I felt the tears welling up again. I could see his face when we told him about the glider trip. I could so clearly remember his enthusiasm both before and afterwards. He hadn’t stopped talking about it for days.
I flipped a few pages further on and the diary fell open at random to that weekend in late July when he and his father had gone on their biking trip over the moors. Robbie’s entries there also burst with enthusiasm. ‘Coolest time ever,’ he’d written. ‘I’m going to make Dad do this again.’
There was quite a lot about school. And his swimming, of course. All pretty positive. A few schoolboy jokes, including one really obscene one which he credited somewhat gleefully to another boy.
He’d been invited, it seemed, though I didn’t remember him ever mentioning it, to a classmate’s rather smart-sounding black-tie birthday bash just before Christmas. I hadn’t known about that, but I suppose he would have told me eventually. For a start Robbie hadn’t owned a dinner suit and he’d doubtless have expected me to acquire one for him.
He hadn’t been a bit interested in clothes, and had always relied on me to sort out his wardrobe. One of so many tasks I would never have to perform again. I swallowed hard and read on.
‘I suppose I’ll have to go, Jack is a really good bloke,’ he’d written. ‘I do hate those kind of things, though.’
He always had too. He was so like his father in that regard. At his happiest in his own home. Or so I’d always thought.
He went on to mention the name of a girl I’d never heard of before.
‘It would be OK if I could persuade Sue S. to go with me. I wonder if she might?’
Girls. He was beginning to show an interest in girls. And he hadn’t told his mother. It was all so normal. I was fleetingly glad of that somehow. Of course he was showing an interest in girls. He was fifteen, wasn’t he? TV and the papers seemed full of tales of fifteen-year-old dads, for God’s sake.
I vaguely wondered who Sue S. was. Another pupil at Kelly? Someone he’d met through his swimming? I might never know now, and probably would never meet her. She could have become his first girlfriend. Maybe she had been.
I flipped through the pages again, looking specifically for a mention of her name. I found it just once more, part of a frustratingly brief entry in mid-September.
‘Sue S. so well fit. Wicked!’
I wondered what that meant, but the diary offered no further clarification. Indeed, Robbie seemed not to have shared too many intimate thoughts at all with his diary, keeping it principally for factual entries, reminders of dates and appointments and so on. Just like his father, I thought.
I felt the tears welling again and only just forced them back. It’s difficult to think clearly through a haze of tears, and I was trying so hard to think clearly.
Another entry did supply a little more insight into his life. It referred to him and a couple of mates managing to successfully order a few beers at a pub in Tavistock where the landlord either hadn’t noticed or didn’t care that they were under age. It made me smile. I had no idea he had ever done anything like that and again was rather glad he had.
‘Everybody keeps going on already about what they’re going to do in their gap years, and which uni they want to go to,’ Robbie had continued. ‘I suppose I’m going to have to think about that one day. But I don’t want to. Certainly not yet. I don’t like to think about leaving home.’
I felt a pang of the only anxiety Robbie had ever previously given me, really. I’d worried about his leaving home. He’d certainly displayed none of the usual desire to spread his wings that might be expected of a young man at the beginning of his life. And I’d always feared the experience might ultimately be traumatic, both for him and for us. I’d sometimes even thought that maybe Robbie would just stay at home. Find work nearby. Or attend a local college. Was it mandatory nowadays for a young person to fly the nest so irrevocably at a tender age?
I closed the diary and put it back in its drawer. As far as I could see there was absolutely nothing in it to indicate that Robbie had any worries at all, let alone anything serious enough to make him want to take his own life.
Perhaps he was the sort of boy who kept his true feelings bottled up to such an extent that he quite simply could not cope with them any more. I hadn’t thought he was like that, but I no longer knew. I didn’t know anything. That was the trouble. Perhaps he’d had concerns, worries, fears that he’d never shared with us or his diary. With anyone.
And perhaps these had driven our Robbie to such a point of despair that he’d felt that he could not carry on.
Could that be? It kind of had to be. I still could not accept it.
I sat there for a while, elbows on Robbie’s desk, my chin resting in my hands, staring out of the window. It had become pretty much completely light outside by then. Or as light as it was probably ever going to get that morning. Appropriately, somehow, dawn had broken dull and wet, in sharp contrast to the previous day. The night must have clouded over eventually. It was drizzling and there was thick mist over the moors. Actually, you couldn’t even see the moors. They were concealed by a dense grey curtain. This was typical November weather. On Dartmoor anyway.
I felt close to Robbie sitting in his room like that. I thought back over his all too brief life. Robbie had been born prematurely twenty-nine weeks into my pregnancy. For several weeks he was in an incubator fighting for survival and at first we were told his chances were not good. Fearing that we were going to lose him made him all the more special. That and the fact that complications during the birth meant I would have no more children.
But that didn’t matter one jot, because Robbie, a little fighter, got through it all, grew into the fine young man we were so proud of, and from the beginning was more than enough for his father and me.
He had been all either of us wanted. He’d meant absolutely everything to us both. And now he was gone.
I had no idea how much time passed before I heard noises from below. Robert was moving around down there. I heard him go into the bathroom.
I stood up, preparing to go downstairs. Before doing so, and now that Robert was awake, I decided to move the desk back to its rightful place by the chimney breast. It was somehow important to me that everything in the room was once again as it should be.
I grasped one end of the desk with both hands and dragged it across the room, finally pushing it, with some difficulty, to fit flush again in its corner.
Standing back to check that it was correctly in position, I noticed the floor. There were two crooked grooves in the highly polished wood clearly marking the path the desk had taken when I pushed it back. The floorboards were ancient, but when Robert had refurbished Robbie’s room he’d put a finish on the floor which had produced a wonderful deep glow that looked as if it had evolved with age rather than out of a bottle, but had turned out to be rather more fragile than he’d expected. I remembered him telling Robbie to take care, and how the two of them had attached little patches of green felt to the legs of Robbie’s chair. The desk however, had not been designed to ever be moved, and no such protective measures had been taken.
I stared at the floor, slowly taking in the significance of what had just happened. There were no other noticeable marks on the floorboards. Just those I had caused by dragging the desk back to its place. No other marks at all.
I ran down the stairs to Robert, making my feet throb badly again. I shouted out to him before I even got to the bedroom, eager to share my discovery. The door to the en-suite bathroom was open. Robert was standing naked at the basin, his mouth full of toothpaste. His hair was wet. He’d obviously showered, and he’d shaved off his stubbly beard. Funny how the routine of life goes on even on such a day. Although his distress showed clearly in his eyes, he looked like my Robert again and not so very different from how he’d been when we’d first met. His face, long and narrow with angular cheekbones, was a bit more lined and leathery and not quite so pale, down to all those years of exposure to North Sea air probably, but his hair had yet to show any trace of grey and he was still in quite good shape.