Page 70 of Pictures of Him

‘Something’s happened,’ Liv told me when I arrived back at our flat, a great deal thinner, my skin marked by exhaustion circles, the pallor of many nights without sleep. ‘No one is talking to us. You for the way you dumped Lucian, me by association.’

Liv was outraged by this, but she still stood by me.

‘He’s broken, Catherine. When I saw him, his hands were shaking so much when he lit his cigarette. I thought he was going to start crying.’

At first I just nodded, for speech was impossible.

‘Aren’t you going to say something? Don’t you care?’

‘Nothing matters any more,’ I said eventually, and my voice sounded exactly as I felt: emotionless, zombie-like, an expression of greyness. Somehow I found the words to tell Liv, ‘My mother is dying. She hasn’t got long.’

‘Oh Catherine,’ Liv said. ‘How can this have happened to you?’

I effectively closed my life down, skipping lectures andhurrying out to my weekly tutorials, furtively scanning the streets like a criminal, ducking into doorways if I spotted anyone I knew. I resigned from the student newspaper; no amount of pleading from Angry Jeff could make me change my mind. At night I lay sleepless in my bed, thinking of you, then thinking of my mother, but only for a few minutes at a time, for the pain was so vicious and extreme I sometimes felt like I was the one who was dying.

I was something different now, a time bomb, a student with a gory countdown to death and bereavement. People didn’t want to know. Friends I’d drunk coffee with day in, day out, now crossed the street rather than think of the right thing to say. A close cousin of mine – we were born six weeks apart – stopped calling. I wouldn’t see him until my mother’s funeral, and even then he had no words. I didn’t blame any of them. We were nineteen, twenty. Death was too big for us to handle. It made me think of you, facing your father’s suicide all alone. Such irony: the only person who could understand what I was going through was the one I couldn’t speak to.

New travels fast in a university town. Not long after my return, I opened the door to find Sam standing there in his big black overcoat and his Nike trainers, worn as sporting accessory not fashion statement. His eyes were always able to express multiple emotions – strength, understanding, forgiveness. To Sam I could say sorry, over and over again. He opened his arms and I walked right into them. I thought if I held onto him tightly enough, then maybe he could levitate me away.

Four months before: Catherine

And I am home. Leaning back against the front door, inhaling the smells of this house of mine, something bacony that Sam must have cooked for supper, fresh paint and coffee grounds, and mud from the stream. In the sitting room I don’t bother to turn on the lights, but lie down on the sofa, faded blue and uncomfortable but ours, and instantly reassuring with Daisy’s discarded trainer socks balled up in one corner, a half-drunk mug of tea on the floor beside it. Joe’s Adidas Superstars, a birthday present, kicked off at right angles, one face up, the other on its side. Thousands of pieces of Lego in a bright blue plastic box. DVD cases opened up, their discs spilled out across the floorboards. It says a lot, this room. It tells me that Sam, fanatical about returning discs to cases and mugs to the dishwasher and dirty socks to the laundry basket, is losing his grip.

I lie in the darkness picturing what must be happening down at the lake. You’ll be talking to the police and perhaps there will already be a cluster of journalists there. I imagine you trying to console Harry with his insurmountable grief; I think of Alexa and Rachel, swamping him the minute hewas hauled off the boat, even Jack on standby, arms folded across his chest: the five of you as impenetrable in tragedy as you are in everyday life.

But mostly I think of you, your face, as I told you the truth about why I’d left. I replay this moment again and again, the words I’d held in for so long a haemorrhaged jet of poison. I see your face, shock first, then immediate withdrawal. You couldn’t get away fast enough. I chastise myself for my selfishness, telling you this while you were dealing with Ling’s death. But I also see that there was no other way. The drowning of that sweet girl has left us with nothing but endings.

I don’t expect to sleep, not tonight, not with Ling and Harry and you, always you, pressing against my mind. But I wake a few hours later, cold and sore from my blanketless, pillowless night, to Daisy’s shout, ‘Mummy’s here!’ and so there is no warning, none at all, just my small pyjamaed daughter and Sam, standing in front of me, long brown legs with their fine covering of black hair.

‘I didn’t hear you come in.’

‘Why did you sleep here, Mummy?’

It’s hard to answer with her arms around my neck, my face pressed up tight against her hard little chest. And then I realise Ican’tanswer, as the trauma of last night – the drowning, Ling’s death, your face as I told you about Jack – crowds my brain. No room for anything else. No words, no voice.

‘Catherine?’

‘Mummy? Mum!’

Daisy sounds urgent, frightened. She needs me to speak.

I snap myself back to the present. I shift her to one side.

‘You’ve gone all brown,’ I say eventually, gripping one skinny sunburned thigh. ‘Look at your legs.’

Daisy pats my face with her small hands; she traces her forefingers lightly over the skin beneath my eyes.

‘Your make-up has come off,’ she says. ‘Your mascara.’

Daisy is a make-up fanatic, or rather she will be the moment she is allowed. I can imagine her aged fourteen or fifteen, glued to YouTube videos, learning how to create the perfect smoky eye. She knows the contents of my paltry cosmetics bag better than I do myself; she also knows that in my world mascara is a rare event.

‘Where did you go last night?’ she asks.

‘I went to a party with Liv.’

Now I look up to find your name is between us, stamped into the burn of Sam’s stare, the stiffness of his shoulders, one a little higher than the other, his neck tilted, mouth pinched. We have always been able to communicate with our eyes, Sam and I, and even as I’m answering Daisy’s questions – ‘It was in Somerset, not far from here … The house of someone we went to university with a long time ago’ – he is telling me that I have done the one thing he always dreaded, and I am telling him, hand clamped around the thigh of my small daughter, that he did this to us too, remember, not just me, but him, him and Julia, him and his one-night love affair.

‘So this was Lucian Wilkes’s party?’

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