The only thing I wanted in the world was sleep, but I needed to let Melissa know. Hi Melissa, I know you don’t want to hear from me right now and I understand, but I’m afraid I have bad news. Hugo collapsed and was taken to hospital— It occurred to me that I should have texted her from the hospital, asked her to come in; maybe her voice would have made it through to Hugo. It had never even crossed my mind. —but there was nothing they could do. He died late last night—had it been late night? early morning? I need to thank you on behalf of all the family for your incredible kindness to him. It meant the world to him. He was enormously fond of you— It read like I was texting a stranger. I couldn’t find how to talk to her; she seemed like someone from another world, someone long lost. I hope to see you at the funeral, but please don’t feel obligated to come if you’d prefer not to. Love, Toby.
I slept for fourteen hours straight, woke up long enough to eat something and went back to bed. That was how I spent most of the next few days, actually: sleeping as much as I could. Not that I got much rest. Over and over I dreamed that it wasn’t Dominic I had killed, it was Hugo: Hugo sprawled on the living-room floor while I stood over him bloody to the wrists, floundering desperately to remember why I had done this; Hugo’s skull splitting under the ax in my hands while I moaned No no no. Sometimes I was my adult self, sometimes I was a teenager or once even a little kid; often it was in my apartment and I had done it because I thought he was one of the burglars. I would wake sobbing and wander around the house—dark landings, pale blurs of windows, no way to tell whether it was dawn or dusk—till the dream faded enough that I could go back to bed.
Because this was the thing I couldn’t stop coming back to, awake or asleep, poking at it like a rotten tooth: Hugo’s death was my fault, maybe not the fact that he had died but the way of it. If he hadn’t rung the detectives, he would have been at home in bed when the hemorrhage hit. He would have died there, with familiar smells and his own duvet, with dawn and birds starting outside the window. Instead he had died in that hellhole hospital, being mauled and probed like a cut of meat amid the reek of disinfectant and piss and other people’s deaths, because he had shielded me.
Somewhere in there my mother came over, to pick out clothes for Hugo to wear and to bring me my black suit, which she had collected from my apartment. I got the vague impression of intense activity going on out there, among the rest of the family: Phil was in charge of the arrangements, Susanna was picking out the music and she was sure Hugo had liked Scarlatti, did that sound right? did I want to do a reading? because my father was organizing those, and he thought maybe I would—
“No,” I said. “Thanks.”
We were in Hugo’s room, which I hadn’t gone into since the hospital. It was a nice room, mismatched old wooden furniture, a huge teetering stack of books beside the bed and a faded photo on the wall of my great-grandparents in front of the house. It smelled like him, a faint comforting scent of wet wool and dusty old books and smoky tea. On the mantelpiece was a vase of yellow freesias that Melissa had brought home, on a day that felt much too long ago for them to still be alive.
“OK. It’s up to you.” My mother was going through shirts in Hugo’s wardrobe. She was doing it gently, but still, the casual invasion of it set my teeth on edge. “You’ll be a pallbearer, though, won’t you? Your dad and your uncles, and you and Leon and Tom. You’re OK for that?”
What with your leg and all. “Yeah,” I said. “Of course.”
“It won’t be swarming with reporters, anyway, or at least it shouldn’t be. His name hasn’t been in the papers.”
It took me a moment to figure out what she was talking about—I had been asleep when she knocked on the door. “Right,” I said. “Good.”
“So far, anyway.” She unhooked a white shirt and examined it, turning it to the light. “I don’t know if the Guards are just being considerate, letting us get the funeral out of the way—”
“I don’t think they do considerate,” I said. “If they’re keeping quiet, it’s because it suits them.”
“You could be right. Maybe they just don’t want to have to show up and keep photographers and gawkers away from the graveside. Either way, I’ll take it.”
That—graveside—pulled something out of the foggy tangle in my brain. “He wanted to be cremated,” I said.
My mother turned sharply from the wardrobe, shirt dangling from her hand. “Are you sure?”
“Yeah. He said it, back in—” I couldn’t remember how long it had been. “A few weeks back. He wants his ashes to go in the garden.”
“Shit. I don’t think Phil knows that. He was talking about your grandparents’ cemetery plot—I’ll have to ring him.” She turned back to the wardrobe, in more of a hurry now. “This tie? Or this one?”
“No,” I said suddenly. “No tie. And not that shirt. That one, the striped one”—a faded flannel thing that Hugo had worn around the house—“and the dark green jumper, and the brown cords.” Hugo had always hated suits; at Susanna’s wedding, grimacing, running a finger under his collar— This much at least I could do.
“Oliver won’t be happy. He said the blue suit—” My mother narrowed her eyes at the shirt and tie in her hands. “You know what, Oliver can get lost. You’re right. You pick out whatever you think; I’ll ring Phil about the cremation thing.”
She went out on the landing to do it. Going by the careful soothing note in her voice, Phil was up to ninety. “I know, I know, but we can ring them and . . . Because it didn’t occur to him till now. He probably thought you knew— Yes, he’s positive . . . No, Phil. He’s not. What, out of nowhere? He’s not . . .”
Her voice faded down the stairs. Bleak autumn sunlight fell across the floorboards. After a while I went over to the wardrobe and started taking out clothes and picking off lint and arranging them, very neatly, on the bed.
* * *
?The day of the funeral was gray and cold, wind blowing long sheets of rain back and forth in the street. My black suit was baggy on me; in the mirror I looked ridiculous, lost in some stranger’s clothes and some stranger’s very bad day. Someone had organized long black Mafia-looking cars to ferry us from place to place, funeral home, church, crematorium, all of them out in unfamiliar bits of west Dublin, in no time I had lost my bearings completely and had no idea where I was.
“Where’s Melissa?” Leon asked, in the car on the way to the funeral home. His rush-bought suit was too long in the sleeves so that he looked like a schoolkid, and he smelled faintly but unmistakably of hash. Our parents either hadn’t noticed or had decided not to.
“She’s not here,” I said.
“Why not?”
“I didn’t bring umbrellas,” my mother said, leaning over me to peer out the window. “I knew there was something.”
“We’ll survive,” Oliver said. He looked awful, face sagging where he had lost weight, shaving cuts in the folds. “Not like we’ll be out in the cemetery.” He threw me a baleful look; apparently I was in his bad books about the cremation thing.
“But if it gets worse,” Miriam said, a little wildly. She was wearing a drapey black cape thing that, when she came out of their house into the wind, had looked like she was about to take off. “Waiting outside the church, there’s always all that standing around—”
“No worries,” the driver said peacefully, over his shoulder. “I’ve umbrellas in the boot if you need them. Ready for anything.”
“Well then,” Miriam said, triumphantly and obscurely. “There you go.”
No one had anything to say to that. Leon was still eyeing me. I turned my head away and looked out the window, at bare scrawny trees and boxy little houses whipping past.
The funeral home was spotless and neutral, nothing that could possibly make anyone feel any worse, every detail so discreet that it slid out of my mind the second I looked away. Off to one side of the room, shining in the tasteful soft light, was the coffin.