The Shock of the Fall (Special edition) (27 page)

I’m not reading into it. I’m trying not to read into it. But if I did, I doubt I’d be alone. At that exact moment bright sunlight came pouring through the top windows. We had the fire door propped open to let the air in, and with the sunshine came the gentlest breeze, so that all at once it felt warm and cool, and everywhere around us, tiny golden dust particles were swirling in their millions.

There was a collective intake of breath. Nanny Noo squeezed Aunty Mel’s hand. Aunt Jacqueline moved her fingers slowly through the air. Mum was welling up already.

It was all lost on Granddad. ‘No bloody patience, mind. Would he wait for the glue to dry before he started painting that plane? Remember it? The Sopwith Camel? Not a chance.’

‘Was I there?’ Sam asked suddenly. He’d been looking a bit bored until then, slouched back and picking at a spot on his neck. Now he sat forwards, scraping his chair legs over the polished wooden floor. ‘I think I was there,’ he said. ‘And Peter and Aaron. I remember you building Airfix with us. Is the Sopwith the one with two sets of wings?’

‘It’s called a biplane,’ Granddad said.

‘Yeah. Yeah! Simon wanted to paint mine too. He wanted to paint a face on it. I remember it. Shit. That was so long ago.’

‘Language,’ Aunty Mel said curtly. ‘Honestly. This boy of mine.’ She wasn’t really cross with him. She reached to ruffle his hair, and you could tell she wasn’t really cross.

Then Mum turned to Granddad, and with a smile so big it nudged a tear from her eye, she said, ‘Dad. Remember at the lakes? When only you were allowed to help him on the potty.’

Nanny Noo shook her head, ‘Oh that was funny, that was so funny.’

Then Mum did something I’d never seen her do before. She did an impression of Simon. ‘I want Granddad to wipe my bum, Mummy! Not you. Granddad!’

My granddad threw his head back, laughing so hard you could see his gold teeth at the back of his mouth. ‘I was lucky that trip, weren’t I?’

The Beavers and Brownies Hut didn’t feel so big after that – the memories could hardly fit. We went on holidays, and to the school nativity when Simon was the Inn Keeper and decided that there was a room for Mary and Joseph after all. We went to the Bristol Exploratory, where we froze our shadows against the glow-in-the-dark wallpaper. We climbed up to the dangerous tree house with a rusty nail, and then off for the tetanus injection that followed. We stood in the queue for the Ghost Train, three times over, always too scared by the time we reached the front. We scrunched through autumn leaves at the arboretum – the trip when Simon disappeared for a whole hour, and Mum was frantic, but Simon didn’t even know he was lost, and when we found him, he was happily teaching a bemused elderly couple how to tell the time, but he might need some help from them, but not until he asked.

The truth is, I didn’t say that much myself. I didn’t have so many memories of my own to share. Not whole memories, with beginnings, middles, and ends. I was only a little boy when I knew my big brother, and we don’t get to choose what we keep.

What I did at the memorial, was listen.

To the laughter and the tears, and to the quiet stillness that followed.

This is where I want to leave my story, because it’s the place I am most proud of.

But that doesn’t make it the end.

This story doesn’t have an end. Not really. How can it when I’m still here, still living it? When I print out these last pages I’ll turn the computer off, and later today men will come with boxes to take everything away. The lights of Hope Road Day Centre will be switched off for the last time. But in time, another day centre will open and close, and another, and there will always be a Nurse This and a Nurse That, a
Click-Click-Wink
and a Claire-or-maybe-Anna.

I’ve told you about my first stretch in hospital, but I’ve been back in since. And I know I will again. We move in circles, this illness and me. We are electrons orbiting a nucleus.

The plan is always the same: After I’m discharged, I spend a couple of weeks with my parents to help me to settle. Mum wishes I was nine again; we could build a den in the living room, and hide away forever. Dad takes it seriously. He holds back on the special handshakes and talks to me like I’m a man. They’re both helpful in their own way. The first few days are hardest. The silence is a problem. I get used to the hourly checks, the scraping of viewing slats, fragments of conversations drifting from the nurses’ office. I get used to having Simon around. It takes time to adjust, and time to adjust when he’s gone.

I could keep on going, but you know what I’m like. The ink running dry from my typewriter ribbon. This place shutting down. That’s enough small print to get anyone thinking.

So I’ll stack these pages with the rest of them, and leave it all behind. Writing about the past is a way of reliving it, a way of seeing it unfold all over again. We place memories on pieces of paper to know they will always exist. But this story has never been a keepsake – it’s finding a way to let go. I don’t know the ending, but I know what happens next. I walk along the corridor towards the sound of a Goodbye Party. But I won’t get that far. I’ll take a left, then a right, and I will push open the front door with both hands.

I have nothing else to do today.

It’s a beginning.

I would like to thank my parents and sister, who I know will be so proud to see this book on the shelves. I am blessed to have such a supportive family.

I’m grateful to everyone who has read my writing and shared their thoughts. That is no small offering. It is – I’ve learnt – how a novel comes to exist. Thank you Kev Hawkins and Hazel Ryder, who read my earliest drafts, and whose words of encouragement remained with me. Tanya Atapattu, for so many reasons – but especially for your kind encouragement whenever it was most needed. And Phil Bambridge for your generous contribution to the science lesson in the Prodrome chapter.

A very special thank you to Emma Anderson for your incisive editorial notes, and unfailingly helpful advice.

I completed the first draft of this novel on the Creative Writing MA at Bath Spa University. Thank you again to my parents, who helped support me financially during this time, and also to my then flatmate, Samantha Barron, who endured every vicissitude of my studies with me. Thank you to my manuscript tutor, Tricia Wastvedt, and to my other tutors and fellow students, not least Samantha Harvey, Gerard Woodward, John Jennings, and Nick Stott.

Thank you to Ellie Gee, for helping me explore Matthew’s sketches. And to the artist, Charlotte Farmer, who has brought them to life in these pages.

I am hugely indebted to my literary agent Sophie Lambert (Tibor Jones & Associates), whose guidance – both on and off the page – was invaluable. And also to my editor, Louisa Joyner, and the wonderful team at HarperFiction, who turned my hopes of a book into a book. And who gave me a keepsake box.

Lastly, mostly, Emily Parker. For all of the endless reasons, this novel is dedicated to you.

‘We know what you did,’ he said.

‘What?’

I watched his expression change, his mouth curling ever so slightly into a grin. We called him our baby cousin because he was the youngest, but he was only two weeks younger than me, and he was already taller and stronger.

His grip tightened.

‘We know what you did,’ he said again. ‘Everyone knows.’

Then a shape moving past the window, a rattling of the garage door. Sam stiffened – and scurried away.

‘I said it. I said it,’ he whispered excitedly to Aaron.

And if you don’t count those two, crouching on the bottom stair, turning to watch me slam shut the bathroom door again. And if you don’t count Uncle Brian, who had popped outside for a cigarette, and who I could just make out through the frosted glass – his back to the wall, one leg bent at the knee. If you don’t count them, then the place to find my family was in the living room.

All huddled together, all dressed in black except for socked feet, was every relative that I had ever known. All of them. Except Simon.

And not just relatives, but friends, teachers, neighbours, everyone.

Everyone
knows.

I got to staring at our toothbrushes.

Propped side-by-side in the Thorpe Park beaker. The beaker that became the toothbrush holder when Simon and me couldn’t agree on which one of us it belonged to, and which one had left theirs in the car park.

I killed a bit of time doing that – running my thumb over his bristles, touching a few hundred million little bits of him. Then I thought about the funeral, but already it was crumbling away.

‘Unbelievable,’ Dad said.

‘Is it a
horse
, Daddy?’

I couldn’t remember.

‘Daddy. Did you say a
horse
?’

Except I knew it wasn’t a horse, because when I asked for the third time, Mum snapped, ‘No. Matthew. It isn’t.’

Then she might have told me what it was, but I couldn’t think.

We drove in silence along the twisting roads for a long time, the man in the black hat occasionally glancing at me in the rear view mirror. Then on the first stretch of straight road, the transit van – the van that got between our car and the-car-that-wasn’t-a-horse – indicated, and pulled over.

Dad shook his head as we passed, but you could tell the driver felt bad about it. He was staring straight ahead, not wanting to look at us; the way Mum does when she cuts people up on the motorway. I felt a bit bad for him to be honest.

‘It’s a hearse, ami.’ Dad said quietly.

Mum reached across to straighten my tie. It was a clip-on, and didn’t really need straightening. I guess that was her way of saying sorry.

Here are three other things I remember from the funeral:

1.

‘Wonderful, delightful,’ the minister said.

He had a neatly trimmed grey beard and this soft, whispery voice that made everything he uttered sound like a secret.

‘Just wonderful.’

Aunt Jacqueline raised her hands in the air, her eyes closed, singing at the top of her voice. Aunty Mel glared across the aisle at her, furious that she’d chosen this week to find God. The week when everyone else had lost something.

‘Just wonderful.’

Then the silence rushed in.

The pulsing kind of silence that only happens in a big space after lots of noise.

The minister smiled at me. ‘And now Simon’s brother, Matthew,’ he said, ‘is going to share a painting.’

I stood beside him at the alter, clutching my crumpled sheet of paper. I’d painted it at Nanny Noo and Granddad’s, but Nanny didn’t have as many colours as we did, so for a depiction of heaven, it was pretty fucking drab.

Nobody seemed to mind though. ‘And that’s his N64 … and that’s his blanket … and that’s his keepsake box … ’

My voice sounded loud in the microphone.

2.

Dad did a eulogy.

That’s another word I learnt.

And forgot.

He repeated the story he liked to tell us. The one with the small boy who was trying to lift a rock in his garden, and the boy’s dad was watching him heave and sweat and struggle, but get nowhere. Eventually the dad asks, ‘Why don’t you use all of your strength?’ And the boy says, ‘I am, Daddy. I am using all of my strength.’ And his dad says, ‘No you’re not. You haven’t asked me for help.’

It wasn’t his own story, and maybe you’ve heard it before. Perhaps your own dad would sit you on his knee, and sit your older brother on his other knee – whenever either of you had struggled alone.

That’s what happened in our house, anyway.

Dad was sobbing into the microphone, saying how we were
his
strength, that we were
his
rock. He said he would miss Simon every day, for the rest of his life.

He looked at
me
when he said that, and Aunty Mel squeezed my shoulder from the row behind, and Mum squeezed my hand from next to me.

I felt squeezed.

You weren’t there, I wanted to shout.

You weren’t there.

Any of you.

I couldn’t carry him by myself.

3.

But Dad and Uncle Brian and Uncle Paul (who wasn’t really an uncle, but Dad’s closest friend) and Granddad – they could carry him. Dad and Uncle Brian at the back because they were tallest, and Paul and Granddad at the front.

That’s how Simon left the church, to be put back in the hearse and driven to the crematorium.

We all stood up for that bit.

A few people started clapping, but that didn’t really catch on. And stuck to the heel of Uncle Brian’s shoe was a small square of pink tissue paper, or probably confetti.

That’s it.

That’s everything.

The door handle turned.

‘Are you in there?’

‘Get lost, Sam.’

‘It’s Peter.’

Peter’s my middle cousin, and if you’re struggling with all of the names, don’t worry because you never have to meet them. But if it helps, here’s our family tree:

‘What do you want?’ I asked.