For all that it was annoying, there was also something reassuring about my sister nagging at me. Nobody else dared to. It was as if my parents still believed there was something very wrong at the heart of me, and that I must be treated with kid gloves. Mum laid out my washing, neatly folded, on the end of my bed and cooked me three meals a day, and when I caught her watching me she would smile, an awkward half smile, which covered everything we didn’t want to say to each other. Dad took me to my physio appointments and sat beside me on the sofa to watch television and didn’t even take the Mickey out of me. Treen was the only one who treated me like she always had.
“You know what I’m going to say, don’t you?”
I turned over onto my side, wincing.
“I do. And don’t.”
“Well, you know what Will would have said. You had a deal. You can’t back out of it.”
“Okay. That’s it, Treen. We’re done with this conversation.”
“Fine. Thom’s just coming out of the changing rooms. See you Friday!” she said, as if we had just been talking about music or where she was going on holiday, or soap.
And I was left staring at the ceiling.
You had a deal.
Yeah. And look how that turned out.
• • •
For all Treen moaned at me, in the weeks that had passed since I’d come home I had made some progress. I’d stopped using the cane, which had made me feel around eighty-nine years old, and which I had managed to leave behind in almost every place I’d visited since coming home. Most mornings I took Granddad for a walk around the park, at Mum’s request. The doctor had instructed him to take daily exercise but when she had followed him one day she had found he was simply walking to the corner shop to buy a bumper pack of pork rinds and then eating them on a slow walk home again.
We walked slowly, both of us with a limp, and neither of us with any real place to be.
Mum kept suggesting we do the grounds of the castle “for a change of scene,” but I ignored her, and as the gate shut behind us each morning Granddad nodded firmly in the direction of the park anyway. It wasn’t just because this way was shorter, or closer to the betting shop. I think he knew I didn’t want to go back there. I wasn’t ready. I wasn’t sure I would ever be ready.
We did two slow circuits of the duck pond, and sat on a bench in the watery spring sunshine and watched the toddlers and their parents feeding the fat ducks, and the teenagers smoking and yelling and whacking each other in the helpless combat of early courtship. We took a stroll over to the bookies so Granddad could lose three pounds on an each-way bet on a horse called Wag the Dog. Then as he crumpled up his betting slip and threw it in the bin, I said I’d buy him a jam doughnut from the supermarket.
“Oh fat,” he said, as we stood in the bakery section.
I frowned at him.
“Oh fat,” he said, pointing at our doughnuts, and laughed.
“Oh. Yup. That’s what we’ll tell Mum. Low-fat doughnuts.”
Mum said his new medication made him giggly. I had decided there were worse things that could happen to you.
Granddad was still giggling at his own joke as we queued up at the checkout. I kept my head down, digging in my pockets for change. I was thinking about whether I would help Dad with the garden that weekend. So it took a minute to grasp what was being said in whispers behind me.
“It’s the guilt. They say she tried to jump off a block of flats.”
“Well, you would, wouldn’t you? I know I couldn’t live with myself.”
“I’m surprised she can show her face around here.”
I stood very still, my hands rigid in my pockets.
“You know poor Josie Clark is still mortified. She takes confession every single week and you know that woman is as blameless as a line of clean laundry.”
Granddad was pointing at the doughnuts and mouthing oh fat at the checkout girl.
She smiled politely. “Eighty-six pence, please.”
“The Traynors have never been the same.”
“Well, it destroyed them, didn’t it?”
“Eighty-six pence, please.”
It took me several seconds to register that the checkout girl was looking at me, waiting. I pulled a handful of coins from my pocket. My fingers fumbled as I tried to sort through them.
“You’d think Josie wouldn’t dare leave her in sole charge of her granddaddy, wouldn’t you?”
“You don’t think she’d—”
“Well, you don’t know. She’s done it the once, after all . . .”
My cheeks were flaming. My money clattered onto the counter. Granddad was still repeating, “Oh fat. Oh fat.” at the bemused checkout girl, waiting for her to get the joke. I pulled at his sleeve. “Come on, Granddad, we have to go.”
“Oh fat,” he insisted, again.
“Right.” She said, and smiled kindly.
“Please, Granddad.” I felt hot and dizzy, like I might faint. They might have still been talking but my ears were ringing so loudly I couldn’t tell.
“’Bye-bye,” he said.
“’Bye then,” said the girl.
“Nice,” said Granddad as we emerged into the sunlight. Then, looking at me: “Why you crying?”
• • •
So here is the thing about being involved in a catastrophic, life-changing event. You think it’s just the catastrophic, life-changing event that you’re going to have to deal with: the flashbacks, the sleepless nights, the endless running back over events in your head, asking yourself if you had done the right thing, said the things you should have said, whether you could have changed things had you done them even a degree differently.
My mother had told me that being there with Will at the end would affect the rest of my life, and I had thought she meant me, psychologically. I thought she meant the guilt I would have to learn to get over, the grief, the insomnia, the weird, inappropriate bursts of anger, the endless internal dialogue with someone who wasn’t even there. But what I now discovered is that it wasn’t just me. I had become that person and in a digital age I would be that person forever. It was in that faint swivel of heads when you walked through a busy street—“Is that—?” Even if I managed to wipe the whole thing from my memory, I would never be allowed to disassociate from Will’s death. My name would always be tied to his. People would form judgments about me based on the most cursory knowledge—or sometimes no knowledge at all—and there was nothing I could do about it.
I cut my hair into a bob. I changed the way I dressed, bagged up everything that had ever made me distinctive, and stuffed those bags into the back of my wardrobe. I adopted Treena’s uniform of jeans and a generic tee. Now, when I read newspaper stories about the bank teller who had stolen a fortune, the woman who had killed her child, the sibling who had disappeared, I found myself not shuddering in horror, as I once might have, but wondering instead at the part of the story that hadn’t made it into print.