The same strange mood stays with me the rest of the weekend. I don’t go far from home. On Saturday I empty the whole of my bedroom out onto the landing. Everything looks tatty. There are grey outlines against the walls where the furniture used to be and I find old socks and a pair of knickers for a child aged nine to eleven. It’s like my whole life’s been frozen in time.
Dad helps me to bag everything up and move the furniture. He takes away one old cabinet and we talk about buying new things. I sit and look at paint charts. ‘Paint for Life’ it says on the cover, and I think how easy it would be if we could just paint over our lives in a nice, clean white and start again.
I spend New Year’s Eve with Mum and Dad over at Ben and Matt’s place. Somewhere, at different parties, I know that Raven and Joe are doing it like I should be, but I don’t care. I’m still in the strange, still mood and would rather be here letting off fireworks with the adults. I drink my first champagne and watch the stars with Ben while Matt plays the piano in their front room. And so the fresh year creeps quietly in and closes the door behind the old one.
It gets colder. The party remnants are swept away and soon it’s psychologist night again. This time, though, something strange happens. Before I go in – in fact the very moment I’m about to get out of the car – I somehow know that this is the last time I’ll need to come. I look at Dad to see if he feels it too, but he settles back in his car seat with the radio on like always, so I say nothing, just get out and walk through the quiet darkness to her door for the last time.
Inside, we take our usual places but before she’s had time to put her smile on, I find my mouth has opened and I’m speaking. She looks startled and sits frozen – audiotape halfway to the recorder – uncertain whether to disturb me by clicking it into place – but I don’t care. I’m never going to listen to any of it. It’ll just have to stay here in the room, trapped for ever with all the other voices.
‘D’you want to know,’ I say, ‘what happened when my brother died?’
Her mouth opens and shuts again like a stranded fish, but I carry on in this strange, still voice that doesn’t seem to be mine.
‘He had a heart attack,’ I say. ‘They said it would have been quick, but that could be a lie. When they found him, there were bruises on his face – cuts too – but then he was always falling, or getting into fights. They said it was his heart. He was there all alone for three days, and none of us knew. If you didn’t hear from him, that was good. That’s why no one wondered. For us it was like one minute he was alive and the next he wasn’t. But we hadn’t known. Not for three days.’
She looks at me, waiting, but for a moment I can’t speak. It’s like the horror of it has only just hit me. To lie dead for days while everyone carried on as normal, glad you hadn’t disturbed them.
The whites of the Shrink Women’s eyes are gleaming and one hand, still holding the tape, is loitering on her thigh. I watch it furtively slide out of sight as I carry on talking.
‘The rest of that day was unreal. Mum called Dad at work and he came home. They went into the sitting room and didn’t make any noise at all. I was standing right outside listening and there was just silence. I bit a strip of skin off my finger almost to the knuckle and stood there sucking the blood, and when they came out they didn’t even look at me, just went downstairs and sat in the kitchen with cups of tea they never drank. Dad stood by the back door looking out into the garden, saying “Oh My God, Oh My God” until Gran turned up and they went to the police station.
‘You can’t do anything when someone’s died; not even watch telly to take your mind off it, because it would look like you don’t care. I just sat there while Gran shuffled back and forth to the window, sniffing into her hanky. I wondered why she was crying. She’d always been on about Sam, and how we’d all be better off without him, so why was she crying now?
‘I told her I was going to bed and she said “Will you be all right?” and I thought sure, why not, did somebody die? And of course they had, so then I wondered if I’d gone nuts. I went upstairs in the dark and when I got to Sam’s room I stopped outside and listened. I wanted a ghost like it was a movie or something, so I opened the door and went in. I sat on his bed and looked at all the things he’d never touch again, and I couldn’t touch them either.’
There’s a long pause while I remember and then Shrink Woman says, ‘What’s next?’
‘I killed him,’ I say.