JP

I’m not sure, as the one who remains, if you ever get over the shock of death. No matter how it comes. Not the long-drawn-out-cancer goodbye. Not the sudden exit – here one minute, gone the next. Knowing you have to live with grief, that there is nothing you can do to change what has happened, is just unbelievable.

You will never see that person again.

The loss and emptiness is permanent. You have no control over it. You can shut your eyes and cover your ears and, when you open them, you will still be there and that person will still be gone.

You have to experience it to understand it. Nobody can tell you what it will feel like to lose somebody close. Nobody can do it justice.

Thump, thump, thump.

The Guards have a special knock. Some bloke told me that once, when I was dealing. They train them in knocking, he said. It doesn’t matter what news they’re bringing, they’ll hammer down the door until they get an answer. Big thick culchie fucks, he’d added.

I jumped out of my bed that morning, thoughts of Sandra in my head and at the same time knowing it was the police at the door. I’d an awful feeling one of my old jobs had come back to haunt me. I pulled on tracksuit bottoms and a T-shirt, determined to get to the door before Charlie did. I hadn’t quite woken up. I was on automatic.

There were two officers, male and female.

‘Are you John Paul Andrews?’ the woman asked.

‘Yes. I mean, it’s Carney now. I dropped the Andrews, but yeah … Sorry, what’s this about?’

They took off their caps.

It was that one simple act.

I knew.

Even then, with the realization that this wasn’t some overdue arrest, that they were the bearers of bad news, what was running through my head? Seamie. That’s what I thought. The stupid drunk bastard had finally killed himself or been killed.

But it would be years before that knock came.

‘You know Charlene Andrews, date of birth the fifth of May 1986?’

‘Yeah, I’m her brother.’ I said.

‘May we come in?’

I stood aside for them at the door, mute.

They sat at the kitchen table and asked me to join them.

I refused, preferring to stand, thinking I could prevent the inevitable if I didn’t follow protocol.

‘Charlene had you listed as her next of kin on the back of her ID,’ the woman Guard said.

Had.

I put my hands over my face. It felt like I was having an out-of-body experience.

‘Look, we have bad news, I’m afraid. Charlene was involved in an accident last night. We believe she was hit by a car while walking on the Malahide Road just before 2 a.m. She was unresponsive at the scene. The paramedics took her to Beaumont Hospital, where she was pronounced dead at 4 a.m. this morning. We’re so very sorry for your loss.’

No, no, no, no, no, no, no.

I fell back against the counter and sank to the floor.

She knelt beside me, placed her arm around my shoulders.

‘Is there anybody we can call? Your parents? A friend?’

‘There’s nobody,’ I choked. ‘There was just us.’

She glanced at the other Guard, the two of them shaking their heads sadly.

‘Where is she?’ I asked. ‘I need to see her.’ Then, a thought. A glimmer. ‘Are you sure it’s her? What if somebody else had taken her bag? Maybe somebody stole her bag?’

Yeah. That was it.

I hauled myself up and raced to Charlie’s bedroom down the hall, throwing open the door.

The room was as empty as it had been when I went to bed last night. I had slept after dropping Sandra home, while ambulance men leaned over Charlie’s body and tried to bring her back to life. I’d barely given my sister a second thought, so caught up was I in events in my own life.

‘We need a member of the family to formally identify her,’ the Guard said, having followed me into the hall, her face full of concern. ‘But she had photo ID on her person, so we are certain it’s her.’

‘This can’t be happening,’ I said.

The officers talked me into getting dressed and getting into their car, me protesting the whole time that they’d got it wrong.

They brought me to the morgue and into a small white room with a cross at one end and a table in the middle, a sheet covering the shape of a body. Outside, they’d shown me the bag they’d found a few metres away from where they said Charlie had landed after the car hit her. The couple who found her had thought she’d collapsed drunk on the road and almost hadn’t stopped. It was only when they’d slowed down and saw what looked like blood on her sweater that they pulled over.

The coroner showed me the clothes that had been cut from her body. Blue jeans and a pale wool sweater, soft, splattered with dirt and encrusted blood. I held the bag to my nose, thinking I could inhale the smell of my little sister.

All of her personal effects, wrapped up in plastic and marked ‘Charlene Andrews, deceased. 8th June, 2007’.

In the room, they lowered the sheet from her head.

She didn’t look dead. She didn’t even look like she’d been harmed. The damage had been to her internal organs, and while her body was covered in bruises and cuts from the bang and the fall, none of that was apparent on her beautiful face.

I didn’t believe it, yet I nodded, on autopilot.

‘It’s her,’ I told the waiting assistant.

‘Would you like some time with her?’ he asked.

I did, because I thought she’d just sit up if we were alone in the room and tell me she was faking it, that everything was okay. Because I didn’t trust the medical people or the police and I was sure they’d got it wrong. Because I wouldn’t believe she was dead until I’d checked for a pulse myself and knew her heart had stopped beating.

The assistant pulled a chair over to the side of the table for me, and I sat. When he’d left, I reached under the blanket for Charlie’s hand, so cold and small in mine. I squeezed it, but felt nothing back, only its lifelessness.

My little sister was dead. Hours before, she’d been alive. Now she was dead.

It was unreal. I kept waiting to come to, to awake from a nightmare. Except part of me knew I never would. That this had happened. That Charlie was gone.

‘Charlie, do you remember,’ I said, ‘when we were little and you used to make me paint your nails and then do mine?’ I stroked her skin, looking at the chipped pink nail varnish on her fingertips. ‘I said I wouldn’t because it would make me look gay and you said, “If you love me you’ll do it, JP.”’

I sobbed then, unable to see through the tears. Me, the hard man.

‘I’m your big brother, Charlie. You know I’d do anything for you. Please, come back.’

I wanted to climb on to the bed and wrap her in my arms, just like I used to when we were kids. I wanted to protect her from all the bad in the world.

For so long it had been just the two of us. I couldn’t imagine being without her.

They had to help me from the room.

I went through the whole gamut after that.

Shock. Denial. Devastation.

Confusion. Why had Charlie walked home alone that night and not waited for a cab or a lift? Had she been running from somebody or something?

Anger. She had put her safety at risk, taking a road that didn’t even have a properly marked footpath, the police said. The driver had probably sped off in shock. The cops assumed he or she would hand themselves in when the realization of what they’d done sank in.

Fury. I had abandoned her that night. The one time I wasn’t there for her, the worst had happened.

And loneliness. I felt so terribly alone in the world. I had nobody left. No siblings. No parents. No extended family. No close friends.

I picked a small church on the Coast Road for Charlie’s funeral, near the graveyard where we would bury her. I thought there’d just be a handful of us. I’d had time to think it through – the normal three-day funeral ritual didn’t apply in those circumstances. The cops wanted a post mortem and Charlie was held in the morgue for a week before she was released.

In that time, word had spread through her college and wider circle.

The church was packed to capacity, and the line of people coming up to shake my hand at the end seemed to go on and on. I was impatient, monosyllabic. I just wanted to get out of there, get her buried and go home.

For the first time in my life I felt myself longing for drink – anything that could send me into oblivion.

But then I realized that the numbers at her funeral meant something so special, it was worth enduring.

Charlie was loved. She was so loved.

Some of her best friends I knew. But with them were their families – all of them had met Charlie and brought her into their hearts. The rest of her nursing class came, her lecturers and tutors. One man nearly broke down as he shook my hand.

‘She was amazing,’ he sobbed. ‘I’m so sorry.’

A colleague had to take his arm and move him so I could continue with the endless handshakes.

People returned to their seats and waited for me to lead the funeral cortege from the church. I stood up, almost crippled by the weight of grief. Five boys, her friends from college, joined me in hoisting her coffin on to our shoulders and carrying her for the last time.

Charlie had lived for such a short time. She’d had a horrible start, but she’d loved her life and she had been happy. Despite Betty and Seamie.

Just before we exited the church, I saw him.

I almost didn’t. My head was bowed as we walked down the aisle, but at the bottom I looked up at the mourners who’d come to say goodbye to Charlie and hadn’t even been able to get a seat for the Mass.

He caught my eye because something about his suit made me think he hadn’t been in the line at the top of the church. Charlie’s friends were all of a type, mainly students, and, while dressed in their best today, none of them had the money for what he wore. I looked at his face, lowered as her coffin passed, his hands clasped in prayer, watch visible just under the suit. A Bulgari.

His eyes were red and puffy. He’d been crying.

It was him. The man I’d seen in HM Capital. What was he doing at Charlie’s funeral?