It is early September. Nothing has happened to me. Birdie has called a couple of times, but is frequently unavailable. I suppose it is only to be expected. She has other friends, and her loyalty to me is only half-strength. I have been to visit father. He is dreading the approaching school term, but is otherwise cheerful. Mother has summoned him for a meeting tomorrow, which he takes as a good sign. They need to discuss money, apparently. He is sorry to hear about Rad and can be relied upon to say the right thing. ‘I rather liked him. Perhaps he’ll come to his senses.’ As I leave, it occurs to me that he hasn’t even noticed my haircut. Perhaps his eyes look straight at the soul; or perhaps he’s got other things on his mind.
On the day normal life stops I am sitting in my bedroom gazing out of the window into the middle distance – a recent hobby of mine – when I see the familiar green Citroën pull up, and Rad limps down the driveway. My heart lurches: it’s here, the moment I’ve waited for, he’s back. I take the stairs in three bounds and open the door as the bell rings. He looks terrible – pale, greasy-haired and unshaven. I haven’t anticipated quite this degree of contrition.
‘Can I come in?’
‘Of course.’ We go into the sitting room. He waits until I have sat down before sitting on the couch opposite. ‘What have you done to your foot?’ I can’t help asking. It is fatly bandaged and he is wearing a pair of old-man’s slippers.
‘What? Oh, cut it. It doesn’t matter.’ There is a silence. ‘I don’t know how to say this.’ He is avoiding eye contact. I don’t care how he says it. I only know that there will never have been such a grateful recipient of an apology, and that I will make it as easy for him as I can. Any minute now I am going to be happy again; I can sense myself preparing for it. He stands up as if to give himself courage, but it doesn’t work so he sits down again, abruptly.
‘You don’t have to say anything if you don’t want. I understand.’
He looks at me at last with the faintest expression of hope. ‘You’ve heard already? Who from?’ The air between us is thick: his words seem to take a long time to reach me.
‘Heard what?’ I am starting to grasp that what is coming is not an apology – nothing like it.
‘About the accident?’
‘What accident?’
The glimmer of hope has gone. ‘Oh, I thought you meant you knew.’
‘No. I don’t know anything. What’s happened?’
‘Birdie’s–’ his voice goes high and he stops for a second and swallows. ‘Drowned.’
‘Drowned?’ For a second I can’t remember what the word drowned means. It sounds so strange. ‘You don’t mean she’s dead?’
He nods. ‘Yesterday night. I didn’t want you to hear it from anyone else.’
‘How drowned?’
‘We took a boat out on the lake at Half Moon Street, and it capsized. I tried to save her, but I couldn’t even find her.’
As with hurricanes and tornadoes, in the midst of calamity there is a terrible calm. And so in spite of what I am hearing, I don’t burst into tears or collapse. Instead I say something so despicable that it will haunt me for years to come: ‘Why were you at Half Moon Street with Birdie?’
Rad peers at me as though he can’t quite understand what I’ve just said. ‘What does it matter why we were there?’
‘I meant, what happened? How did it happen? Are you sure she’s dead?’ I babble. ‘Can’t they do something? Doctors.’ There is such a pounding in my ears that I don’t take in a quarter of what he says. It is only much later that I am able to piece together the events. One image gets through, though. Rad, soaking wet, running the half-mile back up the lane to the pub, now dark and shuttered, and beating on the door screaming, ‘My girlfriend’s in the lake. My girlfriend’s in the lake.’
‘Will you be all right?’ He is getting up to go. ‘I’ve got to go and see her mother. She knows, but only from the police.’ He is keeping the muscles in his face tense to stop himself collapsing into tears. We could comfort each other, I think. But we don’t.
‘I’ll be okay. My mother will be back in a minute. I’ll sit and wait for her. I can’t believe she’s dead. I can’t think properly. I can’t …’ My mind is so leaden that I can’t even say what it is I can’t do.
Rad doesn’t even say goodbye, he just sort of shakes his head and then he’s gone and I’m alone. I lie back on the couch and look at the ceiling through a kaleidoscope of floaters. I can hear Granny moving about upstairs. I think of Birdie, my sister, whom I have known for just three months and will never now know any better, and then of her mother, the Samaritan, whose years of counselling the bereaved and the desperate will now prove of so little help.