Page 75 of Pansies

“Yeah but”—Alfie reached for Fen’s hand and fit their palms together, Fen’s rough and dry, and Alfie’s all soft and southern—“you were doing it on your own.”

“Don’t you try to fix me, Alfie. Stay because you want me.”

“Yeah, I’ve learned my lesson about DIY, thank you very much. Wanting to help isn’t the same as wanting to fix.” Alfie tried to steady himself by breathing, but his throat was tight. “And, anyway, I’m hardly one to talk.”

“What do you mean?”

“Just that… Shit, I dunno. I think about my life, and it should be a great life, cos I’ve got everything I’m supposed to have, except I’m pretty sure I’m not happy.”

“Oh, Alfie. How can you know something like that?”

“Because of how I feel when I’m with you.”

Fen stared at him. “You’re…ridiculous and impossible and I—” He seemed to run out of steam, pressing his body against Alfie instead, as if he wanted to leave the imprint of himself all over him. As if he hadn’t already. And they stayed like that, solid as the cliffs that rose over them, until Fen pulled back again, just a little. “Can we walk a bit?”

“Course.”

The beach was theirs but for the archless rock, the cormorants, and the kittiwakes, so they held hands as they crunched over the sea-smoothed pebbles.

“This was my mother’s favourite place,” said Fen finally.

“Yeah?”

“Yep. She said it was her rock. When I was little, I thought that meant we literally owned it, you know, like our house. I told some of the kids at school, and they were all like, ‘Prove it.’”

“And what did your mam say?”

“That loving something wasn’t the same as owning it.”

They stopped for a moment to look up at Marsden Rock, which was greenish-brownish against the greyish sky, rough and unlovely.

Fen shook his head. “I don’t get it. It’s just a rock.”

“It’s notjusta rock, it’s a sea stack.”

“Oh well, in that case…”

“They’re pretty rare, you know, and kind of weird when you stop to think about it. I mean that’s centuries of a particular sort of coastal erosion just standing there like.”

“I’ve never really looked too closely at it. Just in case the tide comes in and I get stuck and drown.” Alfie gave his hand a squeeze, and Fen went on. “I’m a little bit scared of the seasometimes. It seems so powerful and alien. I mean, look what it did to the rock.”

“Yeah. I remember when the arch collapsed.”

“I liked it more before, when it had a proper shape. Now it just looks like something left behind.”

Somehow, Alfie knew it had to be here and it had to be now. That there could no right time for some questions, but that leaving them unspoken was its own cruelty. He sucked in a breath of air so pure it hurt a little. “Fen? Can I ask…your mam, how’d she die?”

For a while, Fen said nothing. Only watched the waves churning ceaselessly at the foot of the rock. “Well, technically it was because she took sodium pentobarbital.”

Alfie had been expecting something more like cancer. “She wha?”

Fen turned slowly to face him, still holding his hand. The sea and the sky and the shingle and the rough limestone cliffs had bleached the whole world to shades of grey and gold, except for Fen’s eyes, which were the greenest green Alfie had ever seen. “She took sodium pentobarbital in a grey-blue prefab in Pfäffikon while I held her hand, and Dad sat beside her. Apparently it tastes very bitter.” He said it without inflection, his voice a low murmur half lost to the tide. “They sent her ashes to us a few days later, and we came up here and gave her to the sky and the sea.”

Before Alfie could say anything, Fen jerked his hand away, turned, and strode off back up the beach, pebbles and sea-wrack scattering under his feet. Alfie caught him easily enough in a couple of long strides. “You okay?”

“No, I’m not okay. I watched my mum die, Alfie. Ihelpedher.”

This was all far beyond Alfie’s experience. He knew assisted suicide was a thing, of course. His grandma, who was living resentfully in a very nice nursing home for which Alfie footedthe bill, kept insisting that they might as well just “euthenate her” and have done with it. But this was the first he’d heard of anyone actually going through with it, and he wasn’t sure how you were supposed to react.

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