After Tom’s death I stopped work on Ayesha’s book. The hours spent in Karachi waiting for a flight home had been interminably lonely. Watching the sun rise then set through the drawn curtains of my hotel room I had felt life crowding in on me with fears and reproaches. I tried to put my brain into sleep mode; I had been trying to do so ever since. But the mind turns willy-nilly, churning over what has been and what is to come. Reminders of the past said ‘it wasn’t too late then; you still could have done something’. On the plane home I found the seat I’d sat in for the outward journey; I remembered who was sitting near me, what I’d eaten, what film I’d watched, and the wrenching, tearing in my gut said, ‘Tom was alive; it still wasn’t too late.’
Back in England I devoted myself to the feverish, nagging imperative of uncovering what had happened. Perhaps knowing would help explain. Or perhaps I just needed to be doing something, anything to escape the circling, self-embedding regrets.
I heard intermittently from Ayesha – texts, emails, voicemails – with messages that swerved from sympathy to anger and rebukes. She wanted me to contact her; she wanted to tell me how sorry she was about Tom and about our quarrel in Karachi; she wanted to share some new, important facts she had discovered after I left Pakistan; she wanted me to promise I would write her father’s story.
I didn’t reply. But her voice was in my ears; in my dreams her story mingled with memories of Tom, her dead father shading disconcertingly into the image of my dead brother. I spent my days investigating my brother’s death, my nights dreaming of Ibrahim’s, until the narratives became entangled in my mind. I was looking for answers about two deaths, in two places, in two minds about resuming contact with Ayesha.
I learned that Tom had tried to see Tara. He had gone to the house and been arrested for breaching the restraining order against him. Tara had made a statement to the police and agreed to testify in court. Tom was facing a criminal record that would disqualify him from working in any job that meant mixing with people or, absurdly, with animals. He couldn’t work in shops, in schools, in parks or even as a volunteer dog walker. It was this last one that upset him the most. When he was five he founded a society called the Be Kind to Animals Club, the BKTA, and went knocking on people’s doors asking if they had any pets, checking they were being nice to them.
I know that all marriages are a mystery and rarely does fault lie solely on one side. But I found it hard to accept that Tara had had my brother arrested. I felt anger and sorrow. I couldn’t bring myself to talk to her. I struggled to imagine Tom’s thoughts and feelings in the days that led up to his suicide. Tracing his movements, where he had been and whom he had met, seemed a way to scratch at the conundrum. Tom had left the solicitor a contact address that I didn’t recognise. I checked with Rob Butcher the estate agent and discovered that it was a rental property, a small furnished house whose owners were away and wanted a short-term let. Tom had taken it on a rolling contract with a four-week notice period. Rob gave me the keys.
I braced myself for the company of death – no one had said how long it had been before Tom’s body was found – but the odour in the hall was not of decay. It was a stinging, oily presence and it hung heavy in the air. I opened the curtains; the lounge was littered with papers. In the kitchen a sleeping bag was crumpled on the tiles; beside it, a whisky bottle and a charred disposable barbecue. Tom had lain in this kitchen; his parents gone, his brother continents away, his wife lost; and this is what remained. Out in the street a dog barked; a baby cried; the sun poked in.
I sat in Tom’s chair and arranged his bank statements and bills in date order. I counted receipts for beer, for cigarettes, for whisky. I found the chit from the Co-op for two disposable barbecues and wondered where the other one had gone.
In Tom’s bedroom the shirts on the rail, the shoes by the bed, the old Soviet propaganda posters on the wall were unnervingly familiar. I picked up a faded black jacket and found it fitted. In a drawer were sleeping pills, some opened, some intact, with names that sounded like characters from a Tolkien fantasy – Lunesta, Zolpidem, Ambien, Rozerem. There were receipts from unregulated Internet websites accompanied by advertisements for painkillers and antidepressants. It jarred that Tom, depressed and a risk to himself, was able to buy such quantities of pills when high-street chemists refuse to sell customers a second jar of mini aspirins.
A half-unpacked rucksack lay in the corner, filled with his camping gear – waterproofs, woollen socks and shirts, well-worn hiking boots. It looked as if he had been rummaging in it, perhaps pulling out the sleeping bag that he’d taken to the kitchen and drawn tight over his head to trap the fumes. But if he was unpacking the rucksack, wouldn’t that mean he had been using it? Had he returned from a trip? I unzipped a pocket and found an Ordnance Survey map of the Llyn Peninsula. As children we had spent summer holidays there, in remote cottages outside Llanbedrog or Bodwi Bach, hiking in the mountains with our parents, swimming in the sea, shopping in the market at Pwllheli. Had Tom been looking for the memories of our childhood, seeking solace in the past?
I found his car outside. In the glove compartment was a petrol receipt from Abersoch and a postcard of the church on the beach at Aberdaron. A wave of memories swept over me like a rip tide drawing me back to a shared past that now I shared with no one. I sank into the driver’s seat and it felt right; neither it nor the mirrors needed adjusting. I could smell him in the car – the aroma of his cigarettes, of his outdoors apparel, his tent and anorak. I remembered the last time he had driven down to see me, pictured the car turning into the drive. When he came in he smelled of fields and grass. We sat on the couch and spoke about what we should do with our parents’ house; Tom asked if I would edit some short stories he had been writing. He was looking to the future. I gave him the dates I would be in Pakistan and he put them into his phone. Now I wonder if he took my absence into account when deciding when to kill himself. We spoke about the problems in his marriage and discussed what would happen if it fell apart. He sounded sanguine, but I should have pressed him. Looking back, I think his optimism was forced. He was still the scared six-year-old who told the policeman to ‘ask him’.
I returned to the house. I wanted to take our father’s medals that Tom had hung on the wall and I needed a bag to put them in. Tom was a Labour Party supporter who shopped at the Co-op, so I wasn’t surprised when I found Co-op bags-for-life in the kitchen. He hadn’t overtaxed them.