Page 9 of The Fall-Out

‘Back in the day, sure,’ I said. ‘Damn it, though, why did this have to happen? Like, why? It’s so unfair.’

‘Life’s not fair,’ Rowan said. ‘Like I tell Clara all the time.’

‘He was clean for so damn long.’ Kate’s sadness was mixed with fury. ‘So long. We tried so fucking hard. He tried so fucking hard. And then that car accident in Turkey, and the drugs they gave him there, and it all kind of spiralled.’

‘Even after that.’ Abbie pushed her cup away. ‘He relapsed and then he was okay again. We all thought it would be all right.’

‘Until it wasn’t.’ Kate finished her coffee, drinking it down like she wasn’t tasting it. ‘Daniel and I went to visit him in Manchester, like we’d been doing every couple of weeks, and we just knew, as soon as we walked in the door.’

We all knew the story. We’d heard it many times before – she’d told us as soon as it happened, desperate for some idea, some miracle suggestion that would make everything okay again. She looked over at Daniel now, standing in the cluster of men, all of them solemn and upright in their suits and purple ties. It was like she hoped he’d overhear and move over to her, laughing, and tell her off for going on about that mad, upsetting dream she’d had a couple of months back.

‘That first time – it wasn’t like before, when he quit the drugs the first time. Back then when he was using his flat was like a shell; he’d sold everything. This time he was still living almost normally, going to work and stuff.’

We all nodded, letting her talk it out.

‘But me and Daniel knew. Andy was expecting us – we’d got into a kind of routine with visiting him. He’d found this gelato place down the road and he was obsessed with trying all the flavours, which would’ve taken forever because they kept introducing specials. We’d even been discussing on WhatsApp how we were going to try the pistachio and lemon that weekend. But then when we got there he said he wasn’t hungry. And we just knew.’

‘It’s not your fault,’ Abbie said gently. ‘You tried to get him to go to a Narcotics Anonymous meeting, remember? You even took him there and waited outside for him.’

Kate nodded sadly. ‘He didn’t go to the meeting. He fessed up afterwards – he locked himself in the toilet and watched old episodes of The Simpsons on his phone until it was time to come out again. It was like he thought we’d think it was funny.’

‘I remember,’ I said. ‘It wasn’t one bit funny.’

I could feel the weight of Kate’s guilt and the load of our shared grief spreading over us, darker even than the lowering clouds outside.

‘Remember when Andy bought that teddy bear?’ I said to break the silence.

Abbie looked up, a reluctant smile on her face.

‘He thought he’d be like Sebastian from Brideshead Revisited,’ she said. ‘All charming and whimsical, carrying it everywhere with him.’

‘Except he didn’t,’ Kate chipped in. ‘He kept losing it. He left it in a pub one time, and I put a call out on Facebook for it, and some sweet couple brought it round to my flat. They were so proud they’d found my little boy’s comfort object, and I was like, “Actually, he’s thirty-two.”’

I looked at my watch and saw it was ten to twelve. Time to go. Somehow, we seemed to have mustered enough courage between us to get this done. Around the table, my friends shuffled their feet. Rowan and Abbie got up, wordlessly, and went to the toilet. Kate took out a compact mirror from her bag and topped up her lipstick. I pulled a comb through my hair, more for something to do than because I thought anyone would or should care what I looked like.

Then Patch came over to our table and laid a strong, warm hand on my shoulder.

‘We should probably head over,’ he said. ‘Daniel and Matt are already there, doing the meet and greet thing outside the church.’

Church. I felt myself flinch at the idea, but it had been the one thing Andy’s mother had been insistent on, Abbie had told us on WhatsApp.

Abbie:

Matt tried to suggest that something secular might be a bit more – you know…

Kate:

What Andy would have wanted.

Abbie:

Exactly – apparently she reacted like we’d suggested we chop his body into bits and feed it to our cats. So church it is.

And church it was – the one across the road from the pub, a hulking neo-Gothic building which I supposed would have appealed to Andy’s sense of the dramatic even if he deplored the spirituality it represented.

Together, we all left the pub and crossed the road. The rain had stopped and a thin winter sun was beginning to brighten the cloudy sky. The road was wet and the wind cut through my coat and the gap where the zip of my purple dress was held together by a safety pin.

People were trickling through the arched wooden doors: some I recognised from various parties Andy had thrown over the years, but most were strangers – family, I guessed, or friends of his mother’s, or perhaps even people he’d met at the twelve-step programmes he’d attended before he stopped attending any of them.

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