Page 106 of Last Night

There’s a literary word for what I’m feeling: bathos. Anticlimax. This is the end of our pursuit, but it doesn’t feel the way it was meant to. Did I want a struggle, a sense I’d saved Mr Hart from harm? No, thinking it through, of course I didn’t.

‘Can you pack fast, and meet back here in fifteen minutes?’

‘Yes,’ I say.

‘OK, you go ahead, and I’ll check us out.’

As I get the lift up to my room, I should feel lighter.

Instead my stomach has a stone in it, a rock, like a dragging weight.

I keep hearing that word, over and over again. Almost like a taunt, asking me if I’m going to believe it or not. Asking what I’m going to do with it.

I jab the button for the first floor.

Nothing. I’m going to do nothing with it, because I’m hours away from never having to see Finlay Hart again in my whole life, and this is a puzzle I will never solve. I feel sure Susie took the last pieces to her grave. The lift pings, first floor.

Poison.

The mood on the journey back to England is suitably subdued. We don’t have to meet each other’s eyes, and we have a shared purpose, at least. I fiddle with the radio, or the air con, and Finlay makes the occasional banal remark regards the traffic, and all in all, the satnav probably says as much as either of us.

‘I feel ridiculous at having dragged you all this way for a two-minute chat with my dad,’ Finlay says abruptly, as we pass Leicester, and I know what he also means is: you saw all that dirty washing, and for what?

I recall how much he hated me being in the family home, that week before Susie’s funeral. Trips to nice restaurants were making a virtue of necessity.

‘Honestly, it’s fine,’ I say. ‘I don’t have tons of amazing uses for my holiday allocation from City Nights anyway. Change is as good as a rest, as they say.’

‘I don’t think when they said “change” the meaning was so elastic as to encompass getting a full-bore blast of my dysfunctional family,’ he says, with a grimace.

Oh, he’s still dwelling on the aunt encounter the way I am, too. That has to rate as one of thestrangest fifteen minutes of my life.

‘Think you’ll stay at … what’s it called? City Nights?’ Fin says.

‘I will for now, I have a mortgage and a cat to raise. It’s more whether City Nights will stay at me. There aren’t many ways to make a living from typing snappy things these days, are there?’

‘What would you like to do? What’s your dream job? Writing, presumably?’

‘Yeah, you know those Long Reads in theNYT, or like they used to have inVanity Fair? Thousands of words, really brilliantly written, and the journalist got months to research the subject. You know, like old Hollywood scandals involving the Pickfair Mansion, or some true crime investigation thing. The sort that ends up getting turned into a book. Like the one about the Golden State Killer.’

‘You’ve got a sunny nature, eh?’ Finlay says.

‘Well, there are Cure songs about me,’ I say and then regret it.

Fin looks gratified, but pinkens slightly. I wonder if he wishes he’d not told me that. I wonder what he’s said and done out of spontaneity. I wonder where all thatdo you ever wish you could drop the actconversation came from.

‘Seriously, yes, I do know what you mean,’ he says. ‘About the writing. That sounds really good. So how do you get into that, then?’

‘I have no idea,’ I say. ‘Plus you’d need a time machine for a golden age of print media and proper budgets.’

‘I have uses for that time machine,’ Fin says. ‘Does it seat two?’

‘I’m not sure I’d trust what you’d do with it,’ I say, and smile, to defuse any insult.

‘I’m not sure I trust what I’d do with it.’

A meaningful silence ensues. I feel I have to break it, especially given this is likely the last time I’ll ever see Susie’s brother.

‘We’d both head back a few months and tell Susie to look the other bloody way though, right?’ I say, bluntly, the pain of this thought making me graceless.

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