When she goes, perhaps my guilty conscience will die too. The result will be something neither of us deserve: peace.
Around the back of the church are the new graves, black granite and white marble in the main, standing straighter because time has not marked them yet. These graves bear flowers: some fresh, some wilted, some no more than sticks in the dirt. One bears so many flowers that they overflow on to the grass and make a fat tail that snakes off to the treeline. The name upon the grey, veined marble stone is Petra. Petra Cross.
So here she is, not cremated, left unburned, which is fitting. And here are her tributes. No wonder they come here and mess up the graveyard with their flowers. She’s still in the shade of Suscutin, and that must help to keep their hatred alive.
The dates on the stone remind me there are only two days until the anniversary of her death. People gather on such anniversaries. Old friends come to pay their respects.
I walk back to the pub and inquire after a room.
‘All booked up, sorry,’ says the man behind the bar, barely glancing at me. He’s taken me for a Petra disciple, I think. He hasn’t recognised me. It actually occurs to me to say, Do you know who I am? But thankfully that ridiculous instinct passes.
I could find a bigger hotel and run the risk of becoming an object of interest to the staff, the other visitors, and maybe the newspapers if I’m unlucky.
Howard would kill me.
I know what he would want me to do, and – this is a first – I think maybe I want to do it too.
I phone Liz.
Liz is always the least recognised of us. There’s something about her short brown hair and dark eyes, the five feet four of her, which blends into a crowd and renders her invisible. Her ability to stand in a queue and not get served for hours at a time was an ongoing joke with us all. She never received much fan mail, either. Elizabeth Stuck – the only celebrity who nobody knew about.
It made me love her more. I told her once she should take to crime; she would never have been suspected, let alone caught. But of course she didn’t. When we all broke up she went back to her maiden name of Jones and became a team manager for one of the huge insurance companies that made their home in the centre of Swindon. The ongoing, faceless business of rules and targets seemed to be made for her.
Upon my arrival at her Swindon flat I sit down in a squashy armchair and she sits opposite, her hands in her lap.
‘Thanks,’ I say.
‘No problem.’
Being in the room with her is difficult. Not painful, but a little sore, and tender, like a new growth of skin over an old wound. We never did say goodbye to each other.
She asks me how long I want to stay.
‘Just a couple of days. Is that okay?’
‘Of course. Howard said he was worried about you.’
‘You speak to him a lot?’
‘About once a week. Just to touch base. He phoned me last night.’
Of course, he would phone Liz. The two of them were the oldest, and the most responsible. Her calmness penetrated us all to some degree, and I saw Howard drawing strength from her support, particularly at the end. It wasn’t a disguise on her part; she really was that chilled about it all. How, I don’t know.
‘It’s only because of these bloody pictures,’ I say, sinking further down into her squashy armchair. Everything in this small living room is either cream-coloured or a deep plum hue, and it’s so warm and airless in here, with the windows all sealed up tight. I could fall asleep in a moment.
‘The nude ones? He told me about them.’
‘You didn’t see them?’
‘I don’t do news,’ she says. ‘Besides, I’ve seen it all before.’
Her life is suddenly clear to me. It’s a hibernation. Its warm soft stasis appeals at this moment, but it already contains a seed of repulsion that could easily germinate if I stayed here too long. It’s so peaceful. But it’s not living, not as I would want to live.
‘Good thinking,’ I say. ‘It’s all crap, anyway, all this mental health stuff.’
‘It’s really lovely to see you, Mik. It’s not just small talk, I promise, I know how you hate that. Seeing you reminds me that I didn’t make it all up. Sometimes the past feels like it didn’t happen to me, do you know what I mean? Forgive me, but I didn’t go and see the film you’ve been working on. It could only have made it seem more like someone else’s dream.’
This sudden flow of words sounds rehearsed to me; if so, I’m glad I gave her the chance to say them in person.
‘That is so very okay, Liz. Everything you’ve done has always been okay with me.’
How very formal this intimacy is, with timings and sentiments, like the steps of a waltz. All the things I loved about her are here, in the room with us. They are watching us carry out this dance.
‘I think,’ she says, leaning forward in her own armchair as the octagonal clock on the wall ticks, ‘that out of the six of us, we two did each other the least damage in the process of disengagement.’
We never did argue, that’s true. We stepped around each other, and took sides in the others’ arguments. ‘Perhaps that’s because we didn’t want to hurt each other.’
She shakes her head, and settles her clear gaze upon me. ‘It’s because we loved each other the least.’
The certainty of her statement is unbearable. She has ranked our love and placed it bottom of the pile. I never once did such a terrible thing. It’s a sudden act of violence.
‘If that’s true for you,’ I say, with such delicacy, ‘it wasn’t the case for me.’
For I loved her deeply, as I did all of us. She wasn’t who I went to for talking, true. It was the physicality we created between us that obsessed me, that made me curl up in her bed with her most nights, towards the end. When we made love she grew in stature and significance; she had a vocal tenderness that surrounded me, ensconced me. I let go of everything but her voice, coaxing me inside her. Soft, even waves of sound.
And she loved me less.
‘I mean—’ She gestures, her fingers splayed, towards me, away from me. ‘We were less connected, somehow. Didn’t you feel that?’
It’s overwhelming: the room, the sinking armchair, this lethargy. I have no strength left to pull myself up, to hide this hurt she’s causing. I can feel it on my face, visible to her.
‘Don’t cry, don’t cry,’ she pleads, and she gets up, comes to me, drapes herself over me. She sits on my lap and pulls my head against her chest, commanding the situation, yet moving just softly enough that I don’t resist. She says, hoarse and low, ‘I loved having you in me, I loved you, I loved you, Mik, but it was a love I could let go of. It’s not a bad thing that you didn’t break my heart, don’t you know that? It’s a good thing. It means I think of you most fondly, now. I care for you more now.’
She has weighed and measured me, and now I let her comfort me for the shortcomings she has created.
It’s the only time we hug during my visit. Even when we say goodbye, and tell each other how good it was to spend time together, we don’t touch. We talk about the past throughout both evenings, but the stories we tell belong to the others.
Do you remember the time Nicky tried to cook risotto and the saucepan caught fire?
Howard and his pyjamas, folding them every morning, it was the unsexiest thing I’ve ever seen.
Sunetra’s pot, it’s still there, can you believe it? Dan still keeps a spare key in it.
This act of reliving it, filling in the memories between us to create a crude, piecemeal version of what was once our relationship, brings a level of closure I hadn’t ever imagined I would get.