Secret Smile (18 page)

I stopped at the bottom of the road on my
way back to pick up a pack of streaky bacon and some white bread. In the flat,
no one was stirring yet, so I had a quick shower and pulled on trousers and a
jersey that was old and warm and raspberry pink. I put on the kettle for coffee
and started to grill the bacon. Laura's door opened and her head poked round.
She looked half-asleep still, like a young girl, with mussed hair and rosy
cheeks. She sniffed the air and murmured something unintelligible.

'Coffee and bacon sandwiches,' I said. 'Do
you want it in bed?'

'It's Monday morning!'

'I thought we should start the week well.'

'How long have you been up?'

'An hour or so. I went running.'

'Why are you so cheerful all of a sudden?'

'I'm taking my life in hand,' I said.
'This is the new me.'

'God,' she said, and withdrew her head. A
moment later she had joined me in the kitchen, wrapped in a thick dressing
gown.

She sat at the kitchen table and watched
as I put the rashers between thick slices of bread, and boiled milk for the
coffee. She nibbled at her sandwich cautiously. I chomped into mine.

'What are you up to today?' she asked.

I slurped at my coffee. Warmth was
spreading through me.

'I had an idea in the night. I'm going to
ring round the people who I know are going to be out of the country for a bit.
There are quite a few because our customers often want us to do work for them
while they're not there. I'll ask if they want a responsible couple to housesit
for them. There's at least one family with loads of pets that someone would
have to feed twice a day anyway. Maybe they'd be glad of Kerry and Brendan
staying. I'm sure I can find someone like that — it's much better than looking
in the classifieds. So...' I poured myself another cup of coffee and topped it
up with hot milk, then took another sandwich. 'I'm going to find them somewhere
else to live because they're obviously not going to do it themselves, are they?
And then Troy can be with me like we'd planned. Then I'm going to the
Reclamation Centre with Bill and then I'm going to do my accounts and then I'll
go to my flat and collect a few things and tell them when they've got to be out
by. There.'

'I feel tired just thinking about it.'

'So I'll be out of your hair soon.'

'I like you being here.'

'You've been fabulous, but I feel in the
way. I want to leave before you're wishing me gone.'

'Shall I cook us supper?'

'I'll buy a takeaway,' I said. 'Curry and
beer.'

Laura left for work and I cleared up
breakfast, put a clothes' wash on and vacuumed the living room. I promised
myself that I'd buy her a big present when I left.

I went to Bill's office, just a few
hundred metres from his house, and started making phone calls. The family with
pets had already arranged for a friend to housesit. The young woman who lived
in Shoreditch didn't really want someone she didn't know living in her flat.
The couple with the beautiful conservatory had changed their plans and weren't leaving
for several months. But the two men with a small house on London Fields were
interested. They'd call me back when they'd talked it through.

I started on the accounts while I was
waiting. It didn't take long before the phone rang. They were going to America
in eight days' time for three months, maybe for longer if everything went well.
They hadn't thought of getting someone in, but as it came through a personal
recommendation, and as long as the new kitchen was still done while they were
away, and as long as Kerry and Brendan paid some rent, kept the house clean and
watered the date palm and the orange tree that were in the bathroom, then that
would be fine.

'Eight days?' I said.

'Right.'

Their house was lovely, far more spacious
than my flat, and overlooking a park. It had a circular bath and deep-pile
carpets, and when we'd installed their kitchen it would have a stainless-steel
hob and quarry tiles and a large sunroof. There could be nothing that Brendan
could find to object to, surely. In eight days I could be back in my flat. I'd
paint my bedroom wall yellow and change all the furniture around. I'd clean
windows and throw things out.

'That's great,' I said. 'Really, really
great. You've no idea.'

I called Troy on my mobile and told him. I
could hear him smile.

I arrived at my flat a bit early. There
was a light on in one of the windows, though I could see no sign of Kerry's
car. I inserted the key in the lock, fumbling in the darkness, and pushed open
the door. If no one was there, that would be a relief. If they were in, I could
tell them about the house in London Fields and try to talk to Kerry. Yesterday
I had felt that she would never forgive me, but today it looked different to
me. Nothing had happened, except inside me.

I went up the stairs and there was a smell
that made me mutter crossly to myself because it was bad enough them forcing me
out of my own home, but the least they could do was keep it clean. Then I
pushed open the living-room door. It banged against something that clattered out
of the way as I pushed harder.

What did I see? What did I feel? I don't
know, really. I never will know. It's jumbled up together in a foul twist of
memory that I'll never lose.

Scuff-toed boots that I'd seen hundreds of
times before, but a foot above the floor, and then his canvas trousers, stained
at the knee, and a buckled belt around the waist. A smell of shit. A chair on
its side. Fear a thick eel in my throat. I couldn't look up. I had to look up.
His face above me, tilted to one side, his mouth slightly open. I could see the
tip of his tongue. Blue around his lips. His eyes were open, staring. I saw the
rope that he was hanging from.

Maybe he was still alive. Oh God, maybe he
was; please, please, please. I righted the chair and clambered on to it, half
falling over, and there I was pressed up against his body, trying to hold him
up to relieve the pressure of the noose on his neck and trying to undo the
knot. Fingers trembling too much. His hair against my cheek. His cold forehead.
The slump of his body. But people can be alive when they look dead, you read
about it, bringing them back to life when all hope is gone. But I couldn't undo
the knot and he was so heavy and smelt of death already. Shit and death, and
his flesh was cold.

I jumped down from the chair, leaving his
body swaying there, and raced to the kitchen. The bread knife was in the sink,
and I grabbed it and ran back to Troy. Standing on tiptoe on the chair I began
sawing at the cord while still trying to hold his body. Suddenly he was free and
we fell on to the floor together and his arms were over my body in a ghastly
embrace.

I pushed him off me and hurled myself
towards the phone. Jabbed the buttons.

'Help,' I said. 'Help. He's hung himself.
Please come and help. Please. What shall I do?'

The voice at the other end of the phone
was quite calm. It asked questions and I gabbled answers, and all the time Troy
lay an arm's length away and I kept saying, 'But what shall I do, what shall I
do?'

'The emergency services will be with you
as soon as possible,' said the voice.

'Shall I give him the kiss of life? Shall
I pump his chest? Tell me what to do.'

I looked at Troy while I was saying it.
His skin was chalky white, except where it was blue around the lips. The tip of
his tongue protruded. The eyes were open and sightless. The noose around his
neck was slack now, but there was dark bruising where it had been. My little
brother.

'Hurry,' I said in a whisper. 'Hurry up.'

I put the phone down and crawled across to
where he lay. I put his head in my lap and stroked the hair off his forehead. I
leaned down and kissed him on his cheeks, and on his mouth. 1 picked up his
hand and cradled it between both my own. I did up the middle button of his
shirt, which had come undone. In a minute I would pick up the phone and call my
parents. How do you say: your son is dead. I shut my eyes for a moment,
drenched with the horror of it.

His sweater was draped over the back of
the sofa. There was a book on the table, face down. The clock ticked on the
wall. I looked at it: twenty-five past six. If you could turn the clock back
through the minutes and the hours until it was before Troy had stood on that
chair with the noose round his neck and then kicked off, into death. If I'd
arrived before, left my cheese and pickle roll and my accounts and my loitering
in the warm office, and driven here instead. I ran my fingers through his hair.
Nothing would ever be all right again.

The doorbell rang and I laid Troy's head
gently back on the carpet and went to open it. While they were clustered round
Troy, I picked up the phone.

CHAPTER 21

Everything was disjointed, skewed, in a
strange light, a foreign language. My flat didn't feel like my own flat any
more. It was like being out in the street when there has been an accident.
People were bustling in and out who had nothing to do with me. There were three
people in green overalls, who at first were very urgent and quick and shouting instructions,
and then suddenly were slow and quiet because, after all, there was nothing to
be urgent about any more because we were all too late. I saw a policeman and a
policewoman. They must have arrived quickly. I looked at my watch, but I
couldn't make out the time properly, as if the numbers were far away and in the
wrong order. Someone handed me a mug of something hot and I sipped at it and
burnt my lips. It felt good. I wanted it to hurt. I wanted it to make me feel
something, to wake me out of this numbness. I'd talked to my mother on the
phone. That had been one of the first things I'd done. Initially I'd thought of
trying to break it to her gradually. It felt like the right thing to do. I'd
wanted to say something like, 'Troy is seriously ill. Very seriously ill.' I
could have made it easier for her, except that I couldn't. He was too cold and
dead, his eyes open. So I couldn't say anything to her except that Troy was
dead and that maybe she should come, but that they didn't need to because I could
deal with things. I heard a gasp and then some fumbling attempts at questions.
'Dead?' 'Are you sure?' And then just a sort of moan. She started to say
something about how she had thought Troy was better and I think I cut her short
because I couldn't concentrate on what she was saying.

There was a hand on my arm, a female face
looking into mine. She was a police officer, younger than me, pale-faced,
purple spots like a rash on her cheekbones. Was I all right? I nodded. She
wanted details. Troy's name. Age. My name. I started to get angry. How could
they ask stupid questions at a time like this? Then I stopped getting angry. I
realized that these were the questions that needed to be asked. Suddenly I saw
the scene from her point of view. This was what she did for a living. She was
called to events like this, one after another. The people in the green uniforms
as well. They dealt with them and went home and watched TV. The policewoman was
probably specially trained to deal with people like me. When she looked at me,
she saw me as just one of a series of people like me that she had to deal with,
people who weren't used to this. There had probably been someone a bit like me
yesterday or the day before, and there would probably be someone a bit like me
tomorrow or the day after. She would look at me and wonder whether I was the
sort to make trouble. Some people would be difficult, some would cry, some
would just be numb and unable to talk, some would become manic, a few might
turn violent. Which would I be?

There would be so much to organize, I
thought. Forms to fill out, envelopes to lick, people to be informed. At that
moment it hit me, like a warm, wet wave that ran through every cell. I had to
open my mouth wide and gasp, as if the air in my flat were suddenly hard to
breathe. My head felt light and I started to sway, and the woman's face
appeared in front of me.

'Are you all right, Miranda?' she said.
She took the mug out of my hand. Some of it had already splashed on to my
trousers. It had stung and felt hot, but now it was cold. 'Are you all right?
Are you going to faint?'

All I said was 'I'm fine' because I
couldn't say what I really felt: the realization, like a hot, wet wave, that
this was the end of Troy's story. My head was buzzing with memories of Troy. A
little boy on a beach standing on a sandcastle, the tide washing around it.
Running into a fence in the playground at primary school and losing one of his
front teeth. The way he bit his lip when he was hunched over a drawing. When he
used to get the giggles and roll around with them on the floor as if he were
possessed. The other times, more common, when he went dark like bad weather and
we couldn't reach him. When he was buzzing with ideas and it was as if he
couldn't get them out fast enough, his eyes glowing with them. His very
delicate long, white fingers and his large eyes, almost too big for his face.
There were all those conversations about him when he wasn't there, the Troy
problem. It was one of the main things I remember about growing up, the pained
expression on my mother's face when she looked at him. What to do about Troy?
They had tried so many things. They had taken him to a therapist and to the
doctor. They had tried leaving him alone, encouraging him, warning him,
shouting at him, crying, behaving as if everything were normal. Thousands of
memories, fragments of stories, but now they had all ended in the same way. All
the roads from all those memories led to my flat and a rope and a beam and that
thing that was Troy and also wasn't Troy any more, lying on my floor, with
people he didn't know and who didn't know him clustered around him.