The next few weeks followed the same pattern. Andrew would return from his job working in the pharmacy on the high street and cook pasta with tomato sauce, or sausage and mash, and Sally would get high and watch cartoons. As Andrew watched her suck up spaghetti strands, sauce dribbling off her chin, he wondered just what sort of a person she would turn out to be. The fiery bully and the hippie were still living Jekyll and Hyde–like inside her. How long, too, before she left again? He didn’t have long to wait, it turned out, but this time he caught her sneaking out.
“Please just tell me you’re not going to try and find Spike?” he said, shivering in the doorway against the dawn chill. Sally smiled sadly and shook her head.
“Nah. My pal Beansie got me a job. Or at least he thinks so. Up near Manchester.”
“Right.”
“I just need to get myself back on track. Time for me to grow up. I just can’t do that here. It’s too fucking grim. First Dad, now Mum. I was . . . I was going to come and see you. Say good-bye and everything. But I didn’t want to wake you up.”
“Uh-huh,” Andrew said. He looked away, scratching at the back of his neck. When he looked back he saw that Sally had just done the same. A mirror image of awkwardness. This, at least, made them both smile. “Well. Let me know where you end up,” Andrew said.
“Yeah,” Sally said. “Deffo.” She went to close the door but stopped and turned. “You know, I’m really proud of you, man.”
It sounded like something Sally had rehearsed. Maybe she’d hoped to wake him after all. He couldn’t work out how that made him feel.
“I’ll call as soon as I get settled, I promise,” she said.
She didn’t, of course. The call only came months later, by which time Andrew had gotten his place sorted at Bristol Poly, and already it felt like an unbridgeable gap had opened between them.
They did spend a Christmas together, though, where Andrew slept on the sofa in the little flat Sally shared with Beansie (real name Tristan), the three of them drinking Beansie’s home-brewed beer that was so strong, at one point Andrew was convinced he’d briefly gone blind. Sally was seeing someone called Carl, a lean, languid man who was obsessed with working out and the subsequent refueling. Every time Andrew turned around he was eating something: a whole bag of bananas or great slabs of chicken—sitting there in his workout clothes, licking grease from his fingers like an Adidas-clad Henry the Eighth before he’d let himself go. Eventually Sally moved in with Carl and that’s when Andrew stopped seeing her altogether. The system of regular phone calls came into play not through any spoken agreement; it was just how things began to work. Every three months, for the past twenty years. It was always Sally that called. Sometimes, back in the early days, they’d talk about their mother. Enough time had passed for them to see some of her eccentricities through rose-tinted glasses. But as the years went by, their reminiscing became forced, a desperate attempt to keep alive a connection that seemed to diminish every time they spoke. These days, the conversations had always felt like a real effort, and sometimes Andrew had wondered why Sally still bothered to call him. But then there were moments—often in the silences, when there was only the sound of their breathing—when Andrew had still felt an undeniable bond.
— CHAPTER 9 —
Andrew left the office in a daze, shaking off offers from Cameron and Peggy to accompany him home. He needed fresh air, to be on his own. It took all his strength to pick up the phone and call Carl. But Sally’s husband—Sally’s widower—wasn’t the one to answer. Instead, it was someone who introduced herself as “Rachel, Carl’s best friend”—a strange way for a grown adult to describe herself, especially given the circumstances.
“It’s Andrew. Sally’s brother,” he said.
“Of course. Andrew. How are you?” And then before Andrew could actually answer: “Carl says there’s no room for you at the house, unfortunately. So you’ll have to stay at the B & B down the road. It’s very near the church . . . for the funeral and everything.”
“Oh. Right. Has that all been arranged already?” Andrew said.
There was a pause.
“You know our Carl. He’s very organized. I’m sure he won’t want to worry you with all of the little details.”
Later, as the Newquay-bound train pulled away from London and copses replaced concrete, it wasn’t grief or even sadness that he felt. It was guilt. Guilt that he hadn’t cried yet. Guilt that he was dreading the funeral, that he’d actually considered the possibility of not going.
When the conductor appeared, Andrew couldn’t find his ticket. When he finally found it in his inside jacket pocket he apologized so profusely for wasting the conductor’s time that the man felt compelled to put his hand on Andrew’s shoulder and tell him not to worry.
—
He spent a week in a damp B & B, listening to angry seagulls keening outside, fighting the urge to leave and get straight back on a train to London. When the morning of the funeral arrived, he ate a breakfast of stale cereal alone in the B & B “restaurant,” the proprietor watching on throughout, standing in the corner with his arms folded, like a death row prison guard observing him eating his final meal.
Walking into the crematorium, the coffin resting on his shoulder, he was aware that he had no idea who the men were on the other side (it had seemed impolite to ask).
Carl—who had entered his fifties in disgustingly healthy and stylish fashion, all salt-and-pepper hair and wristwatch the value of a small market town—spent the service with his head raised stoically, tears spilling metronomically down his cheeks. Andrew stood awkwardly next to him, fists clenched at his sides. At the moment the coffin went through the curtains Carl let out a low, mournful howl, unburdened by the self-consciousness that consumed Andrew.
—
Afterward, at the wake, surrounded by people he had never seen, let alone met, before, he felt more alone than he had in years. They were in Carl’s house, in the room dedicated to his burgeoning yoga business, Cynergy. The room had been temporarily cleared of mats and exercise balls so there was space for trestle tables struggling to support the regulation wake spread. Andrew looked at the homemade sandwiches, pale and precisely cut, and was reminded of a rare occasion he’d seen his mother laughing, having recalled the Victoria Wood line about a typical British reaction to the news that someone had died: “Seventy-two baps, Connie. You slice, I’ll spread,” she’d said in a perfect imitation, tweaking Andrew’s ear and dispatching him to put the kettle on.
As he chewed on a damp sausage roll, he suddenly got the sense that he was being watched. Sure enough, Carl was looking at him from across the room. He had changed out of his suit into a loose white shirt and beige linen trousers, and was now barefoot. Andrew couldn’t help but notice he’d kept his expensive watch on. Andrew realized Carl was about to make his way over, so he quickly put down his paper plate and was up the stairs as fast as he could go and into the thankfully unoccupied bathroom. As he washed his hands his eye was drawn to a shaving brush on an ornate white dish on the windowsill. He picked it up and ran his finger across the top of the bristles, specks of powder flicking off into the air. He brought it to his nose and smelled the familiar rich, creamy scent. This had belonged to his father. His mother had kept it in the bathroom. He couldn’t remember talking to Sally about it. She must have formed an especially sentimental attachment to want to keep hold of it.
Just then someone tapped on the door, and Andrew quickly slipped the brush into his trouser pocket.
“Just a minute,” he said. He paused and forced an apologetic smile onto his face. When he emerged, Carl was standing outside with his arms crossed, biceps straining against his shirt. Up close, Andrew could see that Carl’s eyes were raw from crying. He caught the scent of Carl’s aftershave. It was rich and overpowering.