Alex had talked about things getting back to normal in a few weeks but Matt really wasn’t so sure. And he thought maybe he’d been fooling himself, because he’d looked upon these people as the best friends he’d ever had, and yet for all their commitment to stick by him, he felt it was over, like he was on his own again, the friendship reduced to a shell.
He looked at Susie now and said, ‘I think I’m sad because in a couple of months this’ll all be over for me, and it’s weird too, because partly I think I’m just homesick. I miss my little sister.’
She smiled and said, ‘Tell me about her.’
He told her about Martha and then they talked about other things and had more Cointreau. He didn’t even notice as the conversation slipped back to the subject that really connected them. Susie seemed to relish the chance to talk about it again and so he encouraged her, asking the right questions, listening intently.
She didn’t say anything that gave him anymore idea of who Emily Barratt had been. And as he listened he realized that what she was really doing here wasn’t reminiscing on a dead friend, something she’d probably do with people who’d known her, but talking through her own guilt.
Maybe her friends didn’t want to hear that but the pain was real, he could see it, could feel it himself. She looked on the verge of crying a couple of times, taking a sip of Cointreau on each occasion, calming herself. Finally though, she lowered her head and began to weep, her frame becoming even smaller, more vulnerable.
He put his glass down, went over and sat on the bed next to her, put a comforting hand tentatively on her shoulder. She responded immediately, holding onto him, crying into his shoulder, sobbing, the tears damp on his shirt. She was holding him tightly and he had his arms around her and he was embarrassed because it was turning him on.
After a while though, she pulled away slightly and looked at him, an intimate stare, seconds passing slowly. He dried her eyes with his fingers and kissed her, their mouths hot with the taste of alcohol and oranges. They kissed for a few minutes and then she began to unbutton his shirt but pulled away again briefly and said, ‘I don’t normally do this.’
‘Me either,’ he said, and he was telling the truth but he felt like a liar, like he was lying emotionally.
He was still confused by how they’d got to this stage and he was pretty certain she’d made all the running but she quickly became coy, asking if he could turn the light off when they were still only half undressed. And in bed she was timid, clinging to him but restrained, tense, so much so that he asked her a couple of times if she was okay.
She continued to cling on to him afterwards and eventually fell asleep like that. He wondered if that was all she’d wanted, the comfort of sleeping next to someone, taking the sex as part of the bargain. As he lay there on his back with her at his side he couldn’t help but feel cheap somehow, used.
Yet she was the one who had the right to feel tricked. It was like a sick joke, sleeping with the friend of someone he’d killed, all the time pretending to comfort her. And the worst of it wasn’t even that he’d killed Emily Barratt, but that he hadn’t owned up, that he was able to walk through the rest of his time here like someone unblemished.
With the passing of every day he felt less like the kind of person he wanted to be, a person who believed in things that were right and decent, the kind of person he’d been brought up to be. And now there was this. For the sake of an easy and empty lay he’d made himself the lowest hypocrite.
He peered into the darkness above him. He hadn’t slept with the light out since the accident, afraid of the dark - not in some supernatural way, a broader fear than that. It was as if he was losing himself, the person he’d been crumbling away like a structure fatally flawed.
It was worse in the dark because there was nothing to anchor him to the world, just the void, a void into which his whole being was dissipating. It was as if Susie would wake up in the morning and find nothing left of him. Maybe that would be the truth too, because the real Matt MacAndrew had ceased to exist before she’d even met him, and only the shed skin remained.
Part Two
ten years later
5
It was tempting, an easy suicide, to tip forward over the railing and be done with it, let nature take its course. It wasn’t so much that he wanted to die, more that he’d run out of good reasons for living.
And the river was offering a way out, running high and fast. It was black and silent but the lights on the far bank caught the surface here and there and illuminated patches of swiftly moving water, taut and muscular and dangerous.
The water would be fiercely cold now, an instant numbing, perhaps enough for him to lose consciousness first. Even if he didn’t, drowning was as good a way to go as any, swallowed up in darkness and dragged away into another night - no more thoughts, no more dreams, dispersed back into the void.