51

26 October 2019

I sat in a pew near the back of the chapel, between Sasha and Izzy, and I let myself cry. Sasha had Raffy on her lap, and she was crying too, much to Raffy’s confusion. I understood the toxic blend of grief and guilt that was running through her. She hadn’t known Joe (well, only a tiny bit, on the days he’d spoken to her when she was a baby, days that didn’t happen in her real life). She was crying for Mum, and because she was a mother looking at Jasper and Gus and Claire, and she could probably imagine something of the pain they’d carried for all these years.

The guilt, though. That was the worst thing. Our dad had killed Joe and the horror of that was too big, no matter how much anyone said it wasn’t our fault. All those lists I’d made, the lists of suspects. They’d always focused on Lucas and Troy, with ‘angry man at the mall’ as an afterthought at the bottom of the page.

We had to learn to live with it. We had to add it to the fundamental facts about ourselves.

Jai was on the other side of Sasha, holding her hand. I was glad, for her sake, that he wanted to be involved with Raffy now, but selfishly I didn’t want him to move in with us and change the way everything worked. I was, however, doing my best to be nice. I knew I needed to try to be grown up about it because I was seventeen next month, and life moved fast. I couldn’t keep Raffy from his father and, when it came down to it, I didn’t want to.

Zara turned and waved at me and Izzy, and we waved back. I knew it was a strange experience for these little girls, to be at the funeral of the uncle they’d never known. I was picking them up from school one day a week now, and I was intensely relieved that Gus hadn’t stopped that when it turned out that my father had killed his brother. That was quite a thing. He and Abby had been incredibly kind about it, and kept saying that I’d been the one who’d brought some peace to their family, that as I hadn’t even been born I could hardly blame myself for what my dad had done. They were going to get married next summer, now that they had an answer about Joe.

Abby was sitting close to Gus, her hand on his knee, and I hoped that one day I might have someone I’d be that close to. It could never have been Joe, and although Jack and Finn had done a lot to pull me back to the present day, it wasn’t either of them either. Finn and I had had a couple more dates after that terrible one, but it had never taken off. He was seeing someone else now and I didn’t mind at all.

I imagined Joe right here beside me, holding my hand. Joe, two years younger than I was. I imagined it so hard that I truly believed he was sitting there, at his own funeral. It was, to be fair, exactly the kind of place where he would turn up.

I looked at him. He smiled. I tried to touch him, but my hand met Izzy’s thigh, and she reached down and squeezed it. Joe leaned forward and whispered in my ear: ‘I love you and I always will. You’re the love of my life, and my afterlife.’ Then he was gone, and it was just Izzy. She was real.

I shivered all over. I would hold on to Joe and his love for the rest of my life, and I would hold on to my best friend too, for as long as I possibly could. Raffy was dozing in Sasha’s arms, and I stroked his little nose with a fingertip.

The service was beautiful. The church was full of people who’d known Joe, as well as people who hadn’t. Troy was there, and so were Jemima and some of their other classmates. Lots of teachers came, including, of course, Ms Duke, who was in the front row next to Jasper. He had taken my hand, and looked into my eyes, and said, ‘Ariel, I’ll never, ever be able to thank you enough for finding my Joe.’

I was taller than he was. I’d shaken my head, rejecting his thanks.

‘It was Troy too. We just had a feeling.’

I hadn’t really been able to explain what had happened: Troy and I had talked about meeting by accident in the little room, talking about Joe (my reason was because of my babysitting for the girls; Troy’s was obvious), and then looking at the wall panel and unscrewing it on impulse. And finding, as well as the bones, which were all that was left of his body, Joe’s schoolbag and the football trophy which, it turned out, still had fingerprints and Joe’s DNA on it. I’d told the police to check the fingerprints against my father’s, inventing a drunk semi-confession he had once made, and, when they did, he’d been arrested at an apartment in Inverness where he lived with a girlfriend who, it transpired, had had no idea that he had two daughters and a grandson.

There were traces of various chemicals down there. The wall cavity had been big enough to fit a fifteen-year-old boy inside it, and (the police surmised) Dad had gone back with the right substances from work and used them to minimize the odour of decomposition. He couldn’t have hidden it entirely, of course, but the cavity was ventilated by the air-conditioning system, and Piet, among others, remembered the drains outside being cleared because of a smell a couple of months later. No one had made the connection to the missing boy.

We would never know exactly what had happened between them unless Dad decided to talk, but we knew enough. For some reason my father had killed Joe. Not just because he spilled a drink on him, though, surely? It was the one time Joe hadn’t been able to come back and report the details. I was wondering about the old unlucky-punch theory that we’d tried to fit to Lucas, and then Troy. Would that explain why Dad had always been so careful to punch walls instead of people?

Whatever the truth, this was why I couldn’t allow Jasper to thank me. I was the daughter of the man who’d killed his son. Jasper seemed able not to hold it against me. So did Gus and Abby, and Ms Duke had been entirely amazing. Joe’s mum Claire, however, was avoiding me and I didn’t blame her.

It was strange to see her: for so long Joe and I had thought she’d walked out on him and Gus and Jasper, when in fact she’d only been in Reading. I had to remind myself of that every time I looked at her. She’d gone on a course and never seen her son again, and those many, many times that Joe had caught the train to Reading to spend his last hours with her hadn’t happened in the version of her life that she remembered. She had long white hair and loose yoga-person clothes, and she drifted around with perfect posture. I looked, now, at her straight back, her lifted chin, and I wished her comfort and peace.

There were lots of other people around them. They were family members who had come from all over the world. Joe had once mentioned that he had cousins, but I couldn’t really remember him saying anything about them. Here they were, though: adults with families and jobs and busy lives, all gathered to say goodbye to Joe. There were numerous next-generation cousins too: the ones of my age or thereabouts. One of them had particularly caught my eye because he looked far more like Joe than anyone else in this church apart from Zara. I kept finding myself staring at him, and then looking away.

Enzo was here. The French exchange boy who Joe had been perpetually about to visit had actually come over from St Etienne to say goodbye to the friend he’d never met. He was warm, friendly, chatting to everyone in brilliant English, and I knew that if Joe had been able to go on the trip they’d have become good friends.

Troy was sitting in the second row with his wife Amélie (dark and gorgeous, wearing a lovely floaty dress) and baby Joe, who was up there with Raffy in the most adorable baby stakes. He had squishy rosy cheeks and a beaming smile that lit up his whole face, and he was wearing a Babygro with escargot written on it and an embroidered snail.

‘Hello, baby Joe,’ Sasha had said. ‘This is baby Rafael Joe. You’re the two Joes. How lovely is that?’ She and Amélie had talked about the babies so animatedly that Troy and I were abe to have a conversation without anyone overhearing.

‘We did it,’ he said. ‘Ariel. Thank you. We actually did it.’

‘I still can’t believe it was my dad.’

‘I’m so sorry. Do you miss Joe very much?’

I looked around, but no one was listening. ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘Oh God, Troy. I miss him with all my heart, every single day.’

‘Me too.’

Then Jasper came over, and I remembered something Joe had once said.

‘Jasper?’ I said. ‘Someone told me I should ask you about the subtle art of clowning.’

He laughed. ‘That can only have been Gus. Yes, clowning has a very unfair reputation. It’s not just squirting noses and unicycles. It’s not It. It’s not Ronald McDonald. No, the origins of clowning …’

You told me to ask him, I said to Joe in my head. And I did.

I heard Joe saying: Thanks, Ariel. I knew you would.

After the service we all went to the pub by the beach for the wake, and I drank some lemonade and then some wine. Sasha and Jai took Raffy home, and Izzy drifted off to meet Betsy. Joe’s old schoolfriends set off on a pub crawl, and I realized that I was in danger of being the only non-family person left.

I crossed the road, walked out on to the dark sand and stared at the sky. The evening air was harsh on my face. It was a clear, starry night, and the waves were breaking gently in front of me. I took my shoes off and went to stand in the freezing shallow water.

I was pretty sure that the bright star in front of me was Venus.

I stared at it. I looked at the edges of it, where the cloud tops might be.

‘Wait for me, Joe,’ I said. ‘Wait for me, Mum. I’ll see you right there.’

I drew in a deep breath of night-time sea air. I held it. The water was icy cold around my feet. The moment was perfect.

‘Hi.’

I looked round, and there he was. I smiled at him. Joe had come back one last time.

‘Hey there.’ I wondered how he’d done it.

‘Hey, yourself.’ As he said it, he settled into being not-quite-Joe. He was a bit older than him, and his face wasn’t exactly the same.

He was the cousin.

I smiled and tried not to be disappointed.

‘Oh,’ I said. ‘You looked like someone else for a moment.’

‘Sorry,’ he said. ‘I’m Max Simpson. Joe’s cousin, I guess. You’re Ariel, aren’t you? You’re the girl who found him.’

I walked back towards him with a smile.

‘Yes,’ I said. ‘Yes. I am. The girl who found him.’

‘Want a drink?’ He was holding a bottle of wine. I took a swig.

‘Thanks,’ I said.

We sat on a rock together, me and this boy who wasn’t my Joe. This boy who was alive. His arm brushed against mine. And something changed.