Page 37 of Last Night

When I was a teenager, the family cat, Horace, died. He was a mardy old bruiser, prone to biting the hands that petted him, and my ‘complacent young person’ grief wasn’t great. Yet a while after the vet’s trip where my parents returned with an empty carrier, I noticed a fur-covered mouldy grape by the television stand. He’d been rolling it around and jealously guarding it, for weeks prior. Horace had a thing about grapes. All other small spherical objects could do one, but grapes were his fetish.

At the sight of the fur-covered mouldy grape without its protector, my heart cracked.

I hand Ed the sheaf of letters and say: ‘I’m going to see if there’s anything needs “tidying up” in the bedroom.’

I have something particular in mind. During the KonMari craze for banishing clutter, I told Susie I’d completed the ‘sorting personal mementoes’ hardcore level for the aficionados.

‘I could never do that,’ she said. ‘I’ve kept all my diaries and all my letters,’ she said. ‘Every last one. I’m anal like that. Not many people ever wrote to me, though. I am not the love letters type.’

‘You kept diaries?’ I said. Susie didn’t seem the diary-keeping type, either.

‘Yeah, I gave it up eventually but when we were younger and into my early twenties. I was being precious. They’re full of trash, obviously.Wah wah I’m so fat wah wah my brother’s being mean. Wah wah my mum won’t let me buy a crop top.The usual.’

Something I know, as I heavy-tread up the stairs and think about when she made me rub thick swatches of a dozen near-identical oatmeal fabrics to choose this carpet, is: I will never read these diaries.

Telling myself I have the right to because she’s no longer here to stop me, to ‘feel closer’ to her somehow, would be an ultimate betrayal. If she’d never been moved to show me them alive, there’s no cause to think she’d want the contents shared now she’s not.

What I can do for her, though, is stop other people reading them. I push open the door to her bedroom with trepidation. Susie’s taste was very different to my love of dark walls, big plants and kitsch trinkets. Her bed is a white four-poster and the whole space is a symphony of neutrals, and order. The bed is unslept-in, neatly made, pillows plumped. I stare at it.

Imagine if Susie had known when straightening that duvet that she’d never be in that bed again. That she’d come back not to this room, with her foam earplugs on the nightstand and her pyjamas folded on that chair, but instead would be wheeled, flesh chilly, into a morgue.

This lack of warning is another aspect of it that I can’t accept. Susie didn’t know her last day was her last day. She got no ceremony, no sense of occasion. Life life life … and in an instant, dead. Like a brutal edit in a film, a jump cut. Over. Finished.

I see now why those who lose loved ones young become risk-takers. They’re not reckless, they just see the stakes differently to the rest of us. More clearly. They don’t have the same blithe trust intomorrowthat we all do, they know it’s all up for grabs. Ignorance is bliss.

I tentatively open her built-in wardrobes, sweating like a burglar, and riffle through the clothes, trying not to look at any one item, not able to cope with the tsunami of memories they’ll unleash. For a second I stop, paralysed every time I get a stab of recognition, a specific memory attached to a particular coat or a dress.

There’s odds and ends in the bottom of it, pieces of empty luggage, and a box, made of a felt material. It has a lid, and holes in the sides for handles. I drag it out, put it on the bed and open it.

Well, that was easy. Praise be to Susie for being so organised, and, this box aside, no sort of hoarder. Inside are several small bundles of letters, fastened with elastic bands, all of them still in envelopes, and addressed to Susie at her rented flat back when she lived in the Lace Market. And underneath those, girlish diaries with pastel, patterned, foamy covers, the kind with clasps but not locks.

A quick poke about in a set of dresser drawers with glass handles, and a sweep under the bed, turns up absolutely nothing sensitive whatsoever.

I pick my way carefully back downstairs, box balanced on both arms, and find Ed in the kitchen.

I announce: ‘I’m taking this. I’m not going to pry through anything in it, on my mum’s life. But it’s old letters and diaries, exactly the sort of thing she’d want gone.’

‘And I’m taking this, but not in the sense I’m taking it.’

I lean my head round to see what he means, and Ed’s flapping a tiny packet of white powder at me.

‘Where the hell was that?!’

‘In the spare teapot. Which looked like she’d inherited it from a granny. Susie’s in heaven right now having to explain herself.’

I laugh, while feeling ever so slightly perturbed that as her best friend and keeper of her secrets, I wasn’t the one to predict its presence.

14

‘Ey up me ducks,’ says Justin, unwinding a snazzy silk maroon scarf from his neck. Ed and I mumble greetings. ‘Nice day for it. Anyone want anything from the bar?’

We demur and Justin goes to order his coffee.

Uncharacteristically, I cringe at Justin’s playful manner, in the direst of times. It’s been just over a week since Susie died and we are gathering to discuss her funeral plans. I know he’s nothing but good intentions, I love his general iconoclasm. He gives the impression of recklessness for the purposes of his comedy, but he’s emotionally intelligent.

When we were at sixth form, Justin did work experience at an old people’s home. He took a man in a wheelchair out to see a lake and produced homemade sandwiches and KitKats for them to enjoy alongside the view. The man cried and said it was one of the nicest days he’d had in years, as his family didn’t visit.

‘That was that,’ Justin said, at the time. ‘I knew I couldn’t do any other sort of work.’

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