Somehow Ray had realised there was something wrong, and he pulled over. I could hardly get off the bike; my knees were trembling. Ray had to hold me up. He asked me what was wrong, and I couldn’t get the words out. Apparently my face was quite white. The rest of the club were pulling up and dismounting, clustering around us, half curious and half annoyed. Ray unzipped my jacket — not the horrible naff one from 1975, a proper bike jacket, a birthday present from him. I was almost collapsing, he had to support me under the arms. Then for some reason he thought of unbuttoning my shirt.
And a dead bee fell out. It must have been trapped between my shirt and my belly, and been driven to sting me, suicidally, out of confusion and despair, if bees can feel those things.
When we drew up at Cardinals Paddock, and I got off from behind whichever Steve it was that had given me a ride, I could see at once that the blinds were down in the big living-room window. Ray only ever had them that way on the Saturdays when he was playing host. I rang and rang at the bell, but of course there was no-one there. Then I thought to ring the bell of the downstairs flat, which was occupied by Graham, a nice architect whose girlfriend stayed over on alternate weekends. Finally he came to the door.
Of course Graham knew something of what had happened. At this point he certainly knew more than I did. He’d always seemed to be well-disposed to us. He looked after the flower-beds which I’d noticed on that first night, even though they belonged technically to a number of flats. No-one else could be bothered. He even cleared away the pungent droppings the foxes left, on their eerily regular visits — every night at nine on the dot, or else at ten with the same punctuality.
I remember one Sunday morning he explained to me the symbolism of the passion flower, which produced such glorious blossoms in May and such pulpy fruit in July. He tried to show me the trinity symbolised in the flower, the four evangelists, twelve apostles, fourteen stations of the Cross faithfully mapped out in the arrangement of pistils, stamen, petals, and I just smiled and moved away, thinking he was going to ask me why he hadn’t seen us in church. He can’t have known I worked as a gardener. I knew about passiflora from a gardening angle, how they like sun and shelter, though I didn’t know its meaning, if plants have a meaning.
I suppose in this country the best sort of neighbour is the quiet predictable one, the one who doesn’t disturb you but whose movements you know, and that made Ray a good neighbour. He was usually quiet and very predictable in his movements. It didn’t matter that our ways weren’t regular, as long as we were regular in our ways. You could put it like that. On poker nights, which were only at that address every couple of months, the action was occasionally rowdy and went on late, but Ray always gave fair warning. He also kept relations sweet on those occasions by leaving a drinkable present outside Graham’s door — a bottle of wine or Scotch, a case of beer.
What Graham told me was that Ray’s mother had already cleared out the flat. She’d made a bonfire out the back and burned a lot of papers. Graham watched her from his back window. He had wanted to retrieve something for me, he told me, anything he could rescue from the fire, but Ray’s mother had fetched a stool from the kitchen and sat there keeping watch until everything was properly consumed. He couldn’t see her face, but for want of a poker in the flat she used the brush from the toilet to agitate the embers. So as to be sure that nothing survived. It’s the single thing I know about her, that this person could stir the ashes she had made of her son’s life with a toilet brush. Ray didn’t like me to say ‘toilet’. The word he used was ‘lavatory’.
The next day the removal van had come. It took away my clothes and my half-shelf of books along with everything of Ray’s. Graham let me go upstairs, which was always going to be a futile exercise. But I wasn’t prepared for what I saw there: a shiny new surround for the keyhole. Ray’s mother had changed the locks. Even after she’d had the flat emptied, and had burned things rather than risk throwing them away, the mother had spent good money to prevent me from using the key which the son hadn’t trusted me enough to give. And that was when I got hysterical. The Steves had to pretty much carry me downstairs, and then I refused point blank to get on a motorcycle again.
I didn’t even think of the trouble I was causing. Graham had to call a cab to take me home to Mum and Dad’s, and when it arrived Big Steve had to travel with me, while Little Steve followed on his bike. Then from Isleworth Little Steve gave Big Steve a lift back to Hampton to pick up his own machine. A long way round for the Steves, and all because I hadn’t thought.
It was only when Big Steve was putting his helmet on outside Mum and Dad’s that I realised there was something fishy going on. I asked when the funeral was. I knew I’d asked that before, and the answer hadn’t made any sense, so this time I made sure I caught it and kept it in my head. Again they said they couldn’t tell me. And when I asked why they couldn’t tell me, they said they couldn’t tell me because the funeral had already happened.
It gets worse. When I asked where Ray was buried or where his ashes were, they said they couldn’t tell me that either. ‘Couldn’t tell’ not meaning didn’t know. Meaning weren’t allowed to pass on.
Ray had sworn the whole group to silence. Sworn them not to tell me. And when had he done that? In hospital.
My mind was working very slowly. They don’t take dead people to hospital. So what the Steves were saying was that Ray hadn’t been killed on the spot. He’d lived long enough — Big Steve said 72 hours, Little said more like 48 — while he was at death’s door, to keep me away for ever. He shut death’s door against me.
It was bad enough when Ray’s death was like a bolt of black lightning, but now it was a sort of death smear across several days. And I couldn’t tell myself any more what I’d been telling myself since I heard: that Ray knew nothing about what had happened to him, so it didn’t make a difference, except of course to me, that I wasn’t there with him. Ray knew. And I wasn’t there.
After that day, I fully expected my hair to go white, the way Dad’s had. Except that I was almost shaven-headed, and it would have to grow in a bit before it showed. When it grew back, it was certainly thinner than before, but that’s not the same thing. Maybe it’s a myth that shaving hair makes it grow back stronger. I can well believe that if my hair had been long enough to notice it would have been falling out in handfuls.
It turns out that even Dad’s hair, which showed such a sudden and shocking change, didn’t exactly turn white. Shock causes accelerated hair loss, and what happened to him in 1975 was just that the hair with a bit of colour in it tended to fall out, and the white hairs tended to stay. The hairs you want fall out, and the hairs you’d be glad to see the back of stick around. Just what you’d expect.
Mum was glad to have me back living in Isleworth full time, and not just because she liked me to have more hair than Ray had allowed. Dad was getting to be more and more of a handful, though it wasn’t any easier to work out exactly what the problem was.