‘I never thought it would be like this,’ she says. ‘Not when we’d been planning for all these things. Exams, university . . . And it’s not as if your dad’s around. He can’t even be bothered to come and see us.’
It feels weird her mentioning Dad after all this time. After he fucked off, two years ago, she never really spoke about him. She doesn’t like us talking about him, either. It’s like he never existed. He kept in touch at first, but then he just stopped, and we got used to him not being around.
Mum doesn’t look at me as she knocks back her drink. She’s aged so much in the past four days that she doesn’t even look like the same person any more. It was as if Al was the only thing keeping her alive. She’s so thin, and her dark hair is mostly grey, and I dunno how I’ve not noticed that before. Plus, all these lines have appeared down the middle of her forehead and by the corners of her eyes, like she’s turned into one of Al’s drawings that’s been scrunched up and folded loads of times.
She jabs a button on the old radio on the kitchen worktop. The house has seemed so quiet since it happened that maybe she just can’t take the silence any more. Al was always going on, talking about all his facts and stuff, while Phoebe would play noisily and Saul would blast music from his room. And there’d always be some kinda argument or row between us, but not any more. Mum turns the knob, flicking through R & B songs and some country music and old people love songs, till some voices stretch out from one of those boring stations that never has any music, just posh people going on about stuff.
I listen as the voices crackle into tune and the soft fuzzing in the background stops. Then I hear some man over the static. He’s droning on the way the teachers do at school when we have to sit through Mass or when we’ve all been playing up. I imagine him living in one of them big houses near to where all the United players are. Grey hair and loads of money, wearing a dead shit cardigan.
‘Well, what we need is early intervention, Frank,’ he says. ‘It’s because we’re not talking to young people soon enough that these things happen. There’s so much stress for them these days: exams, social-media pressures. You know how it is. Boys especially need to know that it’s not weak to talk about their feelings. You are allowed to do it. No one’s judging you.’
He laughs, all annoying and fake. I bet he only buys the dead expensive range at the supermarket, and has a proper lit car.
‘Suicide,’ he continues, ‘is one of the biggest killers of young men, particularly between the ages of fifteen and twenty-nine. If only there was something we could do . . . if only people would become aware . . . learn what to look out for. That’s what we need to do. We need to educate people about the warning signs. Signs that could prevent someone from—’
My mum slams the radio off, hitting the button hard.
‘What does he know?’ she shouts. ‘With his facts and figures and studies. He doesn’t know what it’s like. There were no signs. Nothing.’ She rests her hands on the worktop and shakes her head. ‘He doesn’t know how . . . sudden it is. How the last thing Al said to me was something so . . . normal. “See you after school.” ’ She pauses. ‘He doesn’t know how one minute you can feel like you know everything about your own child and the next you realize you knew nothing.’
She breathes out slowly, closing her eyes, and tilting her head towards the ceiling, like she’s trying to make sense of it all. ‘We’d planned a day,’ she says. ‘To go down to Cambridge, look round the campus. Al had booked all the tickets. Why would he do that if . . . ?’
I go over and wrap my arms round her. I can’t remember the last time we hugged and I’m half expecting her to push me away, but she hugs me back. Proper tightly.
‘Please, Nate,’ she says, and she turns to look me. ‘You have to promise to talk to me. I can’t lose another child.’
I nod.
She touches the side of my face with her hand. ‘You’re a good lad,’ she says.
My chest tightens and I feel bad for saying all those things, for even thinking them in the first place. Cause maybe she does love me just as much as Al. Maybe it was me always doing the wrong thing, or pissing about. She’s always been there for all of us, working two jobs, sometimes three, so that we could go on school trips, or get new trainers. So that we wouldn’t have to go without.
She straightens herself up and lets go of me.
‘I’m gonna call your Aunt Maureen,’ she says. ‘But I do think it’ll help for you to do something. Go back to school. Even if it’s only for half a day at first.’
I nod again and Mum leaves the kitchen. I stand there alone, staring at the painted tiles and shiny surfaces. At the empty kitchen table and the metal grate that Saul fixed over our back door cause of the amount of times that we’d been broken in to. Even tho everything looks the same, without Al it feels so different. Empty.
I think back to two weeks ago, standing in this spot while Al was looking in the fridge, holding open the door. I can almost hear him say: ‘Do you know that it’s safe to eat mould? They’ve done all these studies and it never did anyone any harm. That’s what medicine’s made out of anyway. So it’s all in your mind. All of it. You can eat it, but you just can’t think about eating it. You’ve got to trick yourself, that’s all.’
For a moment, it’s like none of this has happened. I ain’t someone who’s trying to keep hold of all these thoughts and feelings that don’t make sense. I’m just Nate and my brother’s there.
Alive.
Breathing.
Happy.
When things got tough, I used to think about vanishing. Disappearing. How it would feel . . . how maybe it would solve everything. I’d go and sit on this bench in the middle of Civic, between Iceland and Costa, and I’d stay there for hours, watching all these people go by, and think about Atlantis. How a whole city could be swallowed up without a trace. Because, if an entire city can just disappear, then surely someone from Benchill could, too.
The memorial page had only been up for a couple of days, but it already had 657 likes which was a lot. The comments started to come through straight away. At first, I just sat there, hunched over on my bedroom floor, with my back pressed against the radiator, watching all these posts appear. It made me feel good, seeing all these people writing nice things about Al. I spent the first few hours just liking everything, or pressing the love reaction, or replying to comments. Then I started inviting more people to like the page. Everyone I could think of from school or around Wythenshawe.
Maybe that was a stupid thing to do, but I just wanted Al to be remembered, and the more likes the better. I guess I wanted to make sure that he wouldn’t disappear, or fade . . . That’s the saddest thing. People die, then eventually they’re just forgotten about.
But today it’s all got a bit too much. Every time I look at my phone, there’s another notification and I can feel myself starting to get pissed off. Not cos of the notifications, but cos there’s no need for Al to be dead. For him to think that life was one of those things you could just take for granted and decide to throw away. I’m upset, yeah, but I’m also proper fucking angry.