by Cj Flood
Dad swallows a strangled sound at this, and Mum looks at the ceiling. We’re all remembering the way Sam looked after his ventilator was turned off, how it was like he was gasping, though the doctors said it was only a reflex.
‘Our gorgeous son – Samuel Thomas Dancy – named after our fathers, God bless them both, was a funny, talented boy. He was one of the school’s best strikers . . .’
‘Danc-er!’ someone whisper-bellows from the back rows where the school lot are. There is laughing and shushing, and I love whoever it was who dared to do that.
‘Dancer,’ Mum repeats. She smiles. People shuffle in their pews. ‘He loved karaoke – was an even worse hogger than me – and that’s saying something.’
Tess lifts her arms up in a silent cheer at this, and Mum nods at her. She is starting to sound a bit like a human.
‘And he drew the most beautiful pictures. Put your hand up if you’re lucky enough to own one of them.’
Mum puts her hand up slowly, and there is rustling in the chapel as people turn in their seats to see who else has. Me, Dad, Benjy and Tess have our hands up. We can’t help but smile at each other.
There’s hushed laughter at the back again, and we turn round to see that almost the whole row of girls from the netball team have raised their hands. Some of them are blushing, and some of them are laughing. Ally Fletcher is crying again.
‘That’s my boy,’ Mum says, very softly. She seems to be making it up as she goes along.
‘I’ve often dreamed of Sam’s first girlfriend,’ she says, and she looks over at where Matty is sitting. I turn to see her beaming back at Mum, wiping her eyes.
‘I wondered who would end up being his wife, the mother of his children. I wondered how this girl could ever be good enough for him, and I decided I would treat her as perfect, as long as I could see that she loved him. I always knew Sam would make a good father, because of how he looked out for his little sister, Iris. Because of the father he had.’
Mum looks at me. She bites her top lip. She looks at Dad and they hold each other’s gaze for a few seconds.
‘Iris worshipped Sam from when she was little. She followed him around as he went on his important adventures, and she would stand up to anyone, however big, if she thought they’d treated her big brother unfairly.’
She goes into the story of me charging at a bigger boy who’d pushed Sam over on the dance floor at a Butlins disco. Dad squeezes my hand. I can’t remember it. People laugh.
‘The two of them fought like cat and dog, but they never told tales. We could never get out of them who’d started what. And I’m so proud of the way they looked out for each other.’
Mum looks at me for a few seconds, and I think of Sam telling Dad about Trick, the night everything happened, and how it’s just something else only Dad and me will know about this summer.
Her voice cracks and she coughs and tries again.
‘Sam died too soon. In a way that will make people think of blame and justice. But he was my son. And I choose to focus on the happy times. The fifteen years I had with him were the most beautiful years of my life. Please. Join me in celebrating Sam’s life. Remember him as he was. A bossy, happy, funny boy with more energy than he knew what to do with. Talk about him. Remember him.’
Dad has bent his head to my hand, and I can feel his breath and tears prickling on my palms.
Someone claps, and someone else, and the whole room is clapping, and I feel like laughing and crying. I feel euphoric and ecstatic and heartbroken and distraught because Sam’s gone, but he was here, and he was amazing, and he was my brother.
Mum comes to sit beside me, and it feels like her skeleton is vibrating when she hugs me.
Father Caffrey invites people to leave things with Sam should they want to. Matty puts an envelope on his coffin, and rushes back to her seat. A couple of the popular girls follow with notes and a teddy, and then the football team place a centre forward bib in school colours next to Sam’s picture. I stay where I am. I said everything I wanted when he was alive.
Everyone settles back into their places and the thrashy guitar song Sam tormented us with all summer bangs around the chapel.
The red curtains around the coffin close with an awful whirring sound. I can’t look at them. I wish I couldn’t hear them. It’s a sound you can’t forget. I want to get out of the chapel now. Mum and Dad and me leave fast with our heads down.
We stand by the door, at the top of the steps. People slow down to kiss Mum and Dad. They shake their heads and squeeze their hands. They don’t know what to say. I wish Mum would take her sunglasses off. She’s so stubborn, and then I feel a hand on my back.
‘Iris?’
It’s Leanne.
She gestures me over to a table a couple of metres away. It is stacked with hymn books and pamphlets.
We need you! a green and gold tapestry shouts above her head.
She scrunches her big mouth over to one side. Her black hair is parted down the middle and her scalp is bluey white. It’s the first time I’ve seen her without her cap on.
‘Just wanted to say . . . I’m . . . really sorry.’
‘What for? Leaving my brother in the road or punching me in the face?’
Her mouth drops open.
‘I’m really sorry. We had to go,’ she says, and her expression is urgent. ‘James and Dean are on probation.’
‘I don’t care about that.’
She seems smaller. She’s a different girl. She doesn’t know what to say. She just stands there, with her uneven-looking pointy bob, gawping at me.
‘Trick stayed,’ I say. ‘Pikelet. He stayed with Sam while I went to get an ambulance. So Sam wasn’t on his own.’
She looks at her shoes, which are those cheap canvas pumps you have to wear for indoor PE at school. They’re rubbing the tops of her bare feet, turning them red.
‘He was really special,’ she says, and her voice splits. ‘He drew me these pictures. I could show you maybe.’
I shake my head.
Matty has come over at some point, and linked my arm, and all of a sudden any anger I had towards Leanne, and even Punky and Dean who haven’t even come to the funeral, is gone.
I imagine Sam’s drawing version of Leanne – all angular and bright-eyed – and I think of how she cried when he fell, and how she climbed onto the back of the motorbike.
‘I won’t forget,’ I say, and she nods because she won’t either, and then she walks off, shoulders low, to find her dad. She buries her head in his chest and he kisses the top of her head.
Matty nudges my arm, but she doesn’t hug me. She knows what would happen.
‘I made Sam this,’ she says, and she holds out a small blue ceramic thing.
I turn it over in my hands. ‘What is it?’
‘For flowers,’ she says. ‘It’s a vase.’
‘Looks like a sock.’
‘Piss off,’ she says, and she looks so surprised, and then she blows a snot bubble as she laughs or cries or whatever it is we’re both doing, and we walk out to the sunshine to see if that feels any better.
Forty-four
Tractors come to harvest the corn.
It is September, and the police have been down to take my statement. It doesn’t match Punky and Dean’s, but Leanne has told the truth. Trick has told the truth too. I got a letter. He put three kisses, and underlined my name, and there was a drawing underneath which I think was supposed to be an iris. I told Dad what Trick had said, and he nodded. It’s still hard to talk about.
My counsellor says I’ve got to stop going over the order of events. I’m not responsible, he says. There’s no point in What Ifs.
But what if I can’t stop What If-ing? I say. He doesn’t laugh.
These things take time, he says. He says that a lot.
I’m feeling half sick and half relieved when I hear the tractor engines from the house. I run with Fiasco across the yard, and through the paddock. Dad mowed it finally, and it looks as thou
gh nobody has ever been there. We jump across the stepping stones, through the barbed wire, past the ancient oak.
The tractors gnaw along the far end of the field’s edges, making their way towards the top of the hill, where our cinema seats are still nailed to that lonely oak tree. I’ve been waiting for this day. Dad warned me it would be here soon.
I sprint fast as I can, desperate to get there before the farmer sees me. I don’t want to talk to anybody. Fiasco runs ahead. As soon as we make it, I wonder if it was a good idea.
Our cushions have been moved around by the weather and are huddled in one corner against the maize, but the stool I nicked from Silverweed squats where it always did. Corn on the cobs rot in a pile nearby, and I think of the iris Trick sent. I hung it up to dry by my window, crushed as it was. The jokers we scrapped from the pack have been blown into the corn.
I pick up the stool and cushions, and lay them in the long grass by the oak tree. I want the tractors to have a clear path.
I help Fiasco to the first fork in the trunk, and climb up myself. I use the nail Trick put in for me.
The tractors close in.
Fiasco scratches at the trunk, panicking at being so far from the ground. I pat the seat beside me, and she leaps up, bashing her tail against the burgundy velvet.
The noise hurts my ears. When I part the branches, one of the tractors is coming straight for the corn den. The ground shakes. The tree judders. It passes right by us, hacking at the stalks to get the crop. Fiasco jumps onto my lap and I hug her.
‘Don’t worry, girl. There’s nothing to be frightened about. I’ll look after you. It’ll be okay.’
I stroke her long brown ears, and she calms down.
I think of Trick, in his red vest and rolled-up jeans, smelling of cigarettes though I never saw him smoke one.
I think of his odd eyes, and how nice he’d looked when he’d sat on the caravan steps holding something in his hands with his little sisters crowding round. I remember the way he used to look at me, as if I was weird and special and lovely, and what it felt like when we kissed on the lake.
I remember lying on the bed with my warm brother. I remember chocolate on his chin. The way his dimple popped. I remember listening to stories in his bedroom, before it all happened. There was nothing I wished I’d said to him. There was nothing I wished I hadn’t said.
The tractors have long finished when I climb down. It’s that part of the day when shadows are long and the air is golden. I hold my arms out, and after a lot of encouragement, Fiasco jumps into them.
With the corn gone, you can see for miles. All the way to Ashbourne Road. The fields around me are empty except for miles and miles of yellow stubble. It’s a different place.
The sky is cloud-free and blameless, and the sun is sinking down after the first autumn day of the year. Overhead a single vapour trail soars upwards.
The summer is over, but it will always be my brother’s season.
I imagine that every year he will come to see me, when the shadows are long, and the sun is coming down like this, and the world is showing how beautiful it is possible for things to be.
Soon I will be older than him, but I’ll chase him anyway, like a little sister, and always he’ll be running just along at the edges of things, and always he’ll be turning a corner, just ahead.
Acknowledgements
First acknowledgements must go to my mum and dad, for their endless support and general magnificence. To Liam, because he is the reason I so love to write about big brothers. And to Josie Richmond and all of my extended family, for their support.
So many people have helped this book along the way, and I would like to thank:
All my workshop friends at the University of East Anglia, especially Anna Delany and Tim Cockburn, and Andrew Cowan who believed in this book early on. Nicola Barr, who gave excellent feedback as my agent mentor, and The Lucky 13s for all their energy, enthusiasm and wisdom.
Bernardine Evaristo for being an inspirational mentor, and everyone else who helped make the Jerwood/Arvon Mentoring Scheme so wonderful. The Curtis Brown Agency, Grants for the Arts, and Norwich Writers Centre, for making the finishing of this thing much, much quicker.
Max Naylor, who had to read my earliest attempts at writing, and Fiddy Matthews, Ursula Freeman, Molly Naylor, Em Prové and Clare Howdle, who are my heroes.
Everyone at Simon and Schuster for all the work they have done for this book. Phil Earle, who helped with the title, Frances Castle and Nick Stearn who have made it look so very beautiful, and especially Venetia Gosling who pushed me to work just a little harder with every passing edit: I hope the words do the cover justice.
Finally, Catherine Clarke for believing in my writing and getting people to read it, and for helping it to meet the world in the best shape it could be.
Thank you.
C.F.