‘Oh, Andrew.’ Val turned to him and buried her face in his neck. He closed his eyes and held her, emptied his mind and drank in the simple physical comfort.
Inside, the house was warm. The wood-burning stove was lit and there was a trace of wood smoke on the air and the scent of oranges and cloves from the pomanders Val had brought back from the Christmas markets in Albert Square.
Without talking, they went into the living room. The chair had gone. The floor was clean. There was nothing to see.
‘Do you want a tea?’ Her voice was husky.
‘Yes please.’
Piles of mail on the kitchen table: cards, letters, bills. They sat together opening and sorting them: Christmas greetings and condolence cards. Val making a note of people who had yet to be told, friends who lived abroad and weren’t in any of the loose networks who passed on the news.
‘They might want to know about the funeral,’ she said about one family who came back to the UK most holidays, getting her phone out.
‘It’s Christmas Eve,’ he said.
She glanced at him, then accepted that it wasn’t a good time to ring anyone.
‘There’ll be time after,’ he said.
Now he couldn’t settle. He and Val had emptied their holdalls of the assortment of clothes and toiletries that had accumulated at his parents’ house, then picked at the casserole that was in the fridge. Val was adding to her lists. He fed another log into the stove.
‘His room,’ she said, and Andrew’s head swam. ‘Can we just leave it?’
‘Yes, of course.’ He imagined it would be messy: the bag Jason had brought home only half unpacked, crusted cereal bowls and dirty coffee cups strewn around the place. ‘He might have pots need bringing down.’
She smiled and nodded, faltered, her eyes brimming. ‘I can’t bear it.’ She ran her hands through her hair, pulling at it, her face crumpled.
‘I know.’ He went to hug her.
‘We’ll have a look,’ she said.
His heart beat hard in his chest as they went upstairs. Jason’s door was ajar. Val moved ahead of him to push it open. That’s how she copes with it, he thought; she says she can’t bear it, but then she meets it head on.
The door swung open. There was the bag, jeans and dirty socks on the floor. The smell of him there, the smell of Jason. Posters on the walls: the Gorillaz Plastic Beach album, a Guinness ad, photos of Jason and his mates mucking about in Cornwall, a Peters projection world map.
There were no cups or bowls or plates, no apple cores. No chewing gum wrappers.
‘His bin’s empty.’ Val frowned.
‘Colin – he’ll have cleared up.’
Val sat down on Jason’s bed.
‘I’m going to lie down for a bit.’ She bent to pull her shoes off.
‘Shall I wake you?’
‘No.’ She swung her legs up on to the bed, pulled at the duvet.
‘Okay.’ He shut the door.
Desperate for distraction, Andrew plugged in his laptop. The first time he’d checked his emails in days. The inbox filled: 4… 11… 28… 36… 41 new messages. His junk box gobbled up most of them. Three were from colleagues or acquaintances expressing sympathy. He skimmed them quickly, not wanting to engage.
There were two messages from the hospital speech therapy unit, referrals for the New Year. He replied acknowledging them, feeling unreal. Impossible to imagine being back there, though what else could he do?
He thought about the Facebook site for Jason. He’d still not looked at it, though Val did. She kept mentioning it and had even added her own thoughts and some pictures. She’d tried to read them to him, but he had left the room, unable to stand with her on this. She had sought him out later, wanting to talk about it, began with, ‘It helps me, Andrew, to see how many people care, to read about him.’
He didn’t answer.
‘It’s as if you don’t want to remember-’
‘It’s not that.’ He cut her off. ‘I can’t do it this way.’ Wallow, he wanted to say, but it felt so cruel he bit it back. ‘Not yet. I’m sorry.’
‘I need to be able to talk about him, like we do with your mum and dad – all of us, even the kids.’
Two evenings where in some sort of wake they had sat up late sharing stories. His parents, Val and him, Colin and Izzie and their kids. He had wanted to stop their mouths and cast them out, silence the peals of laughter and murmurs of soft fond recognition. Watching their eyes shine with affection and sparkle with tears, hands moving with gestures to illustrate their tales, he had seethed with rage. Did she not notice that he had said little, contributed nothing, drinking steadily, way more than anyone else, and been the first to leave, escaping with ‘a bad head’ or ‘need to lie down’?
