Page 38 of Last Night
That’s who Justin is.
However, today I don’t trust a total stranger to realise Justin is entirely benign, and that goes triple when the total stranger is Finlay Hart. I am additionally unusually relieved that Justin left Leonard with his sister today, as I can’t see his yappy interventions being taken as comic.
It’s been just over a week since Susie died and Fin got in touch to ask to meet. I explained it was a group effort between me, Ed and Justin and Fin said, well, bring them.
I asked if he wanted to choose a venue and he saidAnywhere in the city centre should be easy for everyone?and I nominated the Caffè Nero by the Brian Clough statue, as straightforward to find.
‘Are you coming in from Bridgford?’ I said, not to be nosy, but because I was edgy and didn’t know how best to spin the conversation out to something of conventionally polite length.
‘No, I’m staying at a hotel in town,’ Fin said.
I didn’t know what to say to that other than ‘Ah.’
Now we’re here, on a Saturday afternoon, with a gang of twenty-somethings near us bellowing and playing music on their laptops, it feels a lumpenly stupid choice.
Ed and I bumped into each other outside, and in the pin-sharp white sunlight I notice how drawn and shadowed he looks, after only a few days apart. Like Ed, but sketched in charcoal. From the way he squints at me before heaving the door open, I suspect I look much the same.
I once again allowed myself to believe the cosmetics industry’s lies that you can cover under eye circles, and spent a while dabbing on three layers of beige. Then caught my reflection in a shop window and saw a very tired woman with ochre raccoon markings. Her expression is set to ‘embattled, and vaguely concussed’.
We chose a table upstairs with a view, looking down on the buskers and the shoppers and the people whose lives are continuing. Lucky foolish unwitting bastards. How can they make being alive seem so easy, when it wasn’t possible for Susie to stay that way? Do they not know how precarious this all is?
I feel scared, to the point of being in a secret sweat under my winter parka as I unzipped it, even though there’s nothing to be scared of, exactly. I suppose I’m scared constantly, now, of this completely altered reality I’m expected to manage.
There’s something so counter-intuitive in planning a funeral – the one person it’s for can’t attend. Dispensing a Lifetime Achievement award, but with no cutaways to their delighted face in the audience.
It’s not for Susie, it’s for everyone else, my mother said.
She made me strong cups of tea, sitting at her kitchen table, and rubbed my back as she said things like ‘Oh my God, how awful,’ and ‘That is no age, no age at all’ and ‘I know you two girls were thick as thieves’ and ‘I am so sorry, darling’ at intervals as I heaved and near-retched, talking about what happened. I wasn’t holding my emotions in check for anyone else’s sake, I could let it out with my mum. She talked fondly about how she’d always thought Susie looked like Carly Simon, and I got a bittersweet pang of gratitude at a familiar observation that only days ago, would be pleasant but mundane. The value of memories of Susie had shot up, like the hiked price of a rare autograph.
But how does that advice work, in practice? It’s for Susie and not for Susie, at the same time?
‘How is everyone?’ Justin says on his return, setting his cup down, spoon rattling in the saucer.
‘Terrible,’ I say. ‘You?’
‘Minging, yep. I look like I’m in prosthetics to play Winston Churchill, I’m that puffy.’
I laugh weakly. I wish Susie’s laugh was echoing mine.
‘You brought notes, Eve?’ Justin adds.
I look down at my gnawed-looking scrap of paper. ‘Uh yeah. Things we discussed previous.’
In truth, I wanted to look as if I have homework if Fin gets testy about the fact we’ve not sorted much. The delay in the body being released after the postmortem means we can’t book the funeral yet.
The body.The remains, as someone said to me. It made Susie – whole and beautiful, if extinct – sound like a shard of bone found on a dig in a forest.
‘You kind of wonder what aesthetic Manhattan restaurants use, now that even coffee chains in Britain have ripped it off, huh?’ Ed says.
‘Mmm?’
‘The Edison light bulbs, exposed brick walls and the knacked-up brown Chesterfield sofas in here. I mean, that was cutting-edge cool, once.’
‘Hah. Yeah.’
‘The Teacup Girls have got in touch with me, by the way,’ Ed says. ‘They want to offer their input into Susie’s send-off. Also, they want to know why we haven’t changed her Facebook page into an In Memoriam. She has her wall locked down.’
‘What?!’ I say, chest immediately aflame with indignation. ‘Firstly, no way are they having input! They’ll give her horses with feathers on their heads and a Snow White glass coffin and “Wind Beneath My Wings”. Played by Boyzone. On kazoos.’
