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Joe was obviously sleeping in this room because there was a wash bag on the bed. I stood looking at it, feeling a wave of sadness. Imagine coming home, to sleep in your childhood bed, knowing your mother is to be buried the next day. Just then, the door flew open, making me jump. It was Joe. He slammed it shut, his back towards me, swearing, leaning his forehead against it for a moment, before fiddling in his inside jacket pocket and producing a bottle of Jack Daniel’s. He unscrewed the top, muttered something about Sorry Mum and have to do this, and then tipped his head back and took a swig. Then he saw me.
‘Bloody hell, you nearly gave me a heart attack!’ he said.
Then, when he’d realized what he’d said, ‘That’s going to keep on happening, isn’t it?’
I smiled. ‘Probably.’
‘Do you want some?’ he said, holding the bottle out. ‘Can I just say, it was a huge oversight by me not to have organised booze at this wake.’
‘Yup,’ I said, taking a gulp. ‘Still, I don’t need booze to relax.’
‘Really?’ he said. ‘’Coz I do.’
I handed him the bottle back. ‘Jack Daniel’s? Going for the hard liquor, then?’
‘I can’t take any risks,’ he said. ‘It needs to reach my bloodstream instantly. I just can’t talk to people any longer.’
There was a long silence, during which we just sort of looked at each other.
‘So, er … the bathroom’s two doors down,’ he said, thumbing in that general direction when I just stood there, still clutching Miss Knickerless. ‘Same place it’s always been.’
I felt my cheeks grow hot.
‘God, sorry. I couldn’t resist, I just had this mad desire to—’
‘Snoop around my bedroom?’
‘Oh, shit, I’m sorry.’
‘I’m joking, Robyn.’ His eyebrows gave a little flicker of amusement. ‘It’s actually really sweet.’
He looked pale as anything, washed out. I’d forgotten about that bit, the tiredness,and he pushed the stuff to the side, collapsing on the bed.
‘I should go,’ I said. He’d come up here to be alone, lose himself, and here I was, making that impossible, but he said, ‘Don’t go. Why do you keep on wanting to go?’
He looked genuinely annoyed – Joe and his transparency.
‘I don’t know, because you want to be on your own?’
He tutted, dramatically. ‘I don’t want to be on my own. I just can’t take much more of people, of Betty. We’re only on 1978. There’s thirty-odd years to get through yet.’
I laughed, despite myself.
‘I needed someone to save me. Where were you, Robbie?’ he said, turning on his side.
‘Snooping round your bedroom?’
I sat down on the bed next to him. Up close, it was like he’d changed even less, and I had this urge to give him a hug, but wondered whether that was appropriate, him lying on a bed and all, so I said, ‘It’ll be over soon. They’ll all bugger off home and then you can go to sleep or watch a film. That’s what I did.’
‘Really, what did you watch?’
‘The Evil Dead.’
‘You are joking?’
‘I’m not, as it happens. It’s my job, you see. You start off quite PC and normal and, before you know it, you can’t operate in normal society.’
Joe thought this was really funny. ‘So, basically, you’ve become like, the world’s most un-PC mental-health nurse? Telling schizophrenics to get real?’
‘Something like that, yes.’
We were both giggling now – funeral hysteria.
‘So, anyway, let’s get back to this Evil Dead thing,’ he said. ‘Talk me through that.’
‘Well, I found that the key is distraction, not stimulation,’ I tried to explain. ‘No tear-jerkers, which rules out a lot more than you may think, for obvious reasons. No documentaries or kids films ’cause they just remind you of too much. So, yeah, slasher-horror really is your best bet. The Evil Dead is the ultimate wake-movie.’
Joe tried to be serious for a second, then smiled. ‘You always did have all the best advice,’ he said.
He turned on his back, closed his eyes and let out this huge sigh. I was looking at the shape of his lips, the Cupid’s bow, the wideness of them, the way they always looked like he was about to say something amusing, trying to remember what it felt like to kiss him. Then remembering that I shouldn’t even be here.
‘You bought me that pen,’ he said suddenly. I’d forgotten I was still holding it.
‘Funny, wasn’t I?’ I said. ‘Such a sophisticated, witty sixteen-year-old.’
‘You were,’ he said, taking it and tipping it upside down.
‘No, I wasn’t.’
‘I thought you were – cute, complicated …’
I rolled my eyes. ‘Oh, weren’t we all?’
‘I’m not surprised that you work for the Mental Health Service – the sidelined in our society … You always liked the underdog.’
‘Me and you, too, then, hey?’
When I’d last seen Joe, three years ago, he’d been living with his girlfriend in Preston but seemed a bit lost, career-wise, working in a sports shop. In our brief email exchange during the last few days, he’d told me he was now teaching English to NEETs (Not in Education, Employment or Training) – kids who’d spent most of their lives skiving off school or inside, basically, and wanted to turn their lives around. He absolutely loved it, he said. The perfect job, if you took away the mounds of paperwork, which was exactly how I felt about my work.
‘I can’t say I’m surprised, either, Joe. All that energy had to go somewhere.’
‘We were a pair of little revolutionaries.’ He grinned.
‘Were we? I can’t remember. I just remember you used to say to me –’ I assumed the younger voice of Joe’s radical years – ‘it’s evolution, Robbie, not revolution.’
‘Did I? God, what a dick. I was so intense!’
‘Oh, Joe, you’re still intense.’
‘How would you know?’ He said, tapping my thigh, as if chastising me for not getting in touch. I ignored it.
‘Actually, you saying that really helped when things were grim,’ I said, seriously. ‘I sometimes say it to my clients.’
‘Really?’
‘Yeah, just to remind them that recovery … it takes time. Step by step. Rome wasn’t built in a day and all that.’
He smiled. He knew what I was getting at.
The room was growing dim, it was getting late, and I was here, having a heart-to-heart, the very thing I’d promised myself not to do. I stood up.
‘Look, I really should be going now,’ I said. ‘I’ll just go downstairs and say, “Hi” to your dad, okay?’
But Joe suddenly got up from the bed and went rooting in a drawer for something.
‘What are you doing?’ I asked.
‘Trying to make you stay.’
‘Joseph Sawyer,’ I said. ‘I wasn’t supposed to come in the first place!’
He turned around. He looked hurt.
‘But why?’
Why did he not get it?
‘Because,’ I sighed, exasperated. ‘Because … oh, God, it doesn’t matter.’ I’m really glad I did come.
He had something in his hand. He put it behind him and, walking backwards, picked up the bottle of JD off the table with his free hand and handed it to me. He always did have this way of making you do things. ‘Come on, drink up,’ he said. ‘This is going to take you right back.’
That’s what I’m worried about.
But then, there was a sound like someone loading a gun, a click, the whirr of a tape being rewound and then, the bluesy, achey riffs of Led Zeppelin’s ‘Since I’ve Been Loving You’ – we used to listen to this track, this album, all the time – and when I saw Joe’s face, the look in his eyes (well on his way to drunk, mainly), I understood that – even if I didn’t want to – Joe needed to. He needed to be anywhere but here.
We swayed – it’s one of those songs that make it impossible not to – but rather awkwardly, like the first self-conscious dancers on the floor at a wedding reception, and I suddenly felt old. It didn’t feel like it used to feel, and when we smiled at one another, it was because we both knew this. I took off my shoes and we danced, passing the bottle between us. It felt like undressing, like a layer of tension was being peeled back. Joe held both arms out, his eyes shimmering with tears.
‘Come here,’ he said. ‘Please? I need a hug.’
I wrapped both arms around his neck then; his suit jacket felt stiff and restrictive and so I took it off for him. We leaned our heads on each other’s shoulders and, as we danced, I could feel his whole body shudder. And I just held him like that, and let him cry as I stroked his hair. The song finished, I was still holding him. He looked up at me.
‘Do you want to go for a walk?’ He said. ‘I can’t stay here.’
We didn’t talk about where to go, we just went; it was like our feet remembered the old route and took us there: down the long, sloping lawn, through the front gate and out onto the path. I didn’t know what time it was, but everything was awash with a lilac hue and the tide was out, leaving sweeping, silver channels like liquid mercury. The air smelt like the inside of mussel shells. Were we drunk? I should hope so, the amount of Jack Daniel’s we’d put away. We were holding hands – it just felt like the right thing to do. We turned left at the gate and out of the cul-de-sac that wraps itself around the bottom of the vicarage. The houses get lower, the closer you get to the sea around here, so you have the big old houses like Joe’s and our old pink one, up on the hills, with a bottom tier of white bungalows petering out to the sea. And this is where we were now, walking – not entirely in a straight line – hand in hand, among the white underskirt of Kilterdale, with the lilac sky and the black shadows and the low houses with their big, glowing fly’s-eye windows; and I didn’t know whether it was because the houses were so low that the sky seemed so big, but it did; so big and empty, like everyone had deserted.
We passed Joe’s hip flask between us. We’d filled it with the remainder of the Jack Daniel’s and then sneaked into the kitchen and put some Coke in there, too, because we didn’t want complete amnesia, just a blurring of the edges, and I could tell the edges were already blurred because we were getting onto fundamentals.
‘So … relationships,’ said Joe. ‘You got some nice guy to look after you?’
‘We just ended, actually.’
‘Oh, shit. Sorry. Why?’ There was a pause, where I knew what Joe was going to say next. Such a mix of self-absorption and selflessness, I haven’t seen in anyone since. ‘Was he just not as good as me?’
‘No, he was just still married to another woman …’
‘Robyn King,’ he said, ‘a marriage-wrecker?’
‘Oh, no, he was separated. He had been for a long time. He was just eking out the longest, most painful divorce in the history of divorces, and I was his therapist. It was never going to work.’
‘There you go, you see – I said you always liked the underdog.’
‘I forgot how the only time you’re sarcastic is when you’re drunk.’
‘It is my mother’s funeral.’
‘Like that’s an excuse.’
We got to the stile that takes you over the fields to the other end of the village.
‘So, what about you?’ I asked. We were trapped in the stile, so were facing each other, our faces inches apart. ‘You were with a girl called Kate, last time I saw you. What happened? Not as good as me?’ I said grinning.
He’d been drinking from the flask again and he laughed, coughed.
Stop flirting, shut up.
‘Nice girl,’ he said, ‘but she had thick ankles and I just couldn’t get over it.
‘See, I told you she wasn’t as good as me,’ I said, flashing my dainty ankles (my body improves as it peters to the ends) and resolving, really, to stop the flirting. I was getting carried away.
We stayed sitting on the stile for a bit, passing the flask to and fro. Beyond the fields, were the cliffs, and beyond the cliffs, you could hear the sea.
‘You could be seventeen in this light,’ said Joe. He had his hand over mine, and all I could feel was that hand, as though that warm area of skin was all that existed.
‘Don’t say that,’ I said.
‘Kiss me,’ he said suddenly, and I laughed.
‘Joe, I can’t kiss you!’
‘Who cares? Why not?’
‘That’s why.’ Because you don’t care, I thought, because why would you? On a day like today?Whereas for me, I was thinking to myself as I looked at the lovely shape of his mouth, it’s not that simple, Robyn, and you know it.
He groaned. ‘Come on,’ he said, and we carried on walking over the fields. A pale disc moon was now intensifying in the sky. The poor old trees, after centuries of being blown mercilessly by North Sea gales, now leaned permanently over.
I leaned over, too.
‘What are you doing?’ said Joe.
