There are many ways to kill yourself. Some do it quickly, leaving their bodies as a farewell gift, or perhaps an act of revenge. Others, over a whole lifetime, die quietly.
Katherine did not understand what happened. First she heard his cry – low, deep, like that of an animal – then she felt the silver fork, the piece of pineapple fly from her hand, Robbie running, running from the room, arms flailing.
Afterwards he looked out at her with hollow eyes, arms loose by his side. Everything so loose, barely held together, almost as if his body had forgotten the meaning of muscle, ligament, bone.
She found him in the afternoon. One overhanging branch, the one he’d sat on as a boy. He was wearing his blue and white striped pyjamas – the pyjamas she’d proudly bought him, the very latest in men’s nightwear – his bare feet a few inches from the ground.
There was nothing under the tree. Only grass, fallen twigs, dandelions that had yet to grow a heady stalk and burst into bloom. No overtoppled chair or box, nothing he could have stepped off into another world. And Katherine realised he had climbed the trunk, his fingers and toes wrapped over the wooden battens. That he’d sat on the branch as he tied the rope, first one end, then the other. How long had he sat there while she typed letters on monogrammed paper and filed newspaper reports into folders? What had he thought as he overlooked the garden: the honeysuckle he’d started to train up the white trellis, the roses whose young leaves were just beginning to sprout?
She did not want to look at his face, the length of his neck, the way his head hung to one side as if looking away, unable to meet her gaze. He used to poke out his tongue as a boy, when he was thinking deeply, when he was tying his shoelaces or even skimming a stone. She hoped he had flown, the way a cicada flies from its transparent skin, leaving a ghostly memory while its true self sits in summer trees, driving the world crazy with its singing.
He had been good at driving her crazy. Perhaps that was his role, the role of any child. To challenge his mother and father. And find them wanting . . .
*
Mrs Newman takes off her reading glasses. There is tenderness in her eyes – a soft, clouded sky – that Katherine has never noticed before. Her lip trembles. ‘It gets easier,’ she says.
She gazes into her lenses, places them carefully back over her eyes, looks down at the newspaper.
*
Grief comes softly behind her. She does not know whose face he will wear. She might be typing a letter or washing a white bowl or looking out from the top of a double-decker tram. She might be at a show at His Majesty’s, surrounded by laughter and gilt-edged conversation. And grief will come and touch her arm with his hand. She will turn and there he will be. He will wrap his arms round her neck. He will ask her to embrace him.