrew saw her eyes were puffy and red, and this time it was he who crossed the room and hugged her. Sally said something, but her voice was muffled against his shoulder.
“What’s that?” Andrew said.
“He left me,” Sally said, sniffing violently.
“Who did?”
“Spike, of course! There was just a note in the apartment. He’s gone off with some fucking girl, I know it. Everything’s ruined.”
Andrew shook Sally off and took a step back.
“What?” Sally said, wiping her nose on her sleeve. Then a second time, louder, when Andrew said nothing. There it was again, that old anger flashing in her eyes. But this time Andrew wasn’t afraid. He was too furious.
“What do you think?” he spat. And then Sally was advancing on him and pushing him back against the fridge, an arm against his throat.
“What, are you fucking glad or something? Pleased that he’s left me?”
“I couldn’t care less about him,” Andrew gasped. “What about Mum?” He struggled to pull Sally’s arm away from his throat.
“What about her?” Sally said through gritted teeth. “She’s dead, isn’t she? Dead as a doornail. How can you be that upset? That woman didn’t have a maternal bone in her body. When Dad died it was all over for her. She just fell apart. Would she really have done that if we mattered to her?”
“She was ill! And given what a mess you are about getting dumped I don’t think you’re one to judge about someone falling apart.”
Sally’s face flashed with renewed anger, and she managed to free her arm to hit him. Andrew staggered backward, his hands over his eye. He braced himself for another impact, but when it came it was Sally taking him gently in her arms, saying “I’m sorry” over and over. Eventually they both slid down to the floor, where they sat, not speaking, but calm. After a while Sally opened the freezer and passed Andrew some frozen peas, and the simplicity of the act, the kindness of it in spite of her being the reason for his pain, was enough to cause tears to leak from his uninjured eye.
The next few weeks followed the same pattern. Andrew would return from his job working in the pharmacy on the high street and cook pasta with tomato sauce, or sausage and mash, and Sally would get high and watch cartoons. As Andrew watched her suck up spaghetti strands, sauce dribbling off her chin, he wondered just what sort of a person she would turn out to be. The fiery bully and the hippie were still living Jekyll and Hyde–like inside her. How long, too, before she left again? He didn’t have long to wait, it turned out, but this time he caught her sneaking out.
“Please just tell me you’re not going to try and find Spike?” he said, shivering in the doorway against the dawn chill. Sally smiled sadly and shook her head.
“Nah. My pal Beansie got me a job. Or at least he thinks so. Up near Manchester.”
“Right.”
“I just need to get myself back on track. Time for me to grow up. I just can’t do that here. It’s too fucking grim. First Dad, now Mum. I was . . . I was going to come and see you. Say good-bye and everything. But I didn’t want to wake you up.”
“Uh-huh,” Andrew said. He looked away, scratching at the back of his neck. When he looked back he saw that Sally had just done the same. A mirror image of awkwardness. This, at least, made them both smile. “Well. Let me know where you end up,” Andrew said.
“Yeah,” Sally said. “Deffo.” She went to close the door but stopped and turned. “You know, I’m really proud of you, man.”
It sounded like something Sally had rehearsed. Maybe she’d hoped to wake him after all. He couldn’t work out how that made him feel.
“I’ll call as soon as I get settled, I promise,” she said.
She didn’t, of course. The call only came months later, by which time Andrew had gotten his place sorted at Bristol Poly, and already it felt like an unbridgeable gap had opened between them.
They did spend a Christmas together, though, where Andrew slept on the sofa in the little flat Sally shared with Beansie (real name Tristan), the three of them drinking Beansie’s home-brewed beer that was so strong, at one point Andrew was convinced he’d briefly gone blind. Sally was seeing someone called Carl, a lean, languid man who was obsessed with working out and the subsequent refueling. Every time Andrew turned around he was eating something: a whole bag of bananas or great slabs of chicken—sitting there in his workout clothes, licking grease from his fingers like an Adidas-clad Henry the Eighth before he’d let himself go. Eventually Sally moved in with Carl and that’s when Andrew stopped seeing her altogether. The system of regular phone calls came into play not through any spoken agreement; it was just how things began to work. Every three months, for the past twenty years. It was always Sally that called. Sometimes, back in the early days, they’d talk about their mother. Enough time had passed for them to see some of her eccentricities through rose-tinted glasses. But as the years went by, their reminiscing became forced, a desperate attempt to keep alive a connection that seemed to diminish every time they spoke. These days, the conversations had always felt like a real effort, and sometimes Andrew had wondered why Sally still bothered to call him. But then there were moments—often in the silences, when there was only the sound of their breathing—when Andrew had still felt an undeniable bond.
— CHAPTER 9 —
Andrew left the office in a daze, shaking off offers from Cameron and Peggy to accompany him home. He
needed fresh air, to be on his own. It took all his strength to pick up the phone and call Carl. But Sally’s husband—Sally’s widower—wasn’t the one to answer. Instead, it was someone who introduced herself as “Rachel, Carl’s best friend”—a strange way for a grown adult to describe herself, especially given the circumstances.
“It’s Andrew. Sally’s brother,” he said.
“Of course. Andrew. How are you?” And then before Andrew could actually answer: “Carl says there’s no room for you at the house, unfortunately. So you’ll have to stay at the B & B down the road. It’s very near the church . . . for the funeral and everything.”
“Oh. Right. Has that all been arranged already?” Andrew said.
There was a pause.
“You know our Carl. He’s very organized. I’m sure he won’t want to worry you with all of the little details.”
Later, as the Newquay-bound train pulled away from London and copses replaced concrete, it wasn’t grief or even sadness that he felt. It was guilt. Guilt that he hadn’t cried yet. Guilt that he was dreading the funeral, that he’d actually considered the possibility of not going.
When the conductor appeared, Andrew couldn’t find his ticket. When he finally found it in his inside jacket pocket he apologized so profusely for wasting the conductor’s time that the man felt compelled to put his hand on Andrew’s shoulder and tell him not to worry.
* * *
—
He spent a week in a damp B & B, listening to angry seagulls keening outside, fighting the urge to leave and get straight back on a train to London. When the morning of the funeral arrived, he ate a breakfast of stale cereal alone in the B & B “restaurant,” the proprietor watching on throughout, standing in the corner with his arms folded, like a death row prison guard observing him eating his final meal.
Walking into the crematorium, the coffin resting on his shoulder, he was aware that he had no idea who the men were on the other side (it had seemed impolite to ask).
Carl—who had entered his fifties in disgustingly healthy and stylish fashion, all salt-and-pepper hair and wristwatch the value of a small market town—spent the service with his head raised stoically, tears spilling metronomically down his cheeks. Andrew stood awkwardly next to him, fists clenched at his sides. At the moment the coffin went through the curtains Carl let out a low, mournful howl, unburdened by the self-consciousness that consumed Andrew.
* * *
—
Afterward, at the wake, surrounded by people he had never seen, let alone met, before, he felt more alone than he had in years. They were in Carl’s house, in the room dedicated to his burgeoning yoga business, Cynergy. The room had been temporarily cleared of mats and exercise balls so there was space for trestle tables struggling to support the regulation wake spread. Andrew looked at the homemade sandwiches, pale and precisely cut, and was reminded of a rare occasion he’d seen his mother laughing, having recalled the Victoria Wood line about a typical British reaction to the news that someone had died: “Seventy-two baps, Connie. You slice, I’ll spread,” she’d said in a perfect imitation, tweaking Andrew’s ear and dispatching him to put the kettle on.
As he chewed on a damp sausage roll, he suddenly got the sense that he was being watched. Sure enough, Carl was looking at him from across the room. He had changed out of his suit into a loose white shirt and beige linen trousers, and was now barefoot. Andrew couldn’t help but notice he’d kept his expensive watch on. Andrew realized Carl was about to make his way over, so he quickly put down his paper plate and was up the stairs as fast as he could go and into the thankfully unoccupied bathroom. As he washed his hands his eye was drawn to a shaving brush on an ornate white dish on the windowsill. He picked it up and ran his finger across the top of the bristles, specks of powder flicking off into the air. He brought it to his nose and smelled the familiar rich, creamy scent. This had belonged to his father. His mother had kept it in the bathroom. He couldn’t remember talking to Sally about it. She must have formed an especially sentimental attachment to want to keep hold of it.
Just then someone tapped on the door, and Andrew quickly slipped the brush into his trouser pocket.
“Just a minute,” he said. He paused and forced an apologetic smile onto his face. When he emerged, Carl was standing outside with his arms crossed, biceps straining against his shirt. Up close, Andrew could see that Carl’s eyes were raw from crying. He caught the scent of Carl’s aftershave. It was rich and overpowering.
“Sorry,” Andrew said.
“No problem,” Carl said, though he didn’t move to let Andrew pass.
“I was thinking I might head off soon,” Andrew said. “It’s a long journey back,” he added, more defensively than he’d intended.
“Of course you were,” Carl said.
Andrew chose to ignore this comment. “See you then,” he said instead, stepping around Carl and heading for the stairs.
“After all,” Carl said, “this must be much easier for you now that Sally’s gone.”
Andrew stopped at the top of the stairs and turned. Carl was looking at him, unblinking.
“What,” Carl said, “you don’t agree? Come on, Andrew, it wasn’t as if you were ever really there for her, no matter how much that obviously hurt her.”
That’s not true, Andrew wanted to say. She was the one who abandoned me.
“Things were complicated.”
“Oh, I’ve heard all about it, believe me,” Carl said. “In fact, there wasn’t really a week that went by when Sally didn’t talk about it—going over it all again and again and again, trying to work out how to get through to you, how to make you care, or at least stop hating her.”
“Hating her? I didn’t hate her—that’s ridiculous.”
“Oh is it?” Renewed anger flashed in Carl’s eyes and he moved toward Andrew, who dropped down a couple of stairs. “So you didn’t hold such a grudge about her apparently ‘abandoning’ you for America that you basically refused to ever see her again?”
“Well no, that’s not—”
“And even when she spent weeks on end—months, actually—trying to reach out and help you sort your life out, you were so pathetically fucking stubborn that you wouldn’t let her in, even though you knew how much it was hurting her.” Carl pressed his fist to his mouth and cleared his throat.
Oh god, please don’t cry, Andrew thought.
“Carl, it . . . it was com—”
“Don’t you dare fucking say it was complicated again,” Carl said. “Because it’s actually very simple. Sally was never really happy, Andrew. Not really. Because of you.”
Andrew dropped down another step and nearly stumbled. He swiveled and used the momentum to keep on going. He needed to be as far away as possible from this. He’s got no idea what he’s talking about, Andrew thought as he slammed the front door behind him. But the doubt that had begun to nag at him as he left only intensified during the train journey home. Was there some truth to what Carl had said? Had Sally really been so cut up about their relationship that it had somehow contributed to her decline? It was a thought too painful to even consider.
* * *
—
With all the lights off, the brightness of the screen was harsh on Andrew’s eyes. TinkerAl’s forum avatar (a dancing, laughing tomato), usually a cheering sight, seemed malevolent tonight.
Andrew made himself look at the words he had typed and untyped so many times he’d lost count.
I buried my sister today
The cursor flashed back at him expectantly. He moved the mouse until it was over the “post” button, but took his hand away, reaching for his plastic tumbler of foamy beer instead. He’d been drinking in an attempt to re-create the comforting sense of warmth he’d felt in the pub with Peggy, before Cameron’s awkwardly delivered bombshell, but it had just left him with a dull, repetitive throbbing behind his eyes.
He sat up straight and felt the bristles of the shaving brush in his pocket poking into his leg. It was three a.m. Carl’s words were still swimming in his head—the confrontation still horribly vivid. What he’d have given now for loved ones around him. Gentle words. Mugs of tea. A moment when a family was more than the sum of its parts.
He looked again at the screen. If he were to refresh, there would be tens, maybe hundreds of messages now shared between BamBam, TinkerAl, and Jim. Something about spotting some limited-edition rolling stock or a platform footbridge for sale. They were the closest he had to friends, but he couldn’t bring himself to confide in them about this yet. It was just too hard.
He moved his finger to the delete key.
I buried my sister today
I buried my
I buried
I
— CHAPTER 10 —
Despite Cameron insisting he could take off as much time as he needed, Andrew went back to work two days after the funeral. He’d barely slept, but it had been bad enough spending one day sitting around with nothing to distract him—he’d much rather have dealt with dead people he’d never met. He braced himself for the onslaught of sympathy. The head tilting. The sad-eyed smiles. People not even being able to imagine how hard it was for him. He’d have to nod and say thanks, and all the while he’d be hating them for saying such things and hating himself because he didn’t deserve their sympathy. It was to his considerable confusion, then, that Peggy had spent the majority of the first hour that morning talking to him about moorhens.
“Very underrated birds, if you ask me. I saw a one-legged one once at Slimbridge Wetland Centre. It was in quite a small pond and it just seemed to be swimming in circles around the perimeter in a sort of sad victory lap. My daughter Maisie wanted me to rescue it so she could ‘invent it a new leg.’ Ambitious, eh?”
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