Secret Smile Page 13

  'That's great,' I said. 'Really, really great. You've no idea.'

  I called Troy on my mobile and told him. I could hear him smile.

  I arrived at my flat a bit early. There was a light on in one of the windows, though I could see no sign of Kerry's car. I inserted the key in the lock, fumbling in the darkness, and pushed open the door. If no one was there, that would be a relief. If they were in, I could tell them about the house in London Fields and try to talk to Kerry. Yesterday I had felt that she would never forgive me, but today it looked different to me. Nothing had happened, except inside me.

  I went up the stairs and there was a smell that made me mutter crossly to myself because it was bad enough them forcing me out of my own home, but the least they could do was keep it clean. Then I pushed open the living-room door. It banged against something that clattered out of the way as I pushed harder.

  What did I see? What did I feel? I don't know, really. I never will know. It's jumbled up together in a foul twist of memory that I'll never lose.

  Scuff-toed boots that I'd seen hundreds of times before, but a foot above the floor, and then his canvas trousers, stained at the knee, and a buckled belt around the waist. A smell of shit. A chair on its side. Fear a thick eel in my throat. I couldn't look up. I had to look up. His face above me, tilted to one side, his mouth slightly open. I could see the tip of his tongue. Blue around his lips. His eyes were open, staring. I saw the rope that he was hanging from.

  Maybe he was still alive. Oh God, maybe he was; please, please, please. I righted the chair and clambered on to it, half falling over, and there I was pressed up against his body, trying to hold him up to relieve the pressure of the noose on his neck and trying to undo the knot. Fingers trembling too much. His hair against my cheek. His cold forehead. The slump of his body. But people can be alive when they look dead, you read about it, bringing them back to life when all hope is gone. But I couldn't undo the knot and he was so heavy and smelt of death already. Shit and death, and his flesh was cold.

  I jumped down from the chair, leaving his body swaying there, and raced to the kitchen. The bread knife was in the sink, and I grabbed it and ran back to Troy. Standing on tiptoe on the chair I began sawing at the cord while still trying to hold his body. Suddenly he was free and we fell on to the floor together and his arms were over my body in a ghastly embrace.

  I pushed him off me and hurled myself towards the phone. Jabbed the buttons.

  'Help,' I said. 'Help. He's hung himself. Please come and help. Please. What shall I do?'

  The voice at the other end of the phone was quite calm. It asked questions and I gabbled answers, and all the time Troy lay an arm's length away and I kept saying, 'But what shall I do, what shall I do?'

  'The emergency services will be with you as soon as possible,' said the voice.

  'Shall I give him the kiss of life? Shall I pump his chest? Tell me what to do.'

  I looked at Troy while I was saying it. His skin was chalky white, except where it was blue around the lips. The tip of his tongue protruded. The eyes were open and sightless. The noose around his neck was slack now, but there was dark bruising where it had been. My little brother.

  'Hurry,' I said in a whisper. 'Hurry up.'

  I put the phone down and crawled across to where he lay. I put his head in my lap and stroked the hair off his forehead. I leaned down and kissed him on his cheeks, and on his mouth. 1 picked up his hand and cradled it between both my own. I did up the middle button of his shirt, which had come undone. In a minute I would pick up the phone and call my parents. How do you say: your son is dead. I shut my eyes for a moment, drenched with the horror of it.

  His sweater was draped over the back of the sofa. There was a book on the table, face down. The clock ticked on the wall. I looked at it: twenty-five past six. If you could turn the clock back through the minutes and the hours until it was before Troy had stood on that chair with the noose round his neck and then kicked off, into death. If I'd arrived before, left my cheese and pickle roll and my accounts and my loitering in the warm office, and driven here instead. I ran my fingers through his hair. Nothing would ever be all right again.

  The doorbell rang and I laid Troy 's head gently back on the carpet and went to open it. While they were clustered round Troy, I picked up the phone.

  CHAPTER 21

  Everything was disjointed, skewed, in a strange light, a foreign language. My flat didn't feel like my own flat any more. It was like being out in the street when there has been an accident. People were bustling in and out who had nothing to do with me. There were three people in green overalls, who at first were very urgent and quick and shouting instructions, and then suddenly were slow and quiet because, after all, there was nothing to be urgent about any more because we were all too late. I saw a policeman and a policewoman. They must have arrived quickly. I looked at my watch, but I couldn't make out the time properly, as if the numbers were far away and in the wrong order. Someone handed me a mug of something hot and I sipped at it and burnt my lips. It felt good. I wanted it to hurt. I wanted it to make me feel something, to wake me out of this numbness. I'd talked to my mother on the phone. That had been one of the first things I'd done. Initially I'd thought of trying to break it to her gradually. It felt like the right thing to do. I'd wanted to say something like, ' Troy is seriously ill. Very seriously ill.' I could have made it easier for her, except that I couldn't. He was too cold and dead, his eyes open. So I couldn't say anything to her except that Troy was dead and that maybe she should come, but that they didn't need to because I could deal with things. I heard a gasp and then some fumbling attempts at questions. 'Dead?' 'Are you sure?' And then just a sort of moan. She started to say something about how she had thought Troy was better and I think I cut her short because I couldn't concentrate on what she was saying.

  There was a hand on my arm, a female face looking into mine. She was a police officer, younger than me, pale-faced, purple spots like a rash on her cheekbones. Was I all right? I nodded. She wanted details. Troy 's name. Age. My name. I started to get angry. How could they ask stupid questions at a time like this? Then I stopped getting angry. I realized that these were the questions that needed to be asked. Suddenly I saw the scene from her point of view. This was what she did for a living. She was called to events like this, one after another. The people in the green uniforms as well. They dealt with them and went home and watched TV. The policewoman was probably specially trained to deal with people like me. When she looked at me, she saw me as just one of a series of people like me that she had to deal with, people who weren't used to this. There had probably been someone a bit like me yesterday or the day before, and there would probably be someone a bit like me tomorrow or the day after. She would look at me and wonder whether I was the sort to make trouble. Some people would be difficult, some would cry, some would just be numb and unable to talk, some would become manic, a few might turn violent. Which would I be?

  There would be so much to organize, I thought. Forms to fill out, envelopes to lick, people to be informed. At that moment it hit me, like a warm, wet wave that ran through every cell. I had to open my mouth wide and gasp, as if the air in my flat were suddenly hard to breathe. My head felt light and I started to sway, and the woman's face appeared in front of me.

  'Are you all right, Miranda?' she said. She took the mug out of my hand. Some of it had already splashed on to my trousers. It had stung and felt hot, but now it was cold. 'Are you all right? Are you going to faint?'

  All I said was 'I'm fine' because I couldn't say what I really felt: the realization, like a hot, wet wave, that this was the end of Troy 's story. My head was buzzing with memories of Troy. A little boy on a beach standing on a sandcastle, the tide washing around it. Running into a fence in the playground at primary school and losing one of his front teeth. The way he bit his lip when he was hunched over a drawing. When he used to get the giggles and roll around with them on the floor as if he were possessed. The other t
imes, more common, when he went dark like bad weather and we couldn't reach him. When he was buzzing with ideas and it was as if he couldn't get them out fast enough, his eyes glowing with them. His very delicate long, white fingers and his large eyes, almost too big for his face. There were all those conversations about him when he wasn't there, the Troy problem. It was one of the main things I remember about growing up, the pained expression on my mother's face when she looked at him. What to do about Troy? They had tried so many things. They had taken him to a therapist and to the doctor. They had tried leaving him alone, encouraging him, warning him, shouting at him, crying, behaving as if everything were normal. Thousands of memories, fragments of stories, but now they had all ended in the same way. All the roads from all those memories led to my flat and a rope and a beam and that thing that was Troy and also wasn't Troy any more, lying on my floor, with people he didn't know and who didn't know him clustered around him.

  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 h
ad 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.