We run through the minimal information we have about the accident and soon stop, because no better answers about what happened will bring her back to us. It makes us think about that moment on the hundred yards from taxi drop to her house, Susie digging in her bag for her house keys, and a hurtling box of metal coming into view behind her. I swallow hard and my heart races, picturing it.
I can’t go back, push her out of the way, shout at her to move.
The text. If I had replied to her text, and she’d stopped to read it, or texted me back? It’s very hard to absorb that I will be thinking and ‘what if-ing’ about last night’s events for the rest of my life. It has an instant permanence, like looking at a fresh wound and knowing the scar it leaves will always be a part of your body.
If thirty-four is still some superannuated version of youth in our era, I’m aware I’ve aged exponentially in the space of a morning. That my life has bifurcated into a Before and After and the innocence that I didn’t know I had has gone. I’m disorientated by it.
‘We should check on her dad, too,’ Ed says. ‘The hospital couldn’t make him understand what happened.’
‘I’m relieved in a way,’ Justin says. ‘Because with Alzheimer’s there’s a worst of all worlds where you understand what’s being said and then forget, so you keep reliving finding out, forever.’
I fall silent, aghast. No one has ever described hell so vividly to me before.
‘What about her brother, has anyone told him?’ Justin says.
‘Shit, Finlay,’ I breathe. I’d totally forgotten about him.
‘So have I, and I share DNA with him, so I wouldn’t sweat it,’ Susie says to me, so swiftly and clearly I wonder if there’s such a thing as an audio-haunting.
Recalling Susie-isms used to make me laugh out loud in the street and now, I guess, they’ll always make me cry. A fat tear rolls down my cheek and I wipe it away.
‘The hospital had no contact details for him. I explained he’s in the States,’ Ed says. ‘Is he still in New York?’
‘I think so,’ I say. ‘She didn’t talk about him much, did she?’
Ed shook his head. We three understood that, conversationally, Finlay Hart was a permanent no-fly zone. Susie wasn’t really one for gale-force expressions of feeling about people, be it positive or negative, so her vitriol regards her brother always took us aback.
‘Her phone,’ Justin says. ‘He must be in that? Have you got her mobile?’
‘Yup.’
In the corner of my room, we have a plastic, standard-issue hospital bag I can barely bear to look at. It contains: Susie’s tan Radley handbag, a battered oxblood Mulberry wallet, full of bank cards that need cancelling (what if she needs them?! What if? She’s going to be fuming when she returns), her keys, a pair of stud earrings which I know will be real gold (‘As my mum says, I’m allergic to cheap metals and cheap men,’ she once said, going full Raymond Chandler dame, aged twenty), a roll of hairbands and a Charlotte Tilbury lipstick, shade, ‘Pillow Talk’.
Plus a white iPhone 8 with a shattered screen that, nevertheless, appeared to be operational when we pressed the power button. Her wallpaper is the four of us, at a music festival, faces posed on top and beside each other, like a Beatles album cover. It had provoked a new wave of sobbing on the drive to mine. As Ed said: she’s not here, but a sodding glass computer the size of a piece of toast survived.
‘Unfortunately Apple makes them impregnable even to the CIA,’ Justin says. ‘Probably the way Suze would want it, to be fair.’
‘I know her passcode,’ I say.
‘Woah, seriously?’ Justin says. ‘Women are mental!’
‘Only by chance.’
It feels spooky. As if it was intended by some higher power. I’ve only known it for a fortnight, maximum. Susie wanted me to take a photo of her with a fan of tail-on prawns as a starter in a seafood restaurant. As she was already gripping the rim of the plate and practising her grin, she gestured with her head at her handset on the tablecloth.
‘It’s my year of birth but backwards,’ she said. ‘Don’t give me chins.’
‘I don’t need to know your passcode to take a photo, the camera opens automatically,’ I said, as I wiped my hands of scampi grease and picked it up, and she said: ‘Oops. Don’t browse my nudes, will you.’
I feel intensely protective of her phone, whether she’d been joking about the nudes or not.
‘Someone should ring him, he must be in her contacts,’ Ed says, and given Ed has broken this news to me and to Justin, I don’t think it’s fair he calls the brother too.
‘What’s he called again? Flynn?’ Justin says.
‘Finlay,’ I say. ‘Fin. I’ll do it,’ I say. ‘After you both go.’
They both mumble about ‘not leaving you on your own’ and I tell them forcefully that I will be fine, and they have to. I don’t want them to, but artificially delaying being alone will be worse.
‘Tell us how it goes with the brother?’ Ed says, as they linger on the doorstep. ‘I’ll call you later.’
He looks at me and leans in for a hug and I hold him for a moment, burying my face in his shoulder. We’ve always been close but, after today’s hospital visit, we’re welded.
There is no ‘later’ for Susie and me, I think, as I close the door. I still haven’t accepted it. She is just over the brow of a hill, to be glimpsed round a corner. I will never tell her the failed one-night-stand, bald-ballsack story and feel gratified at her gurgling laughter. She will never give me her voluble and welcome scathing opinions on the ‘atrocity’ of Hester’s proposal, and soothe my suffering.
I’ve lost her standing shoulder to shoulder with me, in a matching dress, holding an identical bunch of flowers? The problems I had only hours ago were so miniscule.
You usually say old people are a ‘comfort’ to each other. But that’s what Susie and I were, I can see that so clearly, the secret formula: each other’s comfort and joy.
The eternity of the silence overwhelms me. The line between us buzzes with monotonous static, a line never to be busy again.
The only word I can think of that comes close to how I feel is: desolate.
11
I Google search: what time is it New York. Lunchtime. My hands tremble with the enormity of the task I’ve taken upon myself with offering to ring Fin and guiltily, although it’s seven at night and I lost my best friend today so I am not sure why I feel guilty, I pour myself a glass of white wine to take the edge off. It might be because Susie can’t have a glass of wine.
I can’t have any more than this, I know that: the prospect of waking up hungover tomorrow is unbearable, because the prospect of waking up tomorrow is already unbearable.
Does the fact that Susie and her brother were estranged make it easier or harder to have this conversation? More complicated, I think, barely easier. I have no gauge of his response. I’ve never had to break news like this in my life before. I see why Ed was so traumatised by calling me.
After some stiffening gulps of fridge-cold supermarket Sauvignon, I pick up Susie’s phone.