by Matthew Crow
Colette and Olivia had stayed at our house before the ceremony, at Mum’s insistence. Olivia was now a year older than Amber was when I met her, a year older than Amber ever would be, and had turned into a young woman of such alarming beauty that Chris would no longer let his friends come to our house when she was there, as they spent all their time ogling her and trying to persuade her to marry them.
Fortunately she had also inherited Amber’s sharpness, but in a gentler way, like a loving pastiche of the sister she sometimes worried she would one day forget.
Colette screamed blue murder when Mum tried to sneak out her makeup bag, and eventually the subject was laid to rest.
Mum got her own way about the leave-in conditioner, though, and even Colette was amazed when her hair—once wiry and unkempt, like a mop after it has been pushed under a kitchen cupboard—started to resemble something vaguely human.
DS Bradshaw, whom I now call Dennis after conceding that he may not in fact be the Antichrist, had been waiting downstairs for over forty-five minutes while Mum yelled through the door of the spare room where Chris and Fiona sprawled, while she simultaneously removed the curlers from her hair.
“How’s university going?” he asked me. I had got the last train home the night before, and arrived when everyone else was in bed.
“Fine,” I said.
Only it was more than fine. It was the best time of my life. School had been a necessary evil, something to tolerate, something to survive. But everything that came after had been worth the effort, worth the misery and the panic and the Sunday Night Nausea of Doom. Everything was how I’d always imagined it would be, but better. I spent my nights talking to interesting strangers about interesting things. I discovered friends who made me a better person. I read books that changed my life and watched films that left me so breathless that I would still be stuck to the seat long after the credits had finished rolling. I saw parts of the country, parts of the world, that at one point I couldn’t even spell. I fell in and out of love on an almost daily basis, and said yes to any opportunity that came my way.
I lived.
I am now in my third year. I will graduate in the summer. I am twenty-one. It is six years since Amber.
I knocked on Mum’s door as she was putting the final touches to Colette’s attire. She’d made her own wedding dress out of lengths of white lace. Mum had agreed to this on the understanding that she would get to pick her own bridesmaid’s outfit come the big day.
“If it’s a choice between wearing a shapeless hemp dress and death, then I choose death,” she had said when Colette voiced her initial suggestion.
Mum was painting Colette’s nails when she said I could come in. With a steady hand she dragged across the same shade of purple she had once given Amber, and Colette looked tearful in a happy sort of way.
“How’s it going?” I asked.
Mum didn’t turn around. When it came to matters of grooming she had the steely concentration of a bomb-disposal expert. Makeovers are her Hurt Locker.
Colette looked at me and smiled. It struck me in that moment that Amber’s mouth had been just like her mother’s, and suddenly I was fifteen again, and in love again, and devastated.
It took me a minute to catch my breath.
“Almost done,” Colette said.
“You look beautiful.”
“Thank you, Francis,” she said warmly.
“She’s worried Christian will be too hungover to stand up at the altar,” Mum said.
She keeps pretending it’s a normal wedding, even though it isn’t. There isn’t an altar, for a start. The ceremony is not a religious one. It probably isn’t even legal. One of Christian’s friends is doing a reading, and then they are going to walk over hot coals to demonstrate their love for each other. Mum took to her bed when she first discovered it was an outdoor wedding. Grandma said she couldn’t go on account of her arthritis, which was a lie, but she was going to take a taxi to the reception. In preparation for this Mum had packed three slices of ham and a Scotch egg into her bag, on the off chance Grandma made a scene when she discovered it was a vegan spread.
“Open that fizz for me, love,” Mum said, painting the last of Colette’s nails.
“Only a small one for me,” Colette said with a nervous giggle.
I popped the cork and handed them both a glass.
“I’ve got something for you but I don’t know if I should give you it now,” I said, teasing the lump through the pocket of my posh jacket.
“Oh,” Colette said, “don’t worry about me. We’re tougher than we look, us Spratts. Amber didn’t get it from nowhere,” she said with a laugh. Even though her nails were drying I saw Mum carefully give her hand a tight squeeze.
From my pocket I pulled out a small laminated card. On it five petals of a pansy—darkly purple, like a fresh bruise—had been pressed and roughly arranged into the shape of the flower itself.
“It was part of Amber’s Christmas present to me,” I said, handing Colette the card. “Your garden was her favorite place in the world. She told me once. I just thought it might be something nice for you to have today.”
“You’re a good lad,” Mum said, giving me a hug from the footstool where she was sitting.
“Oh, Francis, what a lovely gesture!”
“I suppose it can be your something old and new, and it’s near enough to blue. If you wanted to give it back it can be borrowed as well, so we’re covering every base.”
“It’s the perfect present,” Colette said, teasing her thumb across the fragile petals.
Mum jokingly cleared her throat and pointed to the two airline tickets on her bed. For a wedding gift she had paid for the honeymoon.
Colette laughed and so did Mum.
“I don’t know what I’d have done these last few years without you. You’re very dear to me, Julie Wootton.”
“Here,” Mum said, topping up her glass, “get this down you and sort yourself out. No one wants a maudlin bride. Miss Havisham was jilted for a reason.”
I bent down and kissed Colette on the cheek.
“You do look lovely,” I said again, and left them to their drinks.
In the months after Amber’s death I seemed to exist in a space there isn’t yet a word for. I carried on each day, waking up, getting dressed. But I was suspended somewhere between life and death. Everything that mattered was gone, and I had been left a husk.
Colette started coming around more often. Mum would cook dinner for her and Olivia, and make sure they had plenty of food in the cupboard when she dropped them back home. Chris would sit with me for hours, sometimes talking, sometimes not.
Nothing made much difference.
Nothing made much sense.
I became half mad.
One day in the conservatory when I was looking for a dropped fifty-pence piece I found a pair of socks that Amber had kicked off while we’d spent the evening curled on the sofa.
I carried them to my room and left them on the radiator for three months, because if I had her socks, then she would have to come back and collect them, and they would be warm when she did.
I stayed up all night the next New Year’s Eve. I wanted to claw at the year before, to catch it in my hands and drag myself back into it. I knew that once the New Year came Amber’s death would no longer be something that was happening. It would be something that had happened. Soon she would enter the past tense, as we skipped over firsts—Christmases, birthdays, anniversaries—until eventually she was someone I had to try hard to remember, like I was looking at her through the wrong end of a telescope.
I cried as the sun rose on January the first. Amber’s death felt like the last thing we could ever do together. Of course her bit of it was over. But grieving for her, loving her, missing her . . . they were all things that I still had to do. And the farther away we moved from the e
vent, the less time I would need to devote to each one.
Life goes on.
Before long there were nights when I’d wake with a start, frantic that I had forgotten something, and eventually realize that what I hadn’t done was think about Amber all day long. Days when I’d live my life without the tinnitus hum of grief acting as the screen saver to my every move.
Before long these days became weeks.
Before long these weeks became months.
Before long Amber became nothing but a memory, and a happy one at that.
“Oh, I am hungover,” Chris said, pulling at the collar of his suit, as everyone made their way downstairs.
“All right, people, we’ve got ten minutes before the cars get here,” Mum said, stomping down the stairs like an army corporal. “Well, aren’t you a sight?” she said to Dennis, picking a ball of fluff from the shoulder of his suit and kissing him on the cheek.
“Fiona, so help me God, if you get garlic sauce on that dress I will knock you daft,” Mum said as Fiona picked somberly at a slice of the night before’s pizza.
Everyone congregated in the front room.
“FIVE MINUTES UNTIL CARS!” Mum screamed from the top of the stairs while she hunted out her camera.
When she came down her face was clouded.
“Where in God’s name is Colette?”
It appeared that in the frantic climax to the wedding preparations the whereabouts of the bride had slipped our minds completely.
“I think she went for some air,” Olivia said. “Do you want me to go and get her?”
“No, love, your dress cost more than Chris’s car. You stay put. Francis, deal with this . . . now.”
The front door had been left open. I went into the garden but couldn’t see anyone there.
I walked down the street in my suit, the way I had once walked to school, and felt a phantom terror at the thought of missing the bus.
Across the road, on the benches overlooking the beach, I saw Colette sitting peacefully, alone.
“Mum says if you’re a runaway bride she’s having your honeymoon,” I said, sitting down next to her.
“Oh,” Colette laughed. “Just having a moment to think.”
I asked if she wanted to be left alone and she said no.
“Do you miss her all the time?” I asked.
Colette nodded her head and smiled, staring out at the yawning sea that lay flat, like a sheet of gold, beneath the chilly glow of the sun.
“Every day. But I always have her here,” she said, tapping her chest. “And here,” nodding out toward the endless stretch of ocean. “She’s forever making herself known, that one,” Colette said with a sad laugh. “Like always. We’ll never really be rid of her, you and I.”
I put my hand in hers and she held it tightly.
“Are you happy?” I asked. She seemed to have to think for a moment, but when her answer came it was with a certainty she usually lacked.
“Oh, yes. On days like this you can’t help but feel blessed,” she said as we stared out at the sea together. “We were lucky to have had her for as long as we did. But even a day as beautiful as today must come to an end. Such a lovely day . . . Don’t ever waste days like today, Francis. Don’t let one second of them pass you by.”
We sat for a moment longer, hand in hand, staring out to sea, not speaking, not crying, just thinking, remembering, and smiling.
“Well, I’d imagine Julie’s suitably frantic by now. What say we put her out of her misery and go and make me an honest woman?” said Colette, standing up.
I bent my elbow and let her slide her arm through mine.
“Come on,” she said, as we made our way back to the house together. “Best foot forward.”
Even Mum cried at the wedding. Chris wiped away a dignified tear when he saw me walking Colette down the aisle. I showed no such restraint. In fact, the only person who cried louder than me was Fiona, who bawled like a banshee when Colette and Christian had their first kiss as “life partners.”
The reception lasted all night. Dennis proposed to Mum, drunkenly, and then again in the morning once they were both sober. She said no three times before eventually relenting.
“Fine . . .” she said, at breakfast the next day, “. . . but only until a better offer comes along.”
We didn’t waste one second of that day. We talked about the past. We talked about the future. And we danced. And we sang. And we toasted absent friends, as the stars shone through the night sky, like Amber’s last gift.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Thank you to my friends and family, particularly Dad, Nicole, and Jess.
Thanks to Mandy Dobson—my first and favorite reader—for the advice, the kind words, but mostly for Sammy.
Thanks to all at Corsair and Much-in-Little.
A special thanks to Broo Doherty and Sarah Castleton.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Matthew Crow was born and raised in Newcastle, United Kingdom. Having worked as a freelance journalist since his teens, he has contributed to a number of publications, including The Independent on Sunday and the Observer. He has written two novels for adults. The second, My Dearest Jonah, was nominated for the Dylan Thomas Prize. The Brilliant Light of Amber Sunrise is his first book for teens.
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authors.simonandschuster.com/Matthew-Crow
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This book is a work of fiction. Any references to historical events, real people, or real places are used fictitiously. Other names, characters, places, and events are products of the author’s imagination, and any resemblance to actual events or places or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
SIMON PULSE
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First Simon Pulse hardcover edition March 2015
Text copyright © 2013 by Matthew Crow
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This work was previously published as In Bloom in 2013 in Great Britain by Constable & Robinson Ltd.
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Jacket designed by Jessica Handelman
Interior designed by Hilary Zarycky
The text of this book was set in Electra.
Library of Congress Control Number 2014946180
ISBN 978-1-4814-1873-7 (hc)
ISBN 978-1-4814-1875-1 (eBook)
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