Page 74 of Don't You Forget About Me

An eight-week illness. He must still be reeling. I can’t imagine.

I found out about Dad in one terrible phone call from Esther, as she stood outside the Royal Hallamshire Hospital and I stood in the university library, saying ‘What?’ on repeat, because she’d just said something so obscene and absurd it couldn’t be true. Esther later told me she was going to say Dad was ‘critical’ so I wasn’t alone when I found out, but she couldn’t bear to give me the false hope. I don’t really remember my train journey down from Newcastle. But losing your parents is still something you expect to go through, someday. Losing your other half at thirty isn’t.

Niamh was a ‘podiatrist by day, poet by night’ apparently. Born: Galway. Lived: Dublin. Thirty-three. Thirty-bloody-three. There’s a photo of her petting Keith. Comments underneath about him being the love of her life.

There’s none of her looking sick – I guess she wasn’t sick for long enough.

Instead, she’s holding a stein of beer in Berlin, one thumb up to the camera. In a flowered, strappy dress, hair swept up, head on one side. Caption: ‘Tara and Terry’s wedding.’ Cuddling someone’s baby, her lipsticked lips puckered and pressed against its chubby little jowls. Caption: ‘Rupert loves his Aunty Niamh already!’ Round for dinner at someone’s house, the ‘before we tuck in’ picture, her superior bone structure peeking out of a row of grinning people, poised around a platter of lamb kofta.

Why no Lucas? Does he hate the camera? I don’t think it’d hate him.

Wait, buried in a set of five, captioned: ‘@ Dun Laoghaire’ – here he is. My stomach lurches at the sight of Lucas, personal and off duty, which is ridiculous, given he’s no one to me. And vice versa.

He’s sat looking up at the lens, arm on the back of a sofa. It has peach, plushy, slightly dated upholstery that says it’s a parental or even grandparental house. Niamh is next to him, in a striped top and jeans, legs crossed, beaming. Lucas’s expression is polite acquiescence, but there’s some sort of resentment behind it. I get a peculiar sensation of the telepathy he and I once shared, age eighteen, when I felt I could read his thoughts. Hah,but you couldn’t, I remind myself.

God, but he’s stunning. I feel almost irritated that I was the first to notice the luminous quality of his skin, the inkiness of his hair, the intensity when he fastens his sight on you. A cult band I once loved is now at Number One and my status as Biggest Fan is now lost in a sea of admiration.

Since he’s become suddenly single and wreathed in tragedy, it’s possible he had to leave Ireland to stop himself being mobbed.

I completely recalibrate my recent judgements of Lucas’s behaviour, in light of this horrible bereavement. To think I’ve been cheeky about his lack of joie de vivre. I almost physically cringe.

As I read about the vivacious, popular Niamh, the light of his life, the light gone out in his life, there’s something unnatural I’m feeling. Something weird and ungenerous and irrational and appalling, and eventually I admit it to myself.

I am jealous of her.

24

Esther you didn’t tell Mum & G about the free Robin stand-up show, did you?

No! Why?

I have been summoned for a ‘coffee and a cake’ by them and Mum won’t say why. It reeks of Having A Quiet Word About Something. Gx

Well, not guilty. I told them your writing was really good though so maybe it’s to congratulate you

AHAHHAHHAHA. YEAH. X

I pocket my phone and twitch with low level anxiety. Mum gets on at me plenty, but she’s never gnomic and mysterious.

Across the street, in khaki Barbour, Geoffrey approaches me. Something in his clenched, determined expression is unpromising. He is not doing a saunter, or a cheery amble.

‘Hi! Where’s Mum?’ I say, warily. Hoping for ‘just parking the car’ while knowing Geoffrey would never let a woman drive him.

‘She’s not coming,’ he says, awkwardly.

‘Oh. Is she not well?’

‘Bit under the weather, yes,’ Geoffrey says.

Oh God, have they had a fight? Why didn’t they cancel? My shoulders hunch at what lies before me – a whole social occasion with only Geoffrey. I’d hoped to end my days never experiencing that. I reluctantly follow him into the café, trying to make sure my thought processes aren’t revealed by involuntary grimacing.

He jangles his change in his pocket and makes a show of inspecting the cake display.

‘What’ll it be? Those little tarts with kiwis look enticing. Or perhaps a French Horn.’

‘Uhm …’ I’m not hungry at all – who is, for afternoon tea? – but I feel I should show willing and ask for a bun with my coffee.

‘I’ll just have a cuppa I think,’ Geoffrey says, after. Great. He can’t be arsed with his half of this charade.

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