Secret Smile (20 page)

I was hysterical, I told myself. Mad. I so
badly wanted Troy not to have killed himself, so badly wanted not to have to
blame my parents and myself for his death, so wanted not to have to imagine the
despair that had led him to that moment that I was inventing gothic fantasies
instead.

A few drops of rain fell on me. I drained
my whisky and went back through the kitchen and into the living room. I hung
back by the door, unwilling to talk about Troy and not wanting to talk about
anything else. Kerry was standing with her arm through my father's. Her mascara
had smudged and there were red blotches on her neck. Across the room, Brendan
was on his own. Our eyes met. He looked away and his face crumpled. I suddenly
felt that he was staging this just for me, a private drama. Tears coursed down
his face, into his neck; he stuffed a fist into his mouth and doubled up as if
he were muffling a great howl.

It was Laura who went up to him and put a
hand on his shoulder. She just stood there like that while his bulky body
shook. After a while he stood up straighter, and she took away her hand. I saw
them talking. At one point they both looked over to me.

I turned away and went upstairs to find my
mother, who had disappeared from the gathering. She was sitting in Troy's old
room — Kerry and Brendan's room now, I supposed, for their bags were by the
door. She was sitting on his bed, plucking at the sheets with her fingers and
staring ahead into nothing. She looked tired. Her face was full of lines and pouches
that I hadn't seen before. Even her hair was lacklustre. I went and crouched
beside her and put a hand on her knee. She looked up and gave me a small nod of
acknowledgement.

'I thought I'd leave them to it,' she
said.

'It's fine.'

'I don't know what to do with myself,
really. Nowhere seems the right place to be.'

'I know what you mean.'

'Miranda?'

'Yes.'

'He was getting better. He was.'

'I know.'

I crouched there for a little longer, then
went back to the thinning crowd and to the whisky bottle.

Laura took me home because I'd drunk far
too much whisky to drive myself. She steered me upstairs to my flat and took
off my coat, then sat me on the sofa and pulled off my shoes. 'There,' she
said. 'Now: tea or coffee?'

'Shame to let the drink wear off' I said.
'Whisky?'

'I'll make coffee,' she said firmly. 'And
I'll run you a bath.'

'That's nice of you. You don't need to.
I'll be fine.'

'It's nothing.'

She filled the kettle with water and
plugged it in.

'We were going to share this flat,' I
said.

'I know. Do you want something to eat?'

'I've got a horrible taste in my mouth,' I
said. 'What did Brendan say, then?'

'Say?' She looked confused.

'You were talking with him. After he'd
done his great weeping act.'

'That's not fair, Miranda.'

'You don't think so?'

'He's heartbroken but doesn't think he can
show it in front of all of you. He has to be strong for the family.'

'That's what he said?'

'Yes.'

'Oh well, who cares?'

'He does,' she said. 'I know what you feel
about him, but he cares a lot. After all, you're the only family he's got. He
thought of Troy as his little brother.'

'You too,' I said, infinitely tired.

'What?'

'He's got you on his side too.'

'It's not a question of sides.'

'That's what he says too, but he's lying.
He's on one side and I'm on the other. Now more than ever. You can't be on both
sides at once, you know. And you can't be some fucking United Nations mediator.
You have to choose.' There was a pause. 'You've crossed over, haven't you?' I
could feel my speech thicken. My head was aching with the whisky and the
wretchedness.

'Miranda, you're my best friend. Don't say
things like that.'

'Sorry,' I said. But I couldn't let it go:
'You liked him, didn't you?'

'I felt sorry for him.'

She poured boiling water over the coffee
grounds and stirred vigorously. I stood up and fetched the whisky bottle from
the shelf.

'Look at that,' I said. 'How've I drunk
all of that since the day before yesterday?'

I was almost proud of myself. It was an
achievement, of a kind. I sloshed a generous measure into a dirty wine glass,
closed my eyes and took a gulp.

'You'll feel lousy tomorrow,' said Laura.

'One way or another,' I said.

'Do you want me to stay the night?'

'No. You've been lovely.'

'Are you going to work tomorrow?'

'Obviously. It's a working day.'

'I'll ring you in the evening, then.'

'You don't need to.'

'No, but I will'

'What would I do without you?'

I finished off the bottle. If I shut my
eyes, the room tipped sickeningly, so I kept them squinted open though the
lights were hurting my head. I padded into the bedroom and sat down on the bed.
Which had been Troy's bed for a bit. Although I'd changed the sheets, some of
his things were still there — his watch on the bedside table, his jacket
hanging from the hook on the door, his books scattered around the place. I
fancied I could still smell him. I picked up a book he'd been reading about
bread-making and held it against my chest.

'Oh dear,' I said out loud. My tongue was
thick in my mouth. 'Oh dear, Troy. What shall I do now?'

Later, about two in the morning, I
staggered out of bed and was sick, leaning over the toilet bowl and retching
until there was nothing left in my stomach to vomit. My eyes stung and my
throat hurt and my head throbbed, but I felt a bit better. I drank three beakers
of water and went back to bed. I couldn't get to sleep at once. Thoughts
swarmed in my head. I heard Troy's voice, his last words: 'See you later,
then.' He wouldn't see me, but I'd see him. All the time.

CHAPTER 23

If I'd felt bad in the middle of the
night, I felt unspeakably worse when I woke the next morning. I was going to
die and when I was dead I was going to be pickled and put in a large jar and
put on display with a label identifying me as the first person ever to die of a
hangover. It was hard to think because it hurt. It hurt to do anything.

At about half past nine I made an attempt
to get up and then lay down again. No hangover had ever been quite like this
one. I had the usual symptoms, in a more intense form: the parched leathery
tongue, the headache which felt as if small rodents were eating my brain from
the inside, the general feeling of being poisoned, a shivery creepy-crawly
sensation over my skin. Additional bits of my body seemed to be hurting. Even
my hair was sore. The particular innovation was that I still felt drunk, but it
was like an evil, stale parody of the previous night's drunkenness. All the
good bits — if there had been any good bits — were gone. But the floor-swaying
was still there. The room-revolving was present and correct. That was why I had
to lie down again, but even so it felt as if I were on a water bed. People
didn't die of hangovers, but they did die of alcoholic poisoning. Could it be
that? I remembered that I had a book about medical problems. There were a
couple of snags. The first was that I didn't have a maid who could get it for
me. The second was that I kept it with the cookbooks, so when I finally
staggered across my flat to get it, stomach heaving, I had to see things that made
me think of food. I tried not to think of food, but then the idea of a huge
trifle came into my mind and I could only eject that by thinking of the smell
of overcooked cabbage and then I thought of Troy and that was worse, the worst
of all.

I took the book back to bed. There was no
entry for alcoholic poisoning, but there was one for hangovers. The book
recommended me to drink plenty of water, to go for a brisk run 'even if you do
not feel like it'. If nauseous, and I felt very nauseous, I was to take
something called magnesium trisilicate. Right, I decided, I was going to be
positive. Previously I had wanted to curl up under the bedclothes and die, like
a wounded animal retreating into its hole. Now I was going to adopt the
opposite plan. I was going to attack the problem. I would not only get this
drug, but would also run to get it. And I would have a drink of water first.

Everything felt wrong. The water was too
late for my arid mouth. It seemed to run over its surfaces without being
absorbed. I could barely lift my legs to get my feet into my shorts. I pulled
the T-shirt over my head. It hurt my head. It hurt my arms. I tied the laces of
my shoes slowly, trying to think how to do it for the first time since I was
about six years old. I clutched a five-pound note in my hand and shuffled out
on to the pavement. The bright light, the cold air on my skin and in my lungs,
made me gasp. I don't know if it was making me better in any way, but there was
a new clarity. In a way it felt good to be hurting and I wondered if this were
a welcome continuation of last night. To be drunk, to ache, to be confused, to
be in pain, perhaps anything would be better than opening my eyes and looking
into the sun, truly facing up to what Troy had done to himself and done to us.

The chemist was only a couple of hundred
yards away. I asked the pharmacist, a very tall Sikh, for the magnesium
trisilicate. It had a sickly minty taste, but I sucked it desperately and
headed back for home in an approximation of a jog. I had a shower, put some
grown-up clothes on and lay on my bed to think. There was a metallic taste in
my mouth and when I swallowed it felt to me as if there were something bristly
stuck in my throat that wouldn't go down. My skin felt clammy. I felt sick but
I wasn't going to
be
sick.

There was no doubt about it. I was in
slightly less of a dreadful state. The day could now begin. What was the time?
I reached out to the bedside table for the watch, Troy's watch, that was lying
there. Quarter past ten. That was another thing. I knew why the watch was
there. Part of Troy's problem was that there was never any balance, any
compromise in his life, and for him even normal behaviour was a moral
challenge. He was either completely wired, wildly funny, incredibly enthusiastic,
or he was somnolent, slow, detached, often just fast asleep. Even in his good
times he would have big sleeps in the afternoon, like a small child or a cat.
He didn't just flop in a soft chair. He pulled the curtains, took his clothes
off, got into bed. It was like night time. When he was medicated he was almost
in a coma. He had been sleeping in my bed, and he had taken his clothes off and
put his watch on my bedside table. His clothes were on his dead body, but not
his watch. He may have forgotten. He was depressed, after all.

There was another thing. I closed my eyes
and made myself do it. I pictured my dear, lost Troy hanging from that beam.
The rope. It was easy to remember, shiny green, synthetic, rough. I remembered
the strands as I'd cut it through with the knife to bring him down. For the
first time I thought of suicide as a human activity that needed organizing. You
need to plan it, you need to obtain materials.

I was clear-headed now. I got up and felt
a wave of nausea and dizziness, but it passed quickly. I didn't have the time
to be ill. I had things to do. My flat was so small that there wasn't much to
search. I couldn't remember having seen that rope before, but I had to make
sure. Under the sink there was a bucket, some washing cloths, various bottles
of cleaning fluid. In the cupboard there was the vacuum cleaner, a broom and a
mop, a rolled-up rug, a shoebox containing screwdrivers, a hammer, nails,
screws, a couple of plugs. I looked on top shelves, behind the sofa, under my
bed, everywhere. There was no rope. It could be that he just found a length of
rope and used all of it. Or bought the length he needed and used all of it.
Or...

I phoned my mother. It was difficult not
to begin every sentence I spoke to my mother and father or sister by asking how
they were. We could spend the rest of our lives asking and thinking what to say
in return. I just asked if I could come round and she said, yes, that would be
good.

On the way, I thought of something else. A
few months earlier I'd been stuck in a tube train on the Piccadilly Line for
more than an hour. An announcement came over the tannoy apologizing to all
customers and informing us that there was a person under a train at the next
station. To which the obvious answer would be, well, tell him to get out from
under it so that we can all be on our way. But of course that is a euphemism
for throwing yourself in front of the train and lots of unimaginable things
happening to the person on their way to being underneath. I had a lot of time to
think about it and one of the things I thought about was: do you owe anything
to anyone when you kill yourself? If you throw yourself under a tube train, the
driver is only about three inches in front of you as you go under, with
whatever godawful scrapes and bumps and crunches that ensue. The tube driver
takes early retirement after a suicide, mostly. And what about all the
commuters who suffer half an hour of irritation? Do all the missed dental
appointments, toddlers left standing outside schools, the burned meals, do they
do some damage to your karma?