I look past him and see one of the girls look back at us. Pretty, blonde, kind of rock chick. Our eyes meet for a second, then she frowns, eyes darting to the back of Aaron’s head as if he’s someone she might recognize… but the crowd shifts and she’s lost amongst the other shoppers.
Only then do I realize that Aaron is no longer leaning on the railing, he’s leaning on me.
AARON
There’s a box in my wardrobe, one of those plastic ones with the cheap lids that never clip on properly. It’s covered in stickers: faded superheroes; blindingly shiny holographic discs; papery white patches where I’ve peeled off stickers that I tired of and doodled my own picture in biro; newer, bigger, cooler skateboard stickers and band logos. On the lid, I’ve stuck on some paper and written in massive caps “IDENTIFY YOURSELF CITIZEN” and drawn an intricate image of a thumbprint. The punctuation-phile in me finds a black pen and draws in a comma before CITIZEN. Childishly satisfied, I take the box over to my bed and sit with it for a moment, wondering whether this is really a good idea.
It isn’t, but I’m going in anyway.
The box is filled to the brim with envelopes, cards, notebooks, thin cardboard folders and many, many fictional blueprints for the Death Star. I pull out almost everything, turning over some of the less familiar pieces, trying to remember why I kept them. I find a project from Juniors and a note stapled to the front of it where the teacher made a joke about me being the next Roald Dahl. I smile at it. I’m not looking for memories this old.
At the bottom of the box are year photos — too big to fit comfortably, they’re slightly bowed inside their cardboard frames. I only take out the top one, from the end of Year 9. It’s a smaller photo than those up in the corridors of Kingsway, maybe only 450 of us, but I’m only looking for the girl I saw two hours ago: Penny Fraser. She’s turning a little towards the girl next to her, a huge smile about to blossom, strands of hair swooshing across her face. I peer closely at her, the crooked nose and the very pierced ear. She looks so young. Not as young as in some of the photos of me and her together, the ones tucked away in photo albums that my mother has very carefully left packed up in the loft.
I’m standing one row back, looking suitably ashamed of the God-awful haircut that Mum had inflicted on me the day before. If I squint closely enough I swear I can see the line where my tan stops and my fringe should have been… although maybe I’m just imagining it because I remember being so painfully aware of it at the time. My eyes skip over half-familiar faces to the end of the row.
Chris.
Grief isn’t always a knife-sharp twist in your heart or a dull bludgeon in your stomach, sometimes it’s a net, cast suddenly and silently over your soul so that you feel trapped and suffocated by its grasp. I feel the loss in the deepest recesses of myself, hidden parts of my mind and my matter, united in missing someone I will never see again.
I turn the photograph over and spend a long, long time looking out of the window.
FRIDAY 12TH MARCH
AARON
I tell Neville about seeing Penny at Clearwater. I give him just enough context to stop him from asking questions.
“Why are you telling me this?”
Obviously not enough context.
“I’m not your therapist and this isn’t Jeremy Springer.” I don’t correct him. “You don’t just get to offload and leave.”
“I wasn’t—”
“You were. I’m old and I’m wise and I’ve had enough of this bullshit,” he says. “You’re just taking bits of the jigsaw out of the box. You don’t have to put the whole picture together, but you’ve got to understand it’s frustrating, only knowing bits here and there.”
I don’t say anything, remembering him telling me I needed a friend.
“People who only give away bits of themselves are hiding something.”
“You do it too,” I say quietly.
“Well, you’re not the only one hiding things.”
I look up at him, studying his expression, taking in the seriousness of his gaze and noticing the “tch” of his teeth as he works his jaw slightly — something he only does when he’s about to wipe the floor with me at cards.
“You know I’m going to ask what things, don’t you?” I say and he nods. “And you’re going to tell me that I’ve got to tell you something about me in return.” Again, he nods, closing his eyes briefly as he dips his head ever-so slightly.
I like Neville. I have no idea why. He smells of alcohol and stale sweat. He’s a bad loser and a terrible winner. He hasn’t a kind word to say about anyone and every other thought he has is lewd. Yet he makes me laugh — at him, at the world and at myself. There’s a lot to be said for learning not to take yourself too seriously. Neville is more than the sum of his old wrinkled parts. He’s my friend.
He’s still watching me, then he adjusts his position, his hips clicking loud enough for me to hear and I see a flash of pain in his expression before he settles back in his chair. “You might be a pansy and you’re shite at cards, but you’re not so bad, I suppose. And I trust you.”
Which surprises me.
“So I’ll tell you mine. And then you can tell me yours.” He doesn’t wait for me to agree — he knows he doesn’t need to. “I have never forgiven meself for what I did to my wife.”
There are so many things that I could ask: What did you do? Why can’t you be forgiven? But I know what I’d like someone to ask me.
“What was her name?”
“Alison.” Neville reaches into his pocket and hands me a photo from inside his wallet. It’s of Neville — I can tell that right away. He’s a bit older than Dad and he looks kind of rakish. The woman next to him has her arms wrapped around him and is smiling, rolling her eyes at her husband.
I hand back the photo. “What happened?”
“I cheated on her.”
I wished this surprised me.
“Alison knew what I was like before she married me, but I promised I’d take our vows seriously. And I did, for a while, but I struggled once we had kids…”
Kids?
And so I learn about Neville, about his marriage and the strain he felt once he became a father. Parenthood’s not something I ever think about — this is a part of Hannah’s pregnancy neither she nor I can guess at. Either way, I can’t see anyone handling it as badly as Neville. It sounds like he slept with half the staff at his university and most of the students’ mums. It’s a miracle his marriage lasted as long as it did — twenty-four years. It came apart when one of the women he slept with took it upon herself to break up his marriage, not by telling his wife, but by telling his daughter. On her wedding day. To the woman’s son. Overnight his daughters switched their love for hate because of what he’d done to their mother — then, six weeks later, she died.
“What did she die of?”
“Broken heart.” Neville is staring at his slippers, so he can’t see my involuntary and insensitive eye roll.
“People don’t die of a broken heart, Neville.”
“What would you know?” he whispers as his shoulders start to shake. I move to sit closer and Neville refrains from calling me gay when my knee bumps his. He’s too busy crying. I sit there with him, staying close, letting him know that I’m there when he needs me and I’m thinking all the while that Neville cannot truly believe that he is responsible for his wife’s death.
Not the way I am for Chris’s.