Araminta doesn’t turn to look back at me once as we go up to the rooms, just leads the way with an irritated energy and assumes we are following.
And they are ‘rooms’, like something you’d expect to find if you took an academic residency in the oldest university in the country, or the matron’s job at an expensive, but ancient, private school. It’s a long way from the ‘apartment’ described by the solicitor. ‘Apartment’ implies modern and well-proportioned, airy and clean. This place hasn’t been lived in for years, unless you count spiders and woodlice and earwigs. The solicitor failed to say that the wallpaper was peeling in the corners and the windows grey with years of winter rain and summer dust. She didn’t mention the bathroom: a chipped enamel bath with taps white with limescale and – next door to that – a loo with a cistern up above it and a long rusty chain to pull to flush it. The solicitor forgot to say that the only thing that marks our rooms out as separate to the rest of the building is a green baize door that doesn’t quite shut. Most of all, she kept the absence of a kitchen right out of every single piece of correspondence.
‘There isn’t a kitchen, Mrs Buchan,’ I say as Araminta goes to leave, her whirlwind tour completed.
‘It’s “Miss”,’ she says. ‘But, as I said, you may call me Araminta. And we do have a kitchen, it’s downstairs. Do you need it tonight?’
I thought about the burger we’d had at the Services when Leo felt sick, remembered the crisps, apples, and chocolate biscuits in the car. ‘I’m sure we’ll be all right for tonight.’
‘You might, Cate,’ Phil says, ‘but we won’t. We’ve got at least ten boxes marked “kitchen”.’
‘The kitchen is fully stocked. There will be very little you could need that you won’t find down there already.’ Araminta stands in the hallway. ‘And there is no spare cupboard space.’
I realise that we can’t stay here, this was a mistake and this place isn’t for us. A second later, I remember that we have absolutely nowhere else to go.
*
It is late by the time Frank, Phil, and the removal man whose name I could never quite catch have carried all the boxes upstairs.
They put Leo’s room together first to try and bring some semblance of order. Now they’ve finished, I’m relieved that we have this oasis of our past to hide in. Leo’s room looks much as it always did. Frank even helped him get some posters on the wall until Phil and the other man realised he wasn’t helping them carry boxes up three flights of stairs.
I’ve convinced Leo that a bedroom picnic is exciting and we’re sitting on his bed with apples and chocolate biscuits pretending, like we did when he was little, that the bed is a boat and all around us is water. He still thinks this will be an adventure.
I lie back on his pillows and listen to the empty house. I imagine that I’m in London, that I can hear the Pearsons next door – their television always too loud for us but not quite high enough for them to hear. Or Delores and Alfie upstairs, art students that Leo has counted amongst his best friends for the last couple of years. Instead, there’s us: Leo and me.
I don’t know where Araminta went. She said a very firm goodnight and told me that she’d be back at 9 a.m. to show me how things work and where the kitchen is. I sip warm water from a plastic bottle we had in the car and think about when I lived in a city, when I could get a mocha chai latte with almond milk at midnight if I ever felt like it; I never did, but that doesn’t stop me adding the rural isolation to my list of woes.
Leo is scrolling through music on his iPad, displaying an impressive line in choices for someone whose literacy skills aren’t that hot. He puts his big headphones on and lies back on the pillow. Every now and then he bursts into song. Leo inherited his father’s voice. If he’d had mine he might have been able to roughly carry a tune, maybe even do a reasonable karaoke. Instead he sings like Richard, like a cinder under a door, but that doesn’t harm his love of singing loudly and often.
The music makes Leo smile, his fingers tap out a rhythm on the duvet and his feet jiggle. I envy him his ease and his confidence. Leo feels like this because he has me, because he has every trust in me. I don’t have anyone to lean on right now, unless you count Simon – inexorably linked to us by shared history and by the fact that he’s Leo’s godfather – but he’s 12,000 miles away researching fish that walk along the bottom of the sea.
I leave Leo to it and go into my own room, before he can see the tears that are welling up in my eyes. I lie back on the bed and breathe deeply. The mattress is solid and lumpy: we are not going to get on well. With each breath I take in more of the musty smell, the creased old curtains, I become more and more aware of the utter hopelessness of our surroundings. I think I had visions of moulded ceilings, patterns of white plaster edging every room. Instead, this low ceiling is cracked at the edges, with a tiny gap all the way round for insects to come and go through. A spider clings to a dusty web in the off-white corner as if to prove to me that he was here first.
I pick up my phone – I just want to share my wretchedness, my deflating hopes as they ebb into the threadbare old rug. I scroll through my recent calls, through my friend list. The trouble with being a teacher for so long is that all my friends are teachers too. They have escaped to warmer climes, as I used to, on the first day of the holidays and – apart from texts and postcards – none of them will really be in touch again until the grind of the September term starts anew. It’s going to be a long summer.
Simon and I signed up for an online grieving course, after the first months of incredulity had worn off – when it had been long enough for me to realise I’d never love anyone as much as I’d loved Richard, and for Simon to learn that you only have one lifelong best friend. Some of our other old friends find it hard to talk about suicide: they’re embarrassed and sorry for me in equal measure. Others can’t deal with my anger. Simon knows exactly what I’m going through: the sadness, the regret, the pulsing guilt that has pounded in my ears every day for the last four years. And the utter negativity of helpless powerless fury. Simon knows first-hand that people are able to support you in sadness, but not so comfortable with despair.
*
There was never a moment where Simon wasn’t Richard’s best friend, wasn’t utterly devoted to him – even when things became so complicated, when those relationships were blurred and stretched and hard to focus on.
My first problem when I met Richard wasn’t how to finish with Simon but how to tell Richard why I’d done it. I let Simon down gently and without too much anguish, then spent two nights tossing and turning, wide awake: nights that would have been far less troubled had Richard and I had mobile phones or emails.
On the third day, I slunk into work for an afternoon shift, exhausted and tense. I was working in the uni bar: the floor was sticky with spilt beer and the customers were mostly a nightmare, but it was near my halls and it fitted round my course.
I’d had my back to the bar when Richard approached and I heard his voice before I saw him.
‘Si said I’d find you here.’
I blushed to the roots of my hair. Warm lager splashed onto my hand as I turned. My hand was shaking so much I had to put the plastic cup down on the bar. My throat was dry and all my words lost somewhere deep in my belly.