closed the shop, yet I don’t think we had talked properly for the whole week. You had always found an excuse to leave the room (to check the iron, to feed Higgins, to go to the toilet). Even then, in that slow-moving car, you felt my eyes upon you and you seemed to wince, as though there was a heat to my gaze, scorching your cheek.
Cynthia’s hand squeezed mine as we approached the church. I noticed her nails, decorated with their usual black varnish, her face painted in her macabre style, and remembered her tear-stained joke that morning about how the one useful thing with regard to her sense of fashion was that she never had to think what to wear for a funeral.
We pulled up at the church. We left the car with faces filled with the grief we felt, but also knew we had to show. As we walked past those cramped old graves of plague victims I thought of all the dead parents, separated from their children. Do you remember Cynthia’s old ghost story? About the plague boy who had been buried outside York’s walls, in line with the new laws, and the spirit of his mother rising up from the graveyard to search in vain for her son? She told you both it when you were younger, walking back with your oranges and candles from Christingle, and Reuben laughed at you for being scared.
It is strange. I feel myself sinking. You remember one thing and there is always something else, lurking below, pulling you under. But I must keep my head up. I must stay gulping the fresh air.
* * *
You may wonder why I need to relive these things, when you were there too, but I must tell you everything as I saw it, for you know only your side, and I know only mine, and hopefully when you read this account you will look behind what I have done and a kind of truth will emerge somewhere in that space, that airy space, between your reading and my writing. It is a vain hope, but the last I have, so I will cling to it, as I clung to you as we walked up the path.
Peter, the vicar, was at the other end of that path to meet us, ready to give sympathy and the necessary instructions. He said something to you, and Cynthia butted in on your behalf, defending you against any obligation to speak. It was then that I turned round and saw the boy who had been there the night Reuben died. The boy whom I had hated instantly, for the blank indifference I had seen in his face. His hood was gone. He stood in a cheap suit, wearing a black tie, yet I must admit he had a striking appearance. The pale skin and black hair and those eyes that seemed to contain a dark and brooding power. Something violent, and dangerous.
I don’t know if you had seen him. Had you? I spoke a word in Cynthia’s ear and walked past those antique graves towards him.
‘May I ask what you are doing here?’
He didn’t say anything at first. He was wrestling with the sudden fury that was marked on his face.
‘Ah’m Denny,’ he said, as if it should have signified something.
‘Denny?’
‘Ah were one of Reuben’s mates.’ There was a rough arrogance to the voice, something confrontational that seemed wholly inappropriate to the occasion.
‘He never mentioned you.’
‘Ah were there when he . . . You saw us.’
‘Yes, I saw you.’ I bit back insults and accusations. It was not the time nor the place. ‘Now, why are you here?’
‘The funeral.’
‘No. You weren’t invited.’
‘Ah wanted to come.’ His eyes pressed harder than his words.
‘Well, you came. And now you can go.’
He looked past me, over my shoulder. I turned and saw you still struggling with the vicar.
‘Go,’ I said. ‘You’re not welcome here. Leave us alone.’
He nodded. A suspicion confirmed.
‘Right,’ he said, through a tensed mouth. As he turned and walked away I had the most strange and unpleasant sensation. It was a feeling I can only describe to you as a desertion, some essential part of my soul being pulled away, leaving me for a moment uncertain of where I was. My vision darkened, my brain fuzzed with a strange energy, and I grasped the stone gatepost for support.
My memory jumps at this point to inside the church. I remember the slow trudge behind the coffin. I remember the vicar’s vague niceties. I can see Cynthia, up at the lectern, delivering the bit she had chosen from Corinthians with none of her normal theatrics. ‘For since death came through a human being, the resurrection of the dead has also come through a human being . . .’
Even more sharply, I remember myself looking out as I struggled to start the poem I had chosen. I saw so many faces, all wearing the compulsory expressions of grief. Teachers, customers, undertakers. And you among them, on the nearest pew, staring over at your brother’s coffin. I looked down at the sheet in front of me, the sheet Cynthia had printed out so neatly from her machine.
For a while I couldn’t speak, I couldn’t cry, I couldn’t do anything. I just stood there.
I made those poor people live lifetimes inside that minute. I could hardly breathe. Peter was already heading towards me, raising his eyebrows, when I finally pushed myself into it.
‘To sleep,’ I said, the words echoing off the cold stone walls.
‘To sleep.’
I kept saying it – ‘To sleep’ – turning the key to an engine in my mind. ‘John Keats.’
O soft embalmer of the still midnight!Shutting, with careful fingers and benignOur gloom-pleas’d eyes, embower’d from the light,Enshaded in forgetfulness divine;O soothest Sleep! if so it please thee, close,In midst of this thine hymn, my willing eyes,Or wait the ‘Amen’, ere thy poppy throwsAround my bed its lulling charities;Then save me, or the passed day will shineUpon my pillow, breeding many woes;Save me from curious conscience, that still lordsIts strength for darkness, burrowing like a mole;Turn the key deftly in the oiled wards,And seal the hushed casket of my soul.
I sat back down. Peter concluded the service. I watched the feet of the pall-bearers as they turned down the aisle. The left shoes crossing the right. Four pairs of feet moving in perfect time, like the beginning of a macabre dance routine.
My eyes slid up and reached one of the faces, trying to hide the strain it took to shoulder the coffin’s weight, struck by a grief it didn’t feel.
I looked at you and told you, ‘It’s all right.’
You said nothing.
Outside, five minutes later, and soft rain pattered on the large black umbrella that I held to shelter you and your grandmother. After a week of silence, your tears came, bringing Cynthia’s with them. Only my eyes remained dry, even though my heart must have wept. I’m sure it must have.
I still hear Peter’s voice.
‘We have entrusted our brother Reuben to God’s mercy, and we now commit his body to the ground.’ The pall-bearers lowered the coffin, releasing the black straps in steady motion. ‘Earth to earth, ashes to ashes, dust to dust.’ The comfort of repetition, of ritual, did nothing to calm your sobs. ‘In sure and certain hope of the Resurrection to eternal life through our Lord Jesus Christ.’ The coffin reached hard ground, settled, and was still. ‘Who died, was buried, and rose again for us. To him be glory for ever and ever.’ And then at last there was the collective ‘Amen’, spoken so low it seemed to come from the earth that would bury him. The earth that made us believe he was gone.
The police were going to do nothing to his friends.
‘He wasn’t forced up there.’
Such a primitive notion of force, and accident, and responsibility.
I never told you this but I went to see them. The boys. They hung around the disused tennis courts, so, after I had dropped you at the stables, I went to voice my feelings.
They were there. All except him, Denny.
I