No, James took Fiona home that night because she had lost her keys and daren’t anger the warden at one o’clock in the morning. He gave her his bed, changing the sheets for her and setting a glass of water on the bedside table, and spent the night on the sofa, a crick developing in his neck.
She seemed to know immediately that he was not a threat. Women have a way, James believes, of knowing, of seeing him for who he truly is, and Fiona maintains to this day that she figured it out within the first five minutes of meeting him. Although Plymouth in the eighties was not the most diverse of places, James never thought to hide it from anyone. Why should he be ashamed of who he was? He accepted his friends’ ribbing with aplomb, giving back what they dealt to him, always with a smile. But for all their jokes, his friends always had his back. When he was attacked outside a pub in his early twenties, his friend Andrew smashed a glass into one of the men’s faces and ended up with a police caution. When a group of teenagers vandalised his car, Fiona helped him clean it, scrubbing at the words scrawled across the windscreen while singing along to Whitney Houston at the top of her voice.
He has to give this service his best. She deserves that, even if the deceased doesn’t. He knows what it is to be widowed, to be left behind.
James met Tom when he was two years into his career as a teacher. Tom was working as a library assistant at the university, and, when James asked for the latest George RR Martin novel, the grin on Tom’s face sent something shooting through him. He hadn’t believed in love at first sight, not until that day. Not until he met Tom.
They began to have lunch together every day, and walked to and from work together, their houses being not five minutes apart. He met Tom’s parents and Tom met his, his mother fussing about the meal for two weeks beforehand, panicking that Tom was a closet vegetarian. Tom moved in when James’s newly married flatmate moved out, and life was, for a time, peaceful. They spent Sundays with James’s parents, Tuesday evenings at the bingo with Tom’s mum, and Fridays at the pub with friends. They spent their spare time walking along the Barbican, cooking elaborate meals which often went wrong and ended in James flapping a tea towel at the smoke alarm while Tom ordered a pizza. They spent lazy evenings reading together on the sofa, legs entwined, forgotten cups of tea going cool at their elbows. Life was perfect, until everything was torn apart one cold, bright morning in 1992.
James remembers being woken by a hammering on the front door. He shot up in bed, a hand flying out to touch Tom’s shoulder, but his side of the bed was empty, the pillow still plump, the sheets cool. The pounding came again, and James flung the covers aside, wrapping himself in a dressing gown and shoving his feet into slippers before padding down the hall and opening the door with no real sense of urgency. Sometimes he wishes he hadn’t answered the door that morning, had stayed in bed, safe in his ignorance. Sometimes he wishes he had never woken up at all.
The officers delivered the news with sombre faces, hats tucked under their arms. Tom had been attacked after the football match he’d attended with friends the evening before. James had cheerfully waved him off, looking forward to an evening of finishing his jigsaw puzzle in front of the soaps, before a hot bubble bath and an early night. He was pronounced dead at the scene, the stab wound to his chest killing him instantly.
His vision blurs as the memories engulf him, almost thirty years of pain washing over him. He remembers clearly the journey to identify Tom’s body, the smell of antiseptic in the corridor, the coldness of the floor as he collapsed, his forehead pressed against the linoleum. He remembers the way Tom’s mother wailed as he held her, her body shaking as she sobbed out her grief. He remembers the tears in his own mother’s eyes, the way his father cleared his throat over and over again, his Adam’s apple bobbing up and down. And he remembers the funeral, the way the vicar skimmed over the reason for the attack, refusing to acknowledge James as Tom’s partner, his handshake at the end short and without warmth.
A few weeks later, James left his teaching job and began his celebrant training. With no faith in a god who could have allowed Tom to be taken from him, he turned away from religion and focused on the human element of death. Funerals are for the living, James knows, not the dead, and he has spent the past twenty-five years holding up the widowed, the grieving, the people left behind, absorbing their pain and steadying them as they said goodbye to their loved ones.
Looking down at his notes, James wonders if anyone will need a steadying hand tomorrow at the funeral of Richard Asquith, a man he has known for over thirty years, and has despised for almost the same length of time.
2
The Daughter
Water sprays the side of the ferry, the waves wild and full of fury, and I feel myself leaning into the wind, droplets splashing my hair and face. I close my eyes and taste the salt on my lips, and I think of him, the man I haven’t seen in over a decade. My father, whose funeral I am on my way to attend.
I remember the look in his eyes when Mum told him to leave, all those years ago. I was eleven, peering through the banisters as he lifted his suitcase and strode out of the front door without a backward glance. I remember the way she cried after, her face buried in her hands at the kitchen table, a photo of Saffy laid out before her.
‘Hasn’t he been punished enough?’ his wife, Fiona, said the last time we spoke on the phone, almost two years ago, her prim voice setting my teeth on edge. ‘You need to move on, Skye.’
But I can never move on. My sister is still missing, my sister who next year should turn thirty, our shared birthday tethering us together forever. Lost on the beach on an overcast day in June, my father’s back turned as he took a call from someone who was more important.
‘Take her out, will you? Skye needs to rest,’ Mum said to Dad, her voice low so I wouldn’t hear and get jealous, but all I wanted to do was sleep. I had tonsillitis, my mother bringing me chicken soup and ice lollies and reading to me, and Saffy had been restless, as she often was, desperate for me to play with her. I remember the hurt in her eyes when I snapped at her, and although my throat was raw, my whole body aching with fatigue, I reached out to her, clasping her hand in mine.
Find me a seashell, Saffy. Find me a pink one, with yellow stripes. Just like your bracelet. It will make me feel better.
She smiled then, her eyes lighting up. I’ll make you better, Skye.
After a muffled argument with Mum in the hallway, Dad bundled Saffy and Nala, our three-year-old beagle, into the car and drove down to Perranporth. My parents had moved from my mother’s native Scotland to where my father had grown up in Cornwall just before I was born, so he could set up his new business. We lived in a house he built, a house that was custom-made to his exact specifications, and he loved it, but I know Mum always felt anxious in Cornwall. Lonely, homesick.
The weather had forecast rain that day, but Saffy, unlike me, was never afraid to get muddy. She loved splashing in puddles or running through fields with Nala, and we often lost her in the forest, only to find her hidden in the branches, leaves in her hair. She was an escape artist, Mum used to say, always managing to get out of her cot as a toddler without help, wandering off in the supermarket in pursuit of another child or to steal from the pick ’n’ mix. You had to keep an eye on her, we all knew it, even me, just one year older than my little sister. But he didn’t keep his eye on her. He turned away, distracted by the call from his mistress, the woman he had been seeing for five years behind Mum’s back, with all those extended ‘business trips’ down to Cornwall. The secret family he kept not ten miles away in Newquay.