I turn to the doctor, who’s standing with his hands behind his back and his chin respectfully on his chest.
‘That’s her,’ I say, voice full of water, and pain. ‘That’s Susie.’
The doctor nods.
‘I’ll give you a moment,’ he says, and leaves.
I look back at Susie. This is the last time I will ever see her in person, I realise. I try to take every detail in, the extravagant shape of her nose and lips, the brown-blonde treacly colours in her hair. I always envied those thick handfuls of her hair, and now it’s going to waste? Parts of her are still perfect and she’s going to be … thrown away? How can her body not be in use, and of use? We’ve not been asked and I’m not going to ask.
I see her in my mind’s eye, in the pub last night, raising her eyebrow at me. Sardonic, witty, unstoppable Susie. From that, to this. How?
‘This isn’t real, Eve,’ Ed says to me. I sense it’s his turn to break down and mine to keep it together. ‘This is like a fucking nightmare. What is going on? Why did this have to happen? There was no reason for this to happen …’ his voice breaks. I look at him and he’s crying, screwed-up-face crying.
‘It’s not right,’ I say. ‘This is not right,’ putting my arms around him.
I am holding onto Ed and Ed is holding onto me and I think we’re holding each other up.
He strokes my hair but the gesture is so clumsy in his distress that he’s catching great hanks of it and vaguely pulling, but I don’t care.
Somewhere outside this building, I think, people are having normal Fridays. But there’s been a switch-round: it’s not Susie dying that feels impossible, for as long as we’re looking at her dead body – a corpse, she is a corpse? – but that ordinary world which is the impossibility now.
I gaze at her for the last time. There’s an emptiness to her. The snap-crackle of her, gone, vanished, flown. Her body is a vacated premises. It’s like turning up to a house you know well, and finding it emptied and stripped to the fittings.
Have we had enough time with her, we’re asked. Yes, we have, we say, blankly.
They close the curtains.
If there’s something I am sure of, it’s that I will never think I’ve had enough time with her.
10
On the evening of the day Susie has died – words I am still reeling from stringing together, let alone grasping the concept – something she once told me comes roaring back to me.
Her mum Jeanette had a short illness, ovarian cancer that wasn’t treatable and well advanced on diagnosis, that left her and her dad shellshocked with the speed of her departure.
We were thirty that year, and Susie was the first of us to lose a parent. As her friends, we thought it was a big scary grown-up brush with mortality, at the time.
‘The strangest thing, Eve, is you don’t know how to talk about what to have for tea,’ she said, when we all gathered at my place, in the week before the funeral. (The quiz wasn’t the right mood.)
I was baffled.
‘You still need to have your tea, don’t you?’ she explained. ‘But it’s not seemly. In any other crisis you’d still discuss practicalities like that, they’re a relief. And you do talk about funerals and death certificates, all the death admin. Deadmin. But on the day you lose someone, you can’t go –’ she mimed checking her watch – ‘Mmm, six o’clock, who’s for a takeaway? Or I think there’s leftover chicken in the fridge? It feels so flippant, and like you’re drawing a line. As if it’s already diminishing in importance if you can think about your appetite or picking one food over another.’
‘I see what you mean,’ I said. ‘You can’t be something so trivial as hungry?’
‘Not even that. It might only be a Domino’s pizza, but the act of choosing toppings feels so frivolous. It’s like a statement that life goes on. You’re not ready for that statement. You can’t find the moment, or the words, without it seeming tasteless. How can they be dead, and you’re still preferring pepperoni to ham.’
Eventually Justin said: ‘So what did you have for your tea?’
‘Microwaved burgers from Co-op.’
‘That seems more of a statement that life doesn’t go on.’
We shrieked, tutted and laughed, and I knew we were a huge comfort to Susie, in that time. I was the female sympathy and shoulder to cry on, Ed was the calm organiser and steadying backbone, Justin the irreverent clown, puncturing tension.
As Ed and I sit, once more in my small front room with the half-burned pillar candles in the fireplace and the red velvet sofa that Roger has scratched till it bled, we are without Susie, and waiting nervously and miserably for Justin. My stomach growls and as soon as I think: should I bother to raise eating? Is it an inappropriate thing to say? I remember Susie. I wasn’t meant to find out what she meant, this way. I want to tell her, I ache to tell her. I can never tell her anything again. It’s inconceivable.
There is a Susie-less space torn in life – and it’s only been hours. How do we handle this forever?
The doorbell goes and I feel nauseous. Seeing People for the First Time Since is frightening. It’s like having to experience being told, all over again. I stand up slowly and Ed senses my hesitation and answers it.
Justin walks in – my front door opens into the sitting room, I can’t afford anything as fancy as a hallway – and says nothing, throws himself into Ed’s arms. They stand there sobbing, Justin with his head on Ed’s chest, and I think about how I’ve never seen them cry before. I don’t know what to do with my arms, until Justin says, indistinctly: ‘Don’t just stare, join in!’ to me, and I grip them in an awkward huddle.
The room is silent but for the sound of our weeping. It’s quite eerie.
When we break apart, I see Roger in the doorway from the kitchen, ears cocked, frowning in confusion. Noisy humans.
‘Fucking hell, Suze,’ Justin says, when it abates, sitting down heavily: ‘Always a show-off, that one. Has to be the centre of attention. Has outdone herself with this.’
We laugh weakly and slightly hysterically, laughs that are half-sobs.
‘I did not see that coming. And neither did she, clearly.’
I wince, while being able to hear Susie’s delighted shriek in my imagination. She was the biggest fan of Justin’s taboo-breaking. I have a flash mental image of her on that trolley, not laughing. Not moving.
I glance over at Justin, out of habit – he always grins at his own jokes – and instead see him slumped, devastated.
‘You saw her?’ Justin says. ‘… What did she look like?’
I understand this is a way of asking about her injuries.
Ed opens his mouth and nothing comes out. He looks at me, stricken.
‘Exactly like Susie and absolutely nothing like Susie,’ I say.
‘That is … well, Eve has always been good with words. Spot on,’ Ed says.
He looks at his knees. I sense that I needed to see Susie, as difficult as it was, to accept it. Ed found it harder.
‘Do you want to see her?’ I ask Justin and he shakes his head, emphatic: ‘God no, no thank you. I have seen my share of bodies at the home.’