“Sorry,” Andrew said.
“No problem,” Carl said, though he didn’t move to let Andrew pass.
“I was thinking I might head off soon,” Andrew said. “It’s a long journey back,” he added, more defensively than he’d intended.
“Of course you were,” Carl said.
Andrew chose to ignore this comment. “See you then,” he said instead, stepping around Carl and heading for the stairs.
“After all,” Carl said, “this must be much easier for you now that Sally’s gone.”
Andrew stopped at the top of the stairs and turned. Carl was looking at him, unblinking.
“What,” Carl said, “you don’t agree? Come on, Andrew, it wasn’t as if you were ever really there for her, no matter how much that obviously hurt her.”
That’s not true, Andrew wanted to say. She was the one who abandoned me.
“Things were complicated.”
“Oh, I’ve heard all about it, believe me,” Carl said. “In fact, there wasn’t really a week that went by when Sally didn’t talk about it—going over it all again and again and again, trying to work out how to get through to you, how to make you care, or at least stop hating her.”
“Hating her? I didn’t hate her—that’s ridiculous.”
“Oh is it?” Renewed anger flashed in Carl’s eyes and he moved toward Andrew, who dropped down a couple of stairs. “So you didn’t hold such a grudge about her apparently ‘abandoning’ you for America that you basically refused to ever see her again?”
“Well no, that’s not—”
“And even when she spent weeks on end—months, actually—trying to reach out and help you sort your life out, you were so pathetically fucking stubborn that you wouldn’t let her in, even though you knew how much it was hurting her.” Carl pressed his fist to his mouth and cleared his throat.
Oh god, please don’t cry, Andrew thought.
“Carl, it . . . it was com—”
“Don’t you dare fucking say it was complicated again,” Carl said. “Because it’s actually very simple. Sally was never really happy, Andrew. Not really. Because of you.”
Andrew dropped down another step and nearly stumbled. He swiveled and used the momentum to keep on going. He needed to be as far away as possible from this. He’s got no idea what he’s talking about, Andrew thought as he slammed the front door behind him. But the doubt that had begun to nag at him as he left only intensified during the train journey home. Was there some truth to what Carl had said? Had Sally really been so cut up about their relationship that it had somehow contributed to her decline? It was a thought too painful to even consider.
—
With all the lights off, the brightness of the screen was harsh on Andrew’s eyes. TinkerAl’s forum avatar (a dancing, laughing tomato), usually a cheering sight, seemed malevolent tonight.
Andrew made himself look at the words he had typed and untyped so many times he’d lost count.
I buried my sister today
The cursor flashed back at him expectantly. He moved the mouse until it was over the “post” button, but took his hand away, reaching for his plastic tumbler of foamy beer instead. He’d been drinking in an attempt to re-create the comforting sense of warmth he’d felt in the pub with Peggy, before Cameron’s awkwardly delivered bombshell, but it had just left him with a dull, repetitive throbbing behind his eyes. He sat up straight and felt the bristles of the shaving brush in his pocket poking into his leg. It was three a.m. Carl’s words were still swimming in his head—the confrontation still horribly vivid. What he’d have given now for loved ones around him. Gentle words. Mugs of tea. A moment when a family was more than the sum of its parts.
He looked again at the screen. If he were to refresh, there would be tens, maybe hundreds of messages now shared between BamBam, TinkerAl, and Jim. Something about spotting some limited-edition rolling stock or a platform footbridge for sale. They were the closest he had to friends, but he couldn’t bring himself to confide in them about this yet. It was just too hard.
He moved his finger to the delete key.
I buried my sister today
I buried my
I buried
I
— CHAPTER 10 —
Despite Cameron insisting he could take off as much time as he needed, Andrew went back to work two days after the funeral. He’d barely slept, but it had been bad enough spending one day sitting around with nothing to distract him—he’d much rather have dealt with dead people he’d never met. He braced himself for the onslaught of sympathy. The head tilting. The sad-eyed smiles. People not even being able to imagine how hard it was for him. He’d have to nod and say thanks, and all the while he’d be hating them for saying such things and hating himself because he didn’t deserve their sympathy. It was to his considerable confusion, then, that Peggy had spent the majority of the first hour that morning talking to him about moorhens.
“Very underrated birds, if you ask me. I saw a one-legged one once at Slimbridge Wetland Centre. It was in quite a small pond and it just seemed to be swimming in circles around the perimeter in a sort of sad victory lap. My daughter Maisie wanted me to rescue it so she could ‘invent it a new leg.’ Ambitious, eh?”
“Mmm,” Andrew said, batting a fly out of his face. Bearing in mind this was only Peggy’s second property inspection, she seemed to have acclimatized remarkably well, especially given that Jim Mitchell’s house was in an even worse state than Eric White’s.
Jim had died in bed, on his own, at the age of sixty. The flat’s kitchen, bedroom, and living room were all in one, with a separate shower room choked with mildew, its floor boasting an impressive range of stains whose origins Andrew tried not to think about.
“This is the sort of room my estate agent would describe as a ‘compact, chic washroom,’” Peggy said, sweeping a moldy curtain aside. “What the hell,” she yelped, stepping back. Andrew rushed over. The whole bathroom window was covered in little red bugs, like blood spatter from a gunshot wound. It was only when one of them flapped its little wings that Andrew realized they were ladybugs. They were the most colorful thing in the entire flat. Andrew decided that they’d leave the window open in the hope it would encourage an exodus.
They were dressed in the full protective suits this time. Peggy had specifically requested this outside so that she could pretend to be a lab assistant in a James Bond film, having watched You Only Live Twice the previous evening. “My Steve used to have a bit of Pierce Brosnan about him when we were first going out. That was before he discovered pork pies and procrastination.” She sized Andrew up. “I reckon you might pass for—who’s the baddie in GoldenEye?”
“Sean Bean?” Andrew said, moving over to the kitchenette.
“Yeah, that’s the one. Reckon you’ve got a touch of the Sean about you.”
As Andrew caught sight of his reflection in the filthy oven door—the receding hairline, patchy stubble, bags under his eyes—he suspected that Sean Bean might have been doing a lot of things at that moment in time, but he almost certainly wasn’t scrambling around on the kitchen floor of a South London bedsit with a Mr. Chicken! takeaway menu stuck to his knee.
After twenty minutes of searching they went outside to take a breather. Andrew was so tired he felt almost weightless. A police helicopter went past overhead and they both craned their necks to watch it as it banked and flew back in the direction it had come from.