Saturday 9th December 2023
Georgie
Georgie sits in a pew towards the back of the church, rows of heads in front of her, as people stand up one by one to pay tribute to Robbie. She twists her ring around her finger and draws a diagram in her mind, of everybody who is here, those who aren’t here, how they connect to one another. Rowena is ostentatiously passing tissues around. Poppy blows her nose into one; Ellen clutches Dave’s hand; Jack runs his thumb over the smooth curve of the pew arm.
At the centre of her diagram are Leo, Chrissy, Alice, Robbie, Peter.
Ethan.
It all comes back to the six of them, she is sure, and the toxic tangle of their relationships. But the more she watches and mentally adds to her diagram, the more questions crowd in. She remembers the way Marianne and Chrissy snarled at each other before the memorial. She notes that Peter isn’t here, that Robbie’s dad doesn’t seem to be in the picture at all. And she thinks, again, of the stranger who spoke to her outside the Raven that time – ‘Are you Alice Lowe?’ he’d said, and then, when she’d told him she wasn’t: ‘Never trust a Lowe.’
His words were so similar to what Ethan used to say about Alice, back when she was just a faceless name to Georgie. That he didn’t trust her. That she was jealous of him for taking Chrissy’s attention away from her, even the meagre amount Chrissy deigned to give him. He never talked much about his life in the village, but Georgie held on to the names he did mention; she circled back to them after his death, again and again, wondering what it was she hadn’t seen.
Now Rowena is at the front talking about Robbie’s sweet, sweet nature, and Georgie opens the black folder in her lap as quietly as she can, sliding out the papers inside. She asked everyone who RSVPed to either bring along their favourite photo of Robbie or write down their fondest memory. She shunts through them all, scouring for insights into Cromley’s past. There are a few photos she hasn’t seen before. She drinks them in with the same feeling as always: a sense of peeping into the parts of Ethan’s life she never had access to while he was alive. And Ethan is in some of them: running a raffle stall at a school fete, while a young Robbie shows off his prize in the foreground; sitting in the corner of the Raven while Robbie plays guitar in the middle of the shot, turning to look at something, his face in profile, a little blurred from movement. Leo has clearly been trimmed out of some of these. But his dad has been left in, as if any pain about his death has been subsumed by the tragedy and scandal of Robbie’s.
Not for Georgie, though. There is a connection; she feels it. There is a truth that needs ripping out from the centre of it all.
She swallows and turns her attention to the memories of Robbie people have written down. White sheets of paper, folded in half like voting slips. She unfolds them one at a time and reads about funny things Robbie apparently said, his infamously bad driving, the sponsored gaming marathon he did for charity. Some older memories from when he was little: such a cute baby, such a bright little boy.
There is only one that makes her pause. Robbie’s old primary school teacher – Layla, is it? – has brought a piece that Robbie wrote when he was young, under the assignment ‘Somebody you admire’. My Uncle Peter, it’s called. The wobbly handwriting and drawing of a stickman in a policeman’s hat should be endearing, moving, but as she reads the words all she thinks about is Peter hiding the scrapbook of Leo-related cuttings deep inside the skip.
My uncle peter is a policeman. He helps peeple and peeple like him and ask him for things. Everybody nose him. He catches bad guys like the man who made things go on fire. He is very brave.
Georgie looks at the drawing again. There is something next to the grinning stick figure, a scribble of orange crayon, like a flame. The man who made things go on fire? Then she sees a flicker out of the corner of her eye, a blaze of orange, and she jolts upright until she realises Rowena is lighting a candle for Robbie, its flame leaping high at the front of the church.
Everyone claps and Georgie blinks out of her reverie. She needs to get up there to introduce the next speaker. But as the clapping dies away, there’s a disturbance on the other side of the aisle: urgent voices and people springing to their feet in a flurry of unexpected activity. It’s the police – the constables in uniform and the detectives in suits who returned just as the tributes were starting. They are pushing past people to get out of their pew. Their radios are buzzing and everyone is turning, like a Mexican wave, trying to steal a look. In the arched doorway of the main part of the church, they have a whispered conference. Georgie hears one of them say, ‘Injured?’ and then two of them leave – the female PC and the female detective – while the other two remain, hovering awkwardly.
Silence falls. Georgie sees a fluorescent uniform and a dark suit flash past the window. The atmosphere in the church is ruffled. Somehow, the candle that Rowena lit has blown out, and everyone frowns at each other in confusion.
Georgie shoves the papers and photos back into the folder. Alice is standing up, her head turning between the window and the remaining two officers standing at the back. Who is supposed to be speaking next? Georgie can’t remember; she let herself get too absorbed. Alice is moving towards the lectern. She isn’t due to speak till right at the end but she has a determined look in her eye and nobody, of course, will stop her.