The police had been there following up on Harry’s death. They were having trouble tracking down his next of kin. Oliver wished he could be more helpful. He admitted that his conversations with Harry had never crossed over into the personal. They’d chatted about the weather and the garden and that abandoned car in the street. He’d felt, rightly or wrongly, that Harry wouldn’t have appreciated personal questions.
The police wanted to confirm again when he had last seen Harry and he was able to give them an exact date: the day before the barbeque. He said that Harry had seemed in good health. He didn’t mention anything about Harry complaining about Vid’s dog. It didn’t seem relevant. He didn’t want to paint Harry in a bad light.
‘You seem very sure about that date,’ said the nice policewoman.
‘Well, yes,’ said Oliver. ‘It’s because the day after that there was … an incident. Next door.’
She raised her eyebrows and he gave her the details, briefly, because to his surprise he found he got strangely breathless as he talked about it. The policewoman made no comment. Perhaps she already knew. There was a police report on file, after all.
Of course, the police would see no connection, no cross-reference between Harry’s death and the barbeque, but as Oliver closed the door and went back into the kitchen to boil the jug to make himself a hot lemon and honey drink, he found himself thinking of those two minutes.
He estimated it had been about two minutes. Two minutes of self-pity. Two minutes that might have changed everything, because if he’d been out there, he would have seen what was going on. He reckoned there was a good chance he would have seen.
Come on now. That was a stretch. Melodramatic. Putting himself centre stage. ‘You’re not responsible for the whole world, Oliver,’ his mother had once said to him, in a moment of sobriety or drunkenness, it had always been hard to tell the difference.
Oliver switched on the electric kettle.
But it was not a stretch because what had happened at the barbeque had crashed like a meteorite through their lives, and if he hadn’t been so distracted, if life had continued in its normal, predictable way, surely he would have noticed much sooner that Harry hadn’t been around, and he might have banged on his door weeks earlier.
Harry would probably still be dead, but he wouldn’t have been dead for quite so unforgivably, tragically long.
Or he might even have saved him.
The kettle bubbled and hissed and Oliver remembered how he’d stood in that luxurious little bathroom at the back of the cabana, letting the hot water run and run pointlessly over his hands while he stared at his own sad stupid face.
chapter forty-six
The day of the barbeque
Oliver stood in the cabana bathroom washing his hands. It was a fancy, soft-lit, scented bathroom. The light fitting was an imitation chandelier, all glittery glimmer. If his mother were here at this barbeque and at the nasty stage of her inexorable progress towards inebriation she would whisper, ‘So tacky!’ loudly in Oliver’s ear, loud enough that he’d be terrified someone would overhear.
He let the water run needlessly over his hands. He was delaying the moment when he’d have to go back outside again. Frankly, he’d had enough. He liked everyone here well enough, it was just that socialising was a mental and physical effort that left him exhausted and drained, and it wasn’t a good sort of tiredness, like when the lactic acid built up in his muscles after a solid work-out.
He heard laughing outside. Vid’s big booming laugh. Oliver pasted a smile on his face in preparation, ready to share the joke. Ha ha. Good one. Whatever it was. He probably wouldn’t really find it funny.
Erika was drunk. He wanted to take Erika home and put her to bed like a child, and wait for the morning when she would be his beloved wife again. He’d never seen her slur her words before or look at him with glassy, unfocused eyes. It was nothing to get himself worked up about. She wasn’t falling over or dropping things or vomiting in the garden. It was just regular drunkenness. Some people did it every weekend. Clementine was a ‘little merry’ too, hectic spots of colour on each cheek, but he didn’t care what Clementine did.
When he was a kid it used to feel like his parents disappeared when they got drunk. As the levels of their glasses went down, he could sense them pulling away from him, as if they were together on the same boat, slowly pulling away from the shore where Oliver was left stranded, still himself, still boring, sensible Oliver, and he’d think, Please don’t go, stay here with me, because his real mother was funny and his real father was smart, but they always went. First his dad got stupid and his mum got giggly, and then his mum got nasty and his dad got angry, and so it went until there was no point staying and Oliver went to his room to watch movies. He’d had his own VCR in his bedroom. He’d had a privileged upbringing, had never wanted for anything.
He met his own eyes in the mirror. Come on. Pull yourself together. Go back out.