I laugh.
‘I think you will go viral, and get sacked.’
‘Yeah, you’re probably right.’
Missed Call From Ed Cooper appears on the screen. The phone starts flashing with him trying to ring me again. Oh, mate, seriously. Leave me alone.
A text pops up. I slide the bar to open it.
If you’re there, I need you to answer. It’s not about last night and it’s urgent.
‘It’s not about last night’ is strange, and a bit of a mask slip. Ed’s tacitly admitting he knows I’d avoid him on that topic?
It immediately rings again and this time, startled as much as anything, I answer.
‘Hi,’ I say. ‘This best be—’
‘Are you at work?’ Ed interrupts, without a hello. He’s using his teacher voice. A snake uncoils in my stomach. Has he seen our texts about Hester? There are few more unpleasant sensations than being asked to defend your own words where your sole defence is: I didn’t think you’d find out about them.
‘Yes?’
‘Can you go somewhere private?’
‘What? Why?’
‘Can you go outside or to the loo or something, so there’s not lots of people nearby? Somewhere you’re on your own. Take your bag and coat with you. Please trust me, just do it.’
I glance up at my colleagues and both of them are bored enough to already be listening. Funny how the staccato exchange of an abnormal conversation is immediately detectable, despite them only having my side of it.
I’m fully freaked out at why on earth Ed needs me to have my stuff – is he going to drive by and bundle me into an unmarked van?
‘OK, hang on.’ I push my arms into my coat discreetly while keeping the phone clamped between ear and shoulder, gather my bag, stamp up the stairs and make my way out into the cold fresh air. The office is on a quiet side street, opposite a car park, and there’s no one around during daytime, except the occasional parcel delivery man.
‘What is it?’ I say.
‘Are you outside?’
‘Yes. You’re scaring me, what’s this about?’
There’s a pause, a windy whoosh of the air around me as I strain to hear any noise from the handset.
‘Ed? Are you there?’ I say again. ‘Fucks sake, say something?’ I’m shaky.
‘… I’m here.’
Somehow, I know this is momentous, and that these are the last seconds of normality before a bomb goes off. I couldn’t possibly say what it is, but I know it’s ticking.
‘I’ve got something … something absolutely terrible to tell you and I don’t know how to say it.’
His voice isn’t normal. It’s a deep pitch and yet wavering and it makes me so scared I could be sick, and that’s nothing to do with the units in a lavender Martini still working their way through my system. The adrenaline’s fixed the hangover, in fact.
‘Tell me!’
My body, and time, stands perfectly still. I bargain: is it the wedding, he’s called it off? I know it isn’t this. I know it’s something profoundly bad and my mind has begun spinning a roulette wheel of options but not stopped on an answer yet.
‘Fuck, OK. I’m going to say it because I don’t think there’s a good way. Susie’s dead, a car hit her last night I am so so sorry.’
He says this on one breath and I am, for a second, stunned as if a bolt gun has been applied to my temple. I start shivering, shivering so hard I could be in a meat locker.
I’m furious with him. This is vile. You don’t go round scaring people, making shit up that’s this bad, it’s, it’s—
‘Why would you say that? Why would you say something like that? That’s a fucking horrible thing to say, Ed!’ I half-shout. ‘She isn’t, you know she isn’t!’
‘Eve, she is, I’m so, so sorry. Oh, God.’ I can hear that he’s crying, wheezing on the in-breath.
‘No she’s not! She was only with us a few hours ago! Why are you doing this? This is fucked up!’
I realise after speaking that I have no oxygen left. I am suddenly unable to manage talking and breathing at the same time. I suck in air heavily, as if it’s through a straw. My knees may buckle. I lean against the wall for support.
‘She was walking to her house and a driver veered off on the pavement and hit her. She died shortly after they got her to the hospital.’
Information that I, on one level, know must be true, registers as completely false. Thirty-four-year-olds don’t die overnight like this, after pub quizzes. Without warning.
It’s a level of cognitive dissonance that could make me faint. I’m going to faint. I must still be drunk, or this is a hallucination. I slide down the wall and crouch on the pavement, bag next to me, squatting.
‘Are you alright?’ Ed says. ‘I mean, no you’re not alright,’ he gabbles. ‘Is there anywhere to sit down?’
‘I’m sat down,’ I snap. ‘She texted me! This can’t be true. This is a mistake … I have the text here.’ (That I can’t read to you.)
‘When did she text you?’
‘Not long after we left the pub … half eleven?’
‘It happened just after midnight.’
My focus on the grimy ground swoops in and then out, in a way that suggests an imminent blacking out.
I put my hand on a wall to steady myself, and wonder why I’ve never noticed so much about walls before – the heat from the morning sun still in the brick, the rough, porous texture of it against my palm. The way the grainy mortar squeezes out like buttercream in cake.
‘I need you to come to the hospital and meet me. I’ll be waiting outside the entrance of A&E at Queen’s Med. Can you get a taxi?’
‘Yes,’ I say, because this is what I’m supposed to say. I have no idea what I can and can’t do.
‘Eve, this may sound stupid, but I don’t care. Walk to the car carefully, sit down if you feel light-headed, and look both ways crossing the road. You’ve had a huge shock. I want you to get here safely.’
‘OK.’
‘I’m not losing you too.’
The first hot tears leak from my eyes. My chest contracts and I can’t respond. He hasn’t lost Susie, we haven’t lost her?
‘Call me again if you need to. I’m going to wait here until you arrive,’ Ed says.
‘Yes,’ I squeak, and I drag at my face with my sleeve.
I end the call and stare at the gutter, a crisp packet blowing along it in a light breeze. I can hear the electronic dinging of a car reversing in the next street, a song on the radio trickling from its wound-down window. I look up at the dirty paint-water grey of the cloudy sky.
Every single thing about this scene is humdrum, and yet I’ve been plunged into a dystopian science fiction. They’ve used the sets from my usual life.
How can all these people be living, how can everything be carrying on as usual, if Susie is dead?
She can’t be dead. Susie, dead? The single syllable is like a bullet, or an explosion. A profanity. The very idea is obscene, impossible, gruesomely ugly.
Reality has slipped ahead of me when I wasn’t concentrating, but I feel certain I can claw it back. If I feel strongly enough that this hasn’t happened, I can pull her back to me. This is a mistake. It has to be. But it needs my immediate attention to sort it out. I surprise myself with the strength of this conviction.