by Luca Veste
I needed to get out of there. I could almost feel the walls closing in on me. Hidden voices, asking questions I couldn’t answer. I walked straight up the aisle and out of the church without looking back.
Outside it was no better. I willed Chris to follow me, so I could convince him that we needed to go. That I needed to get back home. I needed to be safe.
I could almost feel her presence before I saw her.
She was standing with her back to me, staring out toward the grounds of the church. I hadn’t seen her in months, but I didn’t even need to look her in the eye to know it was her. I could almost smell her, hear her voice, feel her skin beneath my hand.
As if sensing my presence herself, Alexandra turned her head as I stared at her back, and she looked at me.
Then, she smiled.
Fourteen
In that instant, it was as if the past year hadn’t happened. I could have kidded myself forever. Concentrated hard—screwed my eyes closed to reality and wished for it enough—so I could see a way to ignore every painful moment since I’d last seen her.
Instead, I watched as the smile slipped from Alexandra’s face into a puddle at her feet. The length of time it took to fall, moment by moment…each of them a sting to my heart.
“Hello,” I said, as if that would have been adequate. It wasn’t, but I tried again even though there was nothing I could say. “I mean, are you okay?”
That wasn’t very good either, but it seemed to slide off her. She opened her mouth to speak but didn’t get the chance to as the door behind me opened up and Chris and Nicola emerged from the church and made their way toward us. The worried look on Chris’s face faded as he saw who was standing next to me. This time, Alexandra’s smile didn’t fade as quickly, as she looked past me and toward the pair. Nicola and Alexandra embraced, as Chris looked first at me, then shared an awkward hug with Alexandra.
“How have you been? I haven’t seen you for a while now,” I heard Nicola say, moving away slightly from Chris and I. Chris placed a hand on my shoulder, and we stayed behind as they continued to walk off.
The grass was beginning to brown in the seasonal turn, leaves lying atop it like discarded litter.
“You okay?”
“Yeah,” I replied, giving him an unconvincing smile. “I just needed to get out of there. All got a bit much.”
“You’ve not been to many funerals?”
I shook my head. “Try to avoid them as much as possible.” I looked across the churchyard at Alexandra and felt my eyes blur. “I didn’t think she was going to come.”
“How long since you’ve seen her?”
I looked at Chris, then turned away to watch Alexandra and Nicola talk to each other animatedly. “Ten months. New Year’s Day was the last time.”
“The drunken phone call. I remember you telling me about that.”
“It’s why I’ve stuck to coffee since.”
“Not much has changed I see,” Chris replied, the beginnings of a grin appearing on his face. “Absence makes the heart grow fonder.”
“What?”
“Well, I don’t want to say anything…”
“Then don’t.”
Chris held his hands up but lowered his voice further, knowing I still wanted to hear whatever he had to say. “Nicola still speaks to her occasionally. Off and on. They haven’t met up since Alexandra moved over the water. Every time they speak, I hear your name. And the way you two look at each other…it’s not over. Just saying.”
“I’m not interested in looking backward,” I replied, believing the words myself even if no one else would. I knew Alexandra had moved away, but didn’t realize it was only across the Mersey. No more than a half-hour journey, I imagined. In that moment, it may as well have been in a different country. “It’s been a long time. Besides, we’ve known each other for so long that if it wasn’t going to work, then it never will.”
“So were me and Nicola. We were kids when we started out. We went through that time and we’re still together.”
“That’s different,” I said, moving a little farther down the stone path toward the gravestones to the sides of it. I stepped onto the grass, the leaves crunching under my feet almost reverentially. The ground underneath my shoes was a little soft, but there was no mud there. I wondered if Stuart’s parents could even make the rain stop, given the gravity of the day. I changed the topic of conversation before I had to explain the unexplainable. “I always knew Stuart’s mum and dad did okay for themselves, but I wasn’t expecting the whole works like this. I Googled the home address where they’re having the wake…it’s bloody huge.”
Chris turned and shook his head at me. “It’s not gonna be a mansion, Matt.”
“I know, but this isn’t bad for where we are, you know?”
“I think we’d know if he were a millionaire, don’t you?”
“If he had been,” I said and didn’t know why it suddenly became important to refer to him in the past tense.
“I’m glad Nicola has something to distract her.”
I looked over toward her. She was nodding solemnly at something Alexandra was saying and I could see the tension in her features properly now. The new lines, the dark marks under her eyes. “This is hard.”
“I want to get out of here so bad,” Chris said, looking up toward the clouds above us as if they would provide solace. “Don’t you feel it too?”
“What?”
Chris sighed and shook his head. “It doesn’t matter.”
I was about to push him for an answer, but he began walking away, toward where Nicola and Alexandra had ended up walking together.
“Have you heard anything more about what happened, Alex?” Nicola asked, as we finally reached where they’d stopped, almost at the church boundary wall. “We don’t really know what’s gone on.”
“I know probably as much as you guys do,” Alexandra replied, and suddenly I was a teenager again, hearing her voice for the first time, the soft Liverpudlian accent she had, still the same as it was fifteen years earlier. It had taken us a long time to get together properly, but once we did, it seemed like we’d always known that was going to be the eventual outcome.
And then it was over. In less time than it took to buy a house together, to plan a future. In a heartbeat, we had been done.
I caught her eye and realized she found this as awkward as I did. For some reason, the thought calmed me a little. “Hi. Again.”
“Hey,” Alexandra replied, then cocked her head to the side a little. “You look tired.”
“You look as good as you always did.”
She didn’t blush at the compliment, but did look away with the ghost of a smile playing across her lips. It was a smoother line than I’d expected to be able to manage. It could only be downhill from there, I thought. She was wearing a black dress that went past her knees, with a jacket draped over her shoulders. Her hair was now brown, rather than the blond it had been the last time I saw her. It suited her better, I thought, but then…it wasn’t like I knew all that much. Her hair could have been multicolored, and I would have still found it okay.
She didn’t seem to have changed all that much since I’d last seen her, other than the weight of history on her shoulders and a smile that didn’t reach her eyes anymore. A hint of darkness within them that was only noticeable if you knew what to look for.
Chris and Nicola moved away and left us alone. I looked across the churchyard toward them, but they seemed deep in their own conversation. I turned back to Alexandra and sighed. “It’s been a while.”
“It has indeed.”
“I wondered if you’d come,” I said, and she bowed her head in response. “Still can’t quite believe he’s gone.”
“He was always the loudest out of all of us. Usually they’re the first to go quiet.”
I looked away, reme
mbering how confident and brash Stuart was when we’d first met him. “He settled into the group like he’d always been with us. I remember we were worried how he would get on with the rest of you, but we needn’t have worried.”
“He was the life of the party. Just what we all needed at that age. Not that I saw much of him at the start.”
“That’s right. You were off doing your own university experience.”
She hesitated, then sighed, shaking her head. “Is this our fault?”
I stared at Alexandra as she changed tack in a split second. I didn’t know how to answer. I opened my mouth, but I had nothing to say.
She shook her head and turned away from me. “How’s work?” she said, her hand shaking a little as she brought it up to her face and wiped away an invisible tear. “Still working from home?”
“Yeah, all good,” I replied, glad she’d moved away from her question quickly. “Some things don’t change. Pays the bills, as you know. And you’re still…”
“I actually started lecturing this year. Psychology 101 for the most part. I’ll work my way up; it’ll just take a little time. Spend most of my days at the university, to be honest. Don’t get out that much with all the prep work and that sort of thing.”
“That’s great,” I replied, then wondered where the smoothness of earlier had disappeared to. “I mean, it’s really cool that you got the job you were going for.”
Seriously? Cool?
“Shaping the minds of the future and all of that?” Alexandra said, and now she was smiling. “Oh yes, I’m doing a great service.”
I chuckled softly, then stopped just as quickly, stealing a glance toward the church to make sure no one had seen me. “Probably best we don’t laugh too much around here.”
“Had you seen Stuart recently?” Alexandra said, shuffling from one foot to the next, as if the mere mention of his name was the wrong thing to do.
“Not for a few months. Things haven’t been the same since…well, you know. I guess you can lose touch with people all the time. Still, I wish we hadn’t now. I didn’t know how he was doing recently. Sounds like he was struggling.”
“Aren’t we all?” she said, and now she wasn’t smiling and the lightness of the conversation evaporated instantly.
I shook my head. “Of course, I guess.”
“You didn’t lose touch with Chris,” she said, seemingly happy to move on as quickly as I wanted to. “Or Nicola. Although I suppose they come as a pair, as they always did.”
“I’ve been trying to get rid of him for years, but I just can’t seem to shake him. Stuart…well, that was a different story. I didn’t realize how bad he was feeling. He was always a traveler. Remember after we finished university? He was all over the place.”
“I remember.”
“It’s easier to keep in touch these days,” I said, hearing the babbling coming out but unable to stop myself. “We seem to forget that it’s only ten years or so since we had all this social media in our lives. Can you imagine the photos he would have been posting daily if Facebook had been around in the 2000s? Would have annoyed the hell out of us.”
“You remember that party Stuart had for his birthday?” Alexandra said, her eyes dancing at the memory. “Think it was when he turned twenty-two or twenty-three?”
“Yeah, think he was living in Runcorn at the time. Couple of years after we finished school. The big house party that just went mental. Pretty sure that was the last time I got drunk enough that I couldn’t remember my own name. There was that game we played…”
Alexandra remembered for me. “Ring of Fire. Only we didn’t have a full deck of cards, so it didn’t work properly.”
“That’s right,” I said, laughing to myself. “I ended up downing, like, so much I couldn’t stand up straight. I remember laughing a lot. And that even though so many people were there, it still ended up being the six of us at the end. That’s what…ten or eleven years ago now?”
“It’s hard to imagine him quiet,” Alexandra said, then we fell into another awkward silence.
I was about to break it when I heard Chris’s voice from across the churchyard in some kind of exclamation. I turned to see what had grabbed his attention and saw someone had joined us outside.
It took me a few seconds before I recognized her, but then my mind clicked into gear. “Michelle,” I said, looking toward Alexandra for confirmation. She was already moving, the expression on her face changing instantly to one of surprise. I followed her up the churchyard, waiting for my turn to greet the final member of our old group.
“You all right?” I said, stopping as I reached her and saw the expression on her face. She was different from the last time I’d seen her. Thinner and more waiflike. Her eyes were cast downward, to the ground, but when she lifted them slightly, I could see tiredness and weight there. It had been almost a year, but Michelle seemed to have aged many more in the meantime. “How’s it going?”
“How do you think I am?” Michelle replied, casting furtive glances over her shoulder toward the church. “Wasn’t expecting you all to turn up here today.”
“Why wouldn’t we be here?” Chris said, stepping forward and rubbing Michelle’s shoulder with one hand. She flinched at his touch. “It’s not the best of circumstances. I assume Stuart’s sister got in touch with you as well?”
“Yeah. Told me it was suicide.”
“He was always up and down,” Chris replied, wrapping an arm around Nicola as the wind around us picked up. “He was either massively high or totally incapable of movement. Maybe he just had a stupid idea at one of his low points.”
Michelle tensed, rubbing at one arm, slow at first, then more vigorously. She would look quickly at us, then avert her gaze. As if she was trying to catch us doing something.
“Maybe if she’d known the truth,” Michelle said, spitting out each word with venom. “Maybe then she wouldn’t have gotten in touch with you as well.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
Michelle’s eyes flitted across the ground away from us, but there was no mistaking the tone in her voice. “Are you kidding me? Do you really think they’d let you anywhere near here if they knew it was your fault he’s dead?”
“Michelle, that’s not fair,” I tried, but it was as if she had been waiting to see us so she could finally unload.
“Fair? You think it isn’t fair? I’ll tell you what isn’t fair. It’s not fair that what you did a year ago was never spoken about. We never owned up and took our punishment. Instead, we all have to live with it in silence, and now Stuart is gone because of it.”
“Maybe this isn’t the best place,” Alexandra said, but Michelle waved her away.
“This is all your fault.”
“Michelle, we can’t blame ourselves for this,” Alexandra tried again, but it only seemed to make things worse.
“Are you serious?” Michelle said, her voice loud and mocking now. “I’m blaming you. All of you. I wanted to say something, and you all told me we couldn’t.”
“Not all of us,” Chris said quietly, but Michelle ignored him.
“I’m going to go,” Michelle said, as the atmosphere darkened and the silence only strengthened it. “I can’t be around you people anymore. Stuart’s gone. And I can’t even go in there and say goodbye because that’ll make it real.”
“Michelle,” Nicola said and tried to put an arm around her. She was shrugged away. “Let’s talk about this.”
“He’s dead because of us, Nicola,” Michelle replied, her voice low, almost a whisper, and I could feel the hate emanating from her like fire. “Don’t you get that?”
“They found him on the train tracks,” Michelle continued, disgust and hurt in her voice as she spoke. “Hit by a freight train in the middle of the night. There was barely anything left of him. And they’re going to pretend he did this to himself
. Only, we all knew him. We knew he would never do anything like that.”
It took a second, but I quickly understood what Michelle was saying and could barely believe she was suggesting it. I hadn’t considered the possibility it could be anything other than suicide, how long you could live with something before it finally pushed you over the edge. I shook the idea that there was anything else going on away. A year was long enough for Stuart to make that decision.
I wondered how long I would last. How long each of us would last.
“There’s no other reason for it,” Nicola said, reaching across to stroke Michelle’s arm. “Come on, let’s go inside. No good, us all hanging around out here. They’ll wonder what kind of friends we were. And you’ll regret it if you don’t go in, Michelle.”
“Get off me,” Michelle said, pushing her away physically now. Nicola stumbled over, and Chris was next to her in an instant. Took her weight, as the heel on her shoe snapped. Nicola straightened up and made as if to move toward Michelle, but Chris held onto her.
I moved between them, but Michelle was already walking away.
“I can’t be around you lot anymore,” Michelle spat over her shoulder, and then she was away toward the exit.
I turned back to the other three and could see the anger still in Nicola’s eyes. The pain in Alexandra’s. I tried to speak to her, but she held a hand up and walked away.
I didn’t want to be there. I wanted to be far away, alone in my little house, working in my dining room office, and away from all of this.
I shouldn’t have come. I should have stayed at home. I should have stayed away from these open wounds. These bad memories.
This group.