‘Morning,’ he says, balefully.
‘Hi. Coffee?’
‘I want to get going with it, you?’
‘Same.’
We exchange sleepy monosyllables on the way there, lulled by the familiar drive. Everything’s the same and everything will always be different.
‘I suppose in the modern world we should each of us nominate someone to do this,’ Ed says. ‘Wipe our browsing history. Get rid of the secret shoebox we’re directed to under the bed. Without opening it.’
‘Hah. Yes.’
‘I’ll be your nominee if you’ll be mine,’ Ed says, smiling, and I say ‘OK, deal’ while squirming at how it reminds me of his ill-fated letter. Also, why isn’t his fiancée that person to him?
Why indeed.
‘Hester wanted me to give you her love, by the way,’ Ed says, flipping the indicator.
‘That’s nice of her,’ I say, blandly. ‘Say thank you for me.’
‘I will.’
‘She and Susie clashed antlers from time to time, but Hester was very fond.’
Like hell.
‘Yes, of course.’
‘I didn’t want to say on the phone, I don’t know why, but – Susie liked recreational pharma sometimes, didn’t she. With her sister wives.’
‘Huh?’ I say.
Ed swings a look at me. ‘Lauren? Aisha? Jennifer-Jane? Who has two forenames outside the mid-West, that always got me, such a pseud.’
‘Oh, the cokey berks!’ I say. ‘The Teacup Girls.’
Those nicknames for Susie’s work friends are Justin’s. The former is self-explanatory (Justin loves his ironic revival of exasperated dad words like ‘berk’ and ‘wazzock’) and the latter – the Teacup Girls – is because he said they’d had so much Botox, if they want to express amazement they’d have to drop one.
Susie kept this gang entirely separate from us, and only dipped in and out of it herself, not a core member of the cast, a guest star.
They all had cosmetic work, huge kitchen extensions, white off-roaders they drove to the hairdressers, handbags with logos, wealthy husbands, took skiing holidays in Whistler and drank rosé when the kids were in nursery. And sometimes they put on things covered in sequins to get smashed on champagne cocktails, get off with men who weren’t their husbands and do lines in the toilets.
Susie would tell us about their antics and we’d revel in a good gasp and tut. She gloried in their excesses and, sometimes, she partook in the Class As.
‘Any idea if she has any in the house, or where she’d keep it, if so?’
‘I don’t think she bothered unless someone else brought it to the party,’ I say. ‘I’d be amazed if there was any in the house, honestly.’
‘Hmmmm.’
I was the keeper of Susie’s secrets, and she was the keeper of mine. All bar one.
When we round the corner by the cricket ground, nearing her house, Ed inclines his head and says: ‘It was there.’
I twist round to see an otherwise unremarkable street corner, a tree with a gash in its trunk and some cellophane cornets of carnations lying at its base, in a modern shrine. Who are the people who do that? I can’t imagine Susie even knows her neighbours.
I imagine the scene, the sound of it, the squeal of tyres and the startled cries of people loitering outside the chippy opposite as the vehicle came off the road, trying to warn Susie. Wrong place, wrong time. The sickening thump of a human body on the bumper, the crack of Susie hitting a hard surface at speed. Her lying prone, like a toy thrown across the room in a tantrum.
‘Why did she get out of the taxi on the main road?! If she’d been dropped at her house she’d be here now. This was so meaningless,’ I say, suddenly furious again, this time, with her. The phrase banging your head against a brick wall has more meaning now than I ever want it to.
‘She’ll have been vaping,’ Ed said, who’s obviously thought about this as much as I have, albeit from different angles. ‘Dying, for the sake of those bloody tampon-holder things and Skittles-flavoured steam. Mr Kipling fog.’
‘Ohhhhh,’ I say. Of course. We’d applauded Susie moving on to e-cigarettes in our late twenties. Good to see you taking your health more seriously, we agreed. It was still going to kill her.
‘I wish I’d smacked it out of her hand,’ I say, trying to keep the ragey hopeless tears back.
‘Well, not to be Mr Logic from Viz …’ Ed glances at me as he pulls in to park. ‘You still read Viz? But she’d have been stood there like a chimney with real fags, too.’
‘Oh. Yeah. Duh.’
He turns the engine off.
‘I’ve started doing this too,’ he says, into a quiet that seems larger than it is, with the sudden absence of engine noise. ‘Playing variables, worrying about what if Hester and I hadn’t got engaged, we’d have left the pub earlier. We can’t, Eve. We’re going to go mad if we do. What happened, happened, and our only job is to live with it. Which is enough of a fucking job, frankly. Not beat ourselves up.’
‘Yeah, you’re right.’
Ed squeezes my shoulder before we get out of the car and I’m so grateful I at least have him and Justin to share this loss with. No one else can understand.
I contemplate how hard it’ll be to be in Susie’s house, without Susie, as we walk up the path. Her home can seem nothing much to the untrained eye, but I promise you that solid red-brick Victorian semi-detacheds in this postcode are a pretty penny.
Not for Susie a starter property in an area with ‘drinkers’ pubs’, petty crime waves and wheelie bins bearing Tippexed warnings like: ‘No. 22’s!!!! (DO NOT FUCKIN ROB AGAIN TWATS.)’
‘I want an investment and Dad’s not getting any younger, it’s walkable to his,’ she said, back in our twenties. I think she was rationalising that she felt more comfortable among her own, MacBooks in Caffè Neros and Marks and Spencer’s nearby. After all, she didn’t walk to her dad’s, she got in her racing-green Mini Cooper, with 6 Music cranked up high. (Her Mini, that we averted our eyes from as we passed it outside: how is it here, when she’s not here? It will have to be sold. She’s going to be raging when she comes back, and finds out it’s gone.)
I use the key and let us into her narrow hallway, pushing against a small drift of mail that’s already built behind her door. On the other side, the familiar smell of Susie’s house, the pungent laundry detergent she used, blindsides me.
‘I’ll take those to the kitchen table and look through to see what needs cancelling, utilities, et cetera,’ Ed said.
‘I think you need a death certificate for that?’ I say.
‘You might be right.’
I’m not sure how I know this. Standing in her house, discussing registering her death. Surrounded by Susie’s décor choices, her things, so many coats of hers I remember nights out with her wearing, hanging limply on the back of the door. Soon to be decorating the local branch of Oxfam, on plastic hangers with handwritten price tags.
I’m choked. This is the most difficult thing I’ve ever done. Second most, after the hospital.
Why are things, abandoned things, so hard to bear? They didn’t have that quality before. And compared to the living thing you’ve lost, they’re without value.