Secret Smile (19 page)

The policewoman appeared once more. She
was clutching handfuls of tissues and I realized that I was sobbing and
sobbing. The people in my flat were looking at me awkwardly. I pushed my face
into the tissues, wiping the tears away and blowing my nose. I couldn't stop
myself crying. We'd failed, we'd all failed. It was like for the whole of my
life we had watched Troy drowning. We had done this and that, we'd talked and
we'd worried and we'd made plans and we'd tried to help, but in the end he had
just slipped below the water and it was all for nothing. Gradually my sobbing
gave way to a few snuffles and then 1 felt squeezed out.

The police officer told me that she was
called Vicky Reeder. A man in a suit was standing next to her. He was a
detective inspector called Rob Pryor. He asked me some questions about how I
had found Troy. I was impressed by the calmness of my voice and my precision as
I spoke. There was nothing I could say that wasn't obvious and the man nodded
while I talked. Afterwards, he and a man in uniform looked up at the beam. I
hadn't noticed that. The detective came back to me. He talked to me in a low
respectful voice, as if he were an undertaker. I realized that I was now part
of a particular tribe, the bereaved, who are slightly removed from normal life
and have to be treated with respect and even a certain reverence. He told me
that they would now be taking Troy's body away. This might be upsetting for me,
and he wondered if I might like to step into another room for a few minutes. I
shook my head. I wanted to see everything. I made myself look at Troy. He was
wearing his khaki trousers and a navy blue fleece. He was in old familiar boots
and above them I could see his jaunty red-and-blue striped socks. I thought of
him pulling them on this morning. Did he know that he would never pull them off
again? Had he already decided this morning or was it a sudden impulse? If I had
phoned him for a chat that afternoon, would it have made a difference? I must
stop thinking like that. He was my brother and he had died in my own flat and I
hadn't been there. I wondered what I had been doing at the moment when the
chair tipped over and he flapped in the air for those last seconds. No. I must
stop myself thinking like that.

One of the green uniformed men from the
ambulance unrolled a bulky plastic bag along the length of Troy's body. It was
like a very long pencil case. One of them looked up at me selfconsciously as if
he were doing something indecent. It was all very crude. They lifted him,
holding him by the feet and the shoulders, and moved him the few inches across
to the bag. The bag took some adjusting around him, the end of the cord around
his neck had to be tucked inside and then the large zip was pulled shut. Now he
could be carried out to the ambulance without members of the public being
alarmed.

At that moment I heard voices outside and
my parents came through the door. They had walked up without ringing. They
looked around as if they had just woken up and weren't sure where they were or
what was happening. They looked old. My father was in his suit. He must have
driven from work and picked my mother up on the way. My mother looked down at
the bag and that was one of the bad moments again. She had an expression of
shock and disbelief at the grossness of it, the thereness of it. The detective
introduced himself and then he and my father moved away and spoke in a murmur.
I felt a sort of relief at that. I could be a child again. My dad would sort
things out. I wouldn't have to make the calls, fill out the forms. My parents
could do that.

My mother knelt down for a moment by the
side of the bundle that had once been Troy. She put her hand very gently on the
place where his forehead would be. I saw that her lips were moving, but I
couldn't hear any words. She blinked several times, then stood up and came over
to me. She didn't step over Troy's body, but awkwardly edged her way around it,
her eyes on it as if it were an abyss into which she might fall. She pulled a
chair over to me and sat beside me, holding my hand, but not meeting my eye.
When the ambulancemen picked up the awkward bundle lying on the floor, I looked
over at my mother. She wasn't crying, but I could see her jaw flexing.

My father said goodbye to Detective
Inspector Rob Pryor as if he had helped him change a tyre. I saw Pryor write
something on a piece of paper and give it to my father, and they shook hands
and then everybody left and we were alone. It felt mad. Was that it? The
authorities had come and removed Troy, taken him somewhere, and now what were
we meant to do? Didn't they want anything from us? Did we have any duties? I
still hadn't said anything to my parents.

'Troy,' I said, then stopped. There was
nothing to say; everything.

I expected that, when I said that, my
mother would start crying the way I had and I could hold her and we could avoid
talking or thinking for a while, but she continued just looking puzzled. My
father came and sat opposite me and looked very calm.

'Was this a surprise?' he asked.

I almost screamed at him that of course it
was a fucking surprise and then I thought of my mother and father and their
lost child and I said, 'Yes.'

'Should we have seen anything?' he said.

'We've been seeing things all his life,' I
said. All his life. The meaning of words had changed. Mum started to speak as
if she were talking in her sleep. She spoke about Troy in the last few weeks,
about how he had been bad, but she thought it had been getting better. There
had been worse times before and he had always recovered. She'd been trying and
trying to think if there had been some signal or warning, but she couldn't. She
talked of Troy when he had been younger. These weren't reminiscences. They
would come later. We had all the rest of our lives for that. She talked about
what they had done for him and how they had failed and wondered over and over
again if they should have done it differently. She didn't sound self-pitying or
bitter. Just genuinely curious, as if I or my father could provide an answer
that would satisfy her.

Dad was business-like, in a mad kind of
way. He made tea for us all and then found some paper and a pen. He began to
make a list of everything that needed doing and it appeared that there was a
lot. There were people to be told, arrangements, decisions to be made. So many.
A whole side of paper was covered with his precise, square handwriting.

On top of the horror, it was a strange
situation. The three of us were sitting in my flat. My mother hadn't even taken
her coat off. My father had made his list. There was so much to do, but there
was nothing to do. Nobody wanted to eat. Nobody wanted to go anywhere. There
were people who would have to be told, but not yet. It was as if we needed to
sit there together and hold the secret to us a while longer before letting it
out into the world. So there was nothing to do except talk in fragments, but if
there was any awkwardness, I wasn't aware of it. I was still glowing with the
awfulness of what had happened. I felt as if I'd jabbed my fingers into an
electric socket and the current was just pulsing through me over and over
again.

Hours went by like this and it was just
before nine when I heard a noise downstairs and voices and laughter on the
stairs, and then Brendan and Kerry burst into the room, arm in arm, laughing.
They were cheerfully startled to see us.

'What's up?' asked Brendan with a smile.

CHAPTER 22

It was damp and weirdly warm. In less than
four weeks it would be Christmas. Every high street in the city had its lights
up, the Santa Claus, the swinging bells, the Disney characters. Shop windows
glittered with tinsel and baubles. There were already Christmas trees outside
the greengrocers' shops, leaning against the wall with their wide branches tied
up with string. Some doors in the street where I lived had holly wreaths on
them. The shelves in the supermarkets were loaded with crackers, mince pies,
Advent calendars, boxes of dates, vast tins of chocolates, frozen turkeys,
bottles of port and sherry, little baskets of bath salts and soaps, CDs of
seasonal music, humorous books, crappy stocking fillers. The brass band played
'O Little Town of Bethlehem' outside Woolworth's. Women in thick coats rattled
collection tins in the cold.

What would we do this Christmas? Would we
put up a tree in my parents' half-demolished house or in my living room, where
nine days ago Troy had killed himself? Would we sit round a table eating turkey
with chestnut stuffing and sprouts and roast potatoes and pull crackers, put
silly hats on our heads and take it in turn to read out the jokes? What would
we do, what could we do, that wouldn't seem grotesque? How do you ever return
to normal life, when something like this has happened?

Troy's funeral wasn't crowded. He'd been a
lonely boy and a solitary young man. His few friends at school had fallen away
after he'd left, although a couple of them turned up with the deputy head and
his old physics teacher. His tutor came too, and several family friends who'd
known Troy since he was tiny. There was Bill and Judy and their kids, and my
mother's sister Kath who'd come down from Sheffield with her family, and then
there were the relatives my parents saw once or twice a year, and the ones they
barely ever saw but exchanged Christmas cards with. A friend of Kerry's called
Carol came; and Tony and Laura.

We were there of course: Mum and Dad, me
and Kerry. And Brendan. Brendan looked more stricken than anyone, with his red
eyes and a faint bruise on his forehead turning yellow. Even I had to admit
that he'd been wonderful over the past week: inexhaustible, indispensable,
solid. 'Wonderful' in quotation marks, though. There was more to Brendan than
I'd seen before. I didn't understand it, whatever 'it' was, but he was good at
it. Resourceful, energetic, committed to each moment, persuasive, cooperative,
endlessly aware of other people's needs, feelings. He had a radar for what
everyone around him needed just at that very instant.

He'd offered to make all the funeral
arrangements himself, to take the burden off the family, but Mum had told him
quietly that it helped her to be busy. He'd answered the phone, filled out
forms, made pots of tea, gone shopping, shifted his and Kerry's stuff into my
parents' house again, so I could move back in to my flat. They were moving to
the house I'd found in just two days.

A week after the death, we talked about
the wedding. Kerry wanted to postpone it, but my parents said that love was the
only thing that would get us through. Brendan nodded at that and held Kerry's
hand, stroking it and saying in a wise, reflective voice, 'Yes, yes, love will
get us through,' his eyes shining. At any other time it would have driven me
insane with irritation. I still knew it was irritating, but now there were
layers of numbness between the irritation and me.

'Here you are, better than tea.'

Bill pushed a tumbler of whisky into my
hand and stood beside me while I took a large, fiery mouthful. We had all come
back to my parents' house and were standing in the draughty living room,
drinking mugs of tea and not really knowing what to say to each other. What is
there to say, at events like these?

'Thanks.'

'Are you all right?'

'Yeah.'

'Silly question. How could you be?'

'If he'd died in an accident, or of an
illness or something, that would have been one thing...' I said. I didn't need
to finish the sentence.

'Marcia's going to spend the rest of her
life asking herself where she went wrong, what she did wrong.'

'Yes.'

'That's what suicide does. The fact is,
she did all she could. You all did.'

'No. He shouldn't have killed himself.'

'Well, of course not.'

'I mean, I don't understand it. Mum keeps
saying she thought he was getting better. And he was getting better, Bill.'

'You never know what's going on in
someone's head.'

'I guess.'

I took another gulp.

'He was a troubled young man.'

'Yeah.'

I thought about Troy giggling, making
stupid jokes, grinning up at me. I kept seeing his face when he was in his
happy phases and energy seemed to shine out of him, making him beautiful.

Bill refilled my glass and took the whisky
bottle across to Dad. I wandered out of the crowded living room, into the
building site that used to be the kitchen, then through the hole in the wall
where once there was a door and into the soggy garden. Ripped, splintered
floorboards and pieces of the old kitchen units were heaped up against the
fence. I leaned against an old bit of shelving. It was slightly misty, every
outline just a bit blurred, but maybe that was the whisky.

After my conversation with Bill, I was in
a state wide open for doubts to crash in. The autopsy had been straightforward.
Suicide by hanging. I thought of the last conversation I'd had with Troy on the
phone that morning, when he'd sounded tired but quite cheerful. I'd told him
about finding the house for Brendan and Kerry, and we'd talked about our plans.
I'd said how much I was looking forward to sharing the flat with him, and he'd
said, a bit gruffly, that he was looking forward to it too. My stinging eyes
filled with tears again, though I had believed I was all cried out. I heard
Brendan asking me, the day before, what time I would be collecting my stuff
from the flat, and me replying it would be about half-past six. I let myself
remember pushing the door open at the appointed time and seeing Troy's body
hanging there; his chalky face and sightless, open eyes; the chair upturned by
his feet.