by Luca Veste
Fifteen
The end of the funeral came and went, with promises to keep in touch and polite refusals to go on to the wake afterward. We all seemed to understand that our role in the day was done—the dutiful friends who had probably known Stuart better than anyone else in the place. We waited as Stuart’s father, decked out in a suit that probably cost more than Chris’s car, made a short speech thanking everyone for coming and where to go on to next.
“It was our fault,” Alexandra said, her voice low and hardly audible. I heard it, as she made sure to whisper it in my ear. I turned to answer her, but she was gone. Walking away down the church path and toward the exit. I considered going after her, but I didn’t know what I would say to her if I did. It wasn’t like I could disagree with her.
Michelle had been as right as Alexandra was now. This was our fault. Her words still stung.
Michelle was a world away from the girl I’d known back when we were younger. I remembered how no meetup had been without her constant soundtrack, how she would be smiling and singing, seemingly without a care in the world.
Now, she was different. As if the life had been sucked out of her. I wondered if we all looked the same to an outsider.
A macabre before-and-after photo shoot.
I shook hands with Stuart’s father in a daze, feeling the strength in his palms. His skin was brown like leather, and he looked right through me, as if I weren’t even there. I didn’t think any of us were for him. He was burying his son. Everything about that day was silent and invisible apart from that fact.
Alexandra left soon after. I didn’t see her go, which seemed right. I didn’t know if I’d see her again.
I wasn’t sure if that was a good thing for my sanity or not.
There was silence in the car, once we got back in again and Chris started the journey home. I fiddled with my tie for a while before removing it and feeling like I could breathe again.
“I should have slapped her,” Nicola said, the irritation and annoyance coming off her like steam. “How dare she speak to us like that?”
“She was just upset, that’s all,” I replied, knowing there was no way I could calm Nicola down no matter how hard I tried. “She didn’t mean it.”
Nicola snorted, then pulled out her phone, ending her involvement in the conversation, it seemed.
I shifted toward the center of the back seat, so I could speak to Chris a little better. “She didn’t look good, you know what I mean? Like there’s something more going on. Do you think she could possibly say something?”
“About what?”
“You know.”
“Her and Stuart were close,” Chris said, staring straight ahead at the road. The traffic was light at this time of day, a few hours before rush hour. “And there was no ending. I think she loved him more than we realized. It wasn’t just a simple friends-with-benefits thing between them. That’s probably all it was. Getting that news probably brought back all those feelings. She’s going to need time. That’s all.”
“Right, right,” I replied, but I knew Chris was lying to me. He was worried about the way she’d been acting, but for some reason wasn’t willing to talk about it. “I was worried that it was something to do with what happened…you know?”
“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 anytime 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 spoke about what happened at all. 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 back seat. “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 gear stick. “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 I being failures for not being able to survive together. I caught Chris’s eye in the rearview 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 toward 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 my leg 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, toward Stuart. “Even before…you know. He couldn’t settle. Was always bouncing from one job to the next. Traveling 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 toward Nicola. “He was hyper. I think he was on something, looking back at it. 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 a history of that kind of thing,” I replied, remembering the numerous times back in university when Stuart would still be the life and soul of any party. Even when th
e 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 cry 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 being gone.
I Googled the news reports and found the place where it had come to an end for him.
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 McDonald’s after that, in town, and then we’d get pick ’n’ mix candy 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. Things were getting serious in school now. They were already talking about “options evening,” when we’d decide what subjects we’d study in our high school exams.
“Definitely not geography or history,” Chris would say on an almost hourly basis.
We were already planning on which subjects we’d both take, although I was slightly disappointed that he didn’t want to take 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 McDonald’s when the boy with the shaved head dipped his shoulder and pushed into my chest. Hard.
I stumbled backward, 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 tracksuits, 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 on 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 going to let myself ever be that.
It grew blurry then, as wild punches were thrown from all angles, and I ended up on the ground. I heard screaming, and it took a second before I realized 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 favor.
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 DIY store. 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 started a fight 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 color 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 center. Once we had calmed down, we were then wary of every corner we turned, waiting for the lads with shaved heads and tracksuits 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 talked about what happened. To me, at least.
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 hours after the train hit him. In the media reports, they took great pleasure, it seemed, in not telling a reader exactly what had transpired that night. Instead, they allowed you to fill in the blanks.
He was alone.
He was unrecognizable 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 fell 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 got in the shower, stepping back inside when I realized I still hadn’t washed the funeral from my body. I could feel the weight of it all on my shoulders still, even as I increased the temperature of the water and let it burn my skin.