The Story of You

Of course, I didn’t philosophize like this at my mum’s funeral. I was far too busy concentrating on the church door and whether my bloody sister was going to walk through it in time. If I’d known that when she did, the real trouble was going to start, I might have concentrated more on thinking about Mum. I guess I’m still a bit angry about that.

A funeral congregation always says so much about the person in the box, I’ve always thought, and there was every walk of life in that church: old and young; your floral-society twin-sets; as well as single mums and ASBOs and hoodies from the work she used to do with the Probation Service.

And me … I wished I’d had a chance to thank Marion. For feeding me, and often Niamh, in that year Dad was mainly AWOL; for being my mum, basically, when I didn’t have mine. And when I thought about it like that, I felt really glad I’d come.

Ethan stood up and read a ‘poem’ he’d written, which was all of two lines and said: ‘Mum, I miss you and I love you. I hope you can hear me, from Ethan.’ That was it. Niagara Falls. Just as I was recovering, Joe stepped up to the lectern. He hugged Ethan, then unfolded a piece of A4 paper, his hands trembling. It was all I could do not to go up there and give him a hug.

‘Words can’t really express how much I’m going to miss my mum, or how much I loved her. She was so many things to so many people, but to me, to us, she was just our mum.’

Our eyes met briefly and I smiled at him, encouragingly.

‘I wrote long lists of what she meant to me. I even tried writing a poem, then remembered why I’d put all those terrible love poems in the bin when I was a teenager.’ There was the odd murmur of amusement from the congregation, including me. I still had some of those terrible poems sitting in a box, along with the doodles and sometimes multiple-choice quizzes (he was always very creative with his love letters). ‘And then I found this,’ continued Joe. ‘I think if you replace “love” with “Mum”, it describes her perfectly.’

He read 1 Corinthians 13:4–8.

‘“Love is patient and kind; love is not jealous or boastful; it is not arrogant or rude. Love does not insist on its own way; it is not irritable or resentful; it does not rejoice at wrong but rejoices in the right. Love bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things.”’

He was doing so well until the last line, when he broke down. ‘“Love never ends …”’

And I cried again then, too: for Joe, Marion, my own mum, absent parties, it didn’t matter. Crying was just a nice release.

I waited for the congregation, plus any undesirables from schooldays who might be lurking, to leave. Then I went to find Joe. He was standing near the gate, talking to an old woman in a floppy velvet hat.

‘Then it was 1980 and I think your mum only had Rory … no, wait … maybe she had Simon, too.’

Joe spotted me and stretched his hand over the lady’s shoulder so that our fingers touched. ‘Sorry, excuse me, Betty. Here she is!’ I couldn’t help but notice how his face lit up.’

‘Hi, look, I’m not stopping,’ I said. ‘I don’t want to interrupt. I just wanted to say, beautiful service for a beautiful lady – and your reading, Joe, it made me cry.’

‘Oh, I think Ethan stole the show.’

‘They were both gorgeous,’ I said. ‘Your mum would have been really proud.’

The old lady started off on one again … ‘No, I’ve just remembered, Simon was about five months old …’ and I took the opportunity to study Joe’s face. I’d last seen him three years ago, in the pub on one of the rare Christmases I’d spent in Kilterdale, and been surprised to feel a stab of jealously at the fact he was with Kate, his girlfriend at the time. That he’d even moved in with her. He’d aged since then (but then, grief does that to you). The dark circles he was always prone to around his eyes were more pronounced, and when he smiled, which was often, there were quite deep lines running from his eyes to his hairline, which when I studied him closer, was peppered with a few grey hairs. But older suited him; as though he’d always been older, his face just waiting to catch up. Every time our eyes met, I saw that behind his eyes was the same person I’d known.

The woman took a breath. I really had to go.

‘Joe, I’ll call you, okay?’ I said, squeezing his hand. ‘I don’t want to interrupt,’ but he squeezed mine tighter.

‘But you’re not interrupting.’ His eyes were pleading with me. ‘Come on, don’t go yet. Please? This is Betty.’

Betty looked pretty cheesed off I’d waded in and ruined her flow.

‘Betty used to be a lollipop lady, and knew us all from the very first week Mum and Dad moved to Kilterdale. She used to cross us over to primary school, didn’t you, Bet? Hand me bootleg sweeties from her pocket.’

‘He was a bloody nuisance,’ she said, and Joe and I laughed. ‘A few penny sweets and he was high as a kite.’

Joe had been diagnosed as hyperactive when he was little, and was never allowed sweets or stuff like Kia-Ora. By the time I met him, at sixteen, he was still bouncing off the walls most of the time, but I’d always loved that about him – his energy.

I said, ‘He didn’t improve with age.’

‘How do you know?’ said Joe. ‘You haven’t spent any time with me for sixteen years.’ He was looking at me, quite intently. I couldn’t help think that comment was loaded. ‘Anyway, this is Robyn.’ He said, eventually.

‘Robyn, eh?’ said Betty. ‘That’s a funny name for such a bonny girl. Is she the lucky lady?’

‘No, no …’ Joe said. ‘There is no lucky lady at the moment, Bet.’

So he was no longer with Kate?

‘Robyn’s a friend. A very old, good friend.’ His gaze was intense enough for it to make me look away.

‘She’s a l’il corker, too. Look at all that lovely thick hair,’ Betty said.

‘Now you’re making me blush, Betty,’ I replied.

‘Oh, I still blush,’ said Bet, ‘and I’m eighty-six!’

Betty eventually gave Joe her condolences and shuffled off. I really did have to be getting back to Dad and Denise’s, even though an evening with them – Dad watching Gardener’s World, Denise bringing him endless, elaborate snacks, didn’t exactly fill me with glee. I opened my mouth to say as much when, from out of the corner of my eye, I saw a thickset bald bloke making his way over. He had one child by the hand and was pushing a twin buggy – with twins in it – with the other. Stopping, he slapped an arm around Joe. ‘Hey, Sawyer!’ It was only when he was right up close that I realized it was Voz. ‘You did really well, mate. I wouldn’t have been able to stand up there and do that.’

‘Cheers, Voz,’ said Joe, giving Voz a manly back-slapping hug in return. ‘That means a lot.’

‘All right, Vozzy?’ I said. I was adopting my old matey, blasé school tones, when really I was shocked. I hadn’t seen Voz for years – since that day Joe nearly drowned at the Black Horse Quarry. Who was this beefcake before me? What had happened to runty Voz?

‘All right, Kingy. How are you?’ For some reason, I was touched that he’d used my nickname. ‘You haven’t changed a bit.’

‘You have!’ I said. Joe sniggered. ‘I mean … you look like you’ve been busy.’

He giggled. When Voz used to giggle, he used to look like a cute rat; now he looked like a cute fat rat, all his pointy, ratty features concentrated in the middle of a big round face.

‘Yep, this is Paige.’ The chubby blonde child holding his hand stared back gormlessly at us. ‘Paige is eight.’ (Eight? What had I produced in the last eight years?) ‘And these little monsters are Tate and Logan.’

Tate and Logan? Bloody hell.

‘That’s my missus, Lindsay, over there.’ He pointed to a pretty, dark-haired girl chatting to Joe’s brother. ‘We’ve got another on the way in January.’

‘Wow, Anthony, are you going for world domination?’ asked Joe. ‘An assembly line of Vozzies keeping the whole of the northwest in wallpaper?’ (Voz’s dad owned the Wojkovich Wallcoverings empire.)

‘You’ve got to get cracking while you can.’ Voz laughed. ‘Any of you got kids yet?’

‘No, no …’ said Joe.

‘Not that you know of, eh, Sawyer?’

‘And what about you, Kingy?’ said Voz, when nobody said anything. ‘I hear you work up on the funny farm?’

‘Yep. If you can’t beat ’em, join ’em, eh?’ I smiled.

‘So are you like a shrink? A psychiatrist?’ Voz asked.

‘Well, no, I can’t prescribe the drugs, but I can administer them.’

‘What, someone leaves you in charge with a needle?’ Voz seemed genuinely alarmed by this.

‘Yes, and in people’s own homes. I visit people at home who have mental-health problems.’

‘Can you do something about my missus? She’s got a few mental-health problems.’

‘I tell you what – because it’s you, Voz – I’ll do a two-for-one.’

Voz turned round at the sound of two girls talking loudly. ‘That’s Saul Butler’s wife, isn’t it?’ he said, gesturing to the one with red, bob-length hair. ‘Is Butler not here, Joe?’

I looked quickly to Joe.

‘No, I invited him – his kids all went to one of the playgroups Mum ran.’

So Saul Butler had kids?

‘But he never got back to me, so – you know – his loss.’

Voz grinned at me and for a second he was just little ratty, giggly Voz again, who used to cry actual tears when he laughed. ‘I reckon Butler always fancied you, Robyn. I bet he was well jealous of you, Joe.’

Joe smiled at me. ‘Well, yes, I was a very lucky boy.’

‘I always remember that time up at Black Horse Quarry, when you jumped in. D’you remember?’ Voz said, adding, ‘When you nearly died?’

‘How could I forget?’ said Joe.

‘That was a competition for Butler, that was.’ Voz said, pointing decisively. ‘I’ll never forget his face, standing at the top of that hundred-footer. Absolutely gutted that you had the balls to jump and he didn’t.’

‘Yeah, well, turned out he was the sensible one, didn’t it?’ said Joe. ‘I might well have died if Robbie hadn’t saved me that day.’

‘Och,’ I said, modestly. ‘No …’

One of the twins in the buggy started to cry then, thank God. ‘Right, well, I’d better get these rug rats home,’ said Voz. ‘You take care.’

The moment Voz trundled off with his army of children, Joe’s face collapsed. I remember that effort too.

‘Tired?’ I said.

‘Yeah.’ He took my hand. ‘Look, don’t go, Robbie. Come back for the wake.’

Robbie. Nobody but Joe ever called me Robbie.

‘I can’t, Joe. I have to get back to London.’

‘So do I,’ he said.

‘You’re in London now?’

‘Well, Manchester, but you see,’ he said, pointing, ‘that stopped you. You didn’t know that, did you? You didn’t know I lived in Manchester. We’ve got so much to catch up on.’

‘Joe,’ I sighed. Didn’t he get that I wasn’t just some unfeeling cow but that I was trying to make a polite exit here without having to go into one?

‘Come on, I haven’t seen you for three years. I don’t want to go back on my own and face all those people.’

Then it clicked.

It was a funeral, his mother’s funeral. What was I doing?

Chapter Six

‘Only plus of being a vicar’s son,’ Joe used to say, ‘is that you get a big house’; and it was big compared to the houses most kids who went to our school lived in, but not, I noticed, anywhere near as big as I remembered it from the last time I was in it, years ago. Still, I’d always loved Joe’s house, maybe because it was what ours might have been if Mum and Dad had spent less on socializing and throwing parties, and more on doing the house up (but then, ‘You can’t take it with you when you go,’ Mum used to say. Obviously, she didn’t expect to go quite so soon).

Our house was big too: ‘The big pink house in Kilterdale.’ But it was a wreck. Mum and Dad had bought it when I was six, for a pittance, with some big plans (Dad in particular was good at those) to do it up and turn it into a ‘palace fit for a King!’ It was always the party house – there was nothing to spoil, after all, since nothing had been done – and every summer, we’d hold the King Family Extravaganza, where Mum and Dad would dress up as some famous couple – Sonny and Cher, Marge and Homer, Torvill and Dean – and Dad would serve hot dogs and beer from his old ice-cream van. The big renovation plans began, finally, when I was eleven, but then Dad’s work dried up and they’d always spent so much on socializing, on living for the now instead of thinking about the future (good job, as it turns out) that they couldn’t finish. One year, we had to move into a caravan in the driveway, because we couldn’t afford to finish off the plumbing. Leah (who was fourteen at the time and very unamused by the whole situation) would shout at the top of her voice things like: ‘If I have to shove anyone else’s shit down this septic tank, I am going to throw it at them!’ I dread to think what people on that street thought of us.

It was a shock to the system then, dragged up amidst such chaos (and a lot of fun), to meet Joe, whose house was a vision of sombre, deep contemplation – at least, that was what I imagined. The first time I went there, his dad was wearing his dog collar. We all had tea and biscuits in the living room, making polite smalltalk to the background sound of the grandfather clock ticking away. I bit into a ginger nut and Joe looked at me like I’d just flashed my bra:

‘Oh, no’ he said.

‘What?’ I said.

‘You didn’t say Grace, and we always says Grace before we eat anything.’

I felt sick. They let me suffer for a good ten seconds before they all started killing themselves laughing. So that was the kind of ‘good’ church family they were. That was the kind of home the Sawyers had.

The vicarage was an Edwardian villa-type affair, with huge front windows and a big conservatory off the back. The front doors were open when I got there after the funeral, so you could see right through the sun-flooded hall of the house to the lawn, where people were milling in the sun, drinking cups of tea. The scene was very tame – mind you, I’m not sure what I expected: a free bar, like at Mum’s (recipe for disaster in retrospect)? Most people were over fifty and very sedate. I was a bit disappointed the probation lot hadn’t turned up; they’d have livened things up a bit.

I did a quick scan for alcohol and could see none, which panicked me. Then I spotted Mrs Murphy, our old deputy head, and panicked even more – this was exactly why I’d worried about coming: blasts-from-the-past absolutely everywhere. I looked around for Joe, but couldn’t see him, and so I took myself off to the buffet table, before finding a quiet corner, where I was immediately joined by a woman who’d just got back from a Christian Aid mission in Somalia. I’d just put an entire mini pork pie into my mouth when she started telling me about all the horrors there, so all I could do was nod. She left soon after and so I went for a wander, to find Joe, and hopefully some alcohol. I ventured into the cool, dark hall, where one woman – angular and the colour of digestive biscuits – was talking at the top of her voice to an audience, who looked as if they’d not so much gathered, as been passing through and seized against their will.

‘I’ll never forget when Marion came to my Zumba class,’ she was saying. ‘It was last summer. Or was it the summer before? Or was it the one before then?’

Why was it always the one who knew the deceased the least, who talked the loudest at funerals?

I went on to the kitchen, where people were poring over clip-frame pictures of Marion, which I couldn’t quite bring myself to look at. Old Potty was there with his Mexican-wave eyebrows. I was contemplating slipping out, texting Joe later, then I saw Mrs Murphy looking dangerously like she was making a beeline for me, and decided on a tactical toilet break. I sloped upstairs.

The house had hardly changed in eighteen years. It had the same smell: furniture, polish and books. The wide, dark staircase seemed modest enough now, whereas it used to seem so grand to me, so full of mystique, probably because it led to Joe’s bedroom, which was the only place we could be alone, doing whatever we did in there – learning Zeppelin lyrics off by heart, discussing Potty’s eyebrows … Joe’s mum occasionally walking past with the Hoover.

‘Joseph, leave your door open, please, otherwise Robyn will have to go home!’

Behind that door, we’d be sitting, holding our breath, often in various stages of undress. It seemed like an age ago, another life ago. Like it didn’t even happen.

There was the same mahogany side table at the top of the stairs, with the photos on top. I paused to look at the one of all four boys, an eight-year-old Joe on the end, pulling a stupid face, desperate to dash off as soon as the picture was taken.

I gave myself a quick once-over in the long mirror just before you get to Joe’s room.

I was wearing a black Monsoon shift dress. Last time I looked in this mirror, the girl staring back at me was terrified, with peroxide hair: white face, white hair. I just remember that.

The door to Joe’s bedroom was half open, just a slice of the view of the rolling sheep-dotted fields, then the flat grey line of the sea. I couldn’t resist it. I went inside. It smelt different, of a guest room, but it was still completely Joe’s room. There was still the poster of Led Zeppelin’s album Physical Graffiti (Joe and I were alone and, it has to be said, slightly ridiculed in our appreciation of Led Zeppelin, which as teenagers was enough to make us believe we were destined for one another) and, above his bed, Béatrice Dalle in Betty Blue pouted back at me. Clearly, Joe’s older brothers had introduced him to Betty Blue and the wondrous sexiness that was Béatrice Dalle, since we were only little when the film came out, but I’d often looked at her in that poster; the tough, gap-toothed poutiness and the cleavage, and I’d wanted to be Béatrice Dalle at sixteen. I wanted to be French and insouciant and wild and sexy. I was kind of annoyed with this gawky, traumatised teenager, who just desperately missed her mum. I wandered around for a bit, examining Joe’s odd collection of boy trinkets: rocks and fossils, and then – I couldn’t believe he’d kept it this long! – the ‘ironic’ pen in the shape of a lady; when you tipped her up, her knickers came off. I’d brought it back from Palma Menorca for a laugh, in 1997. That year – the summer we got together – Joe went to Amsterdam and bought me a wooden clog specially engraved with my name. The fact he’d queued up to get that done (because ‘Robyn’ was never on any merchandise in the land) thrilled me. ‘He must really like me,’ I’d thought, ‘If he’s willing to queue in front of his mum and dad, to get a wooden clog signed.’

‘He’s got tenacity, that one,’ I remember Dad saying. A few months later, Joe wasn’t allowed to set foot in our house. But I still have that clog, and sometimes, when I’m feeling down, I just like to turn it over in my hand; feel its wooden, smooth simplicity.

I stood in front of his bed – it was the same metal, tubular bed in 1980s grey that he’d had back then – and remembered how I’d had some of my most uncomfortable nights in it. It was like sleeping on a climbing frame, and yet, in the times we’d snatched together, it was also where I was happiest; where, for a while, I could forget about Mum, curling around Joe’s warm, strong body. We’d lie there in the dark, thrilled just to be naked together.

Joe was obviously sleeping in this room because there was a wash bag on the bed. I stood looking at it, feeling a wave of sadness. Imagine coming home, to sleep in your childhood bed, knowing your mother is to be buried the next day. Just then, the door flew open, making me jump. It was Joe. He slammed it shut, his back towards me, swearing, leaning his forehead against it for a moment, before fiddling in his inside jacket pocket and producing a bottle of Jack Daniel’s. He unscrewed the top, muttered something about Sorry Mum and have to do this, and then tipped his head back and took a swig. Then he saw me.

‘Bloody hell, you nearly gave me a heart attack!’ he said.

Then, when he’d realized what he’d said, ‘That’s going to keep on happening, isn’t it?’

I smiled. ‘Probably.’

‘Do you want some?’ he said, holding the bottle out. ‘Can I just say, it was a huge oversight by me not to have organised booze at this wake.’

‘Yup,’ I said, taking a gulp. ‘Still, I don’t need booze to relax.’

‘Really?’ he said. ‘’Coz I do.’

I handed him the bottle back. ‘Jack Daniel’s? Going for the hard liquor, then?’

‘I can’t take any risks,’ he said. ‘It needs to reach my bloodstream instantly. I just can’t talk to people any longer.’

There was a long silence, during which we just sort of looked at each other.

‘So, er … the bathroom’s two doors down,’ he said, thumbing in that general direction when I just stood there, still clutching Miss Knickerless. ‘Same place it’s always been.’

I felt my cheeks grow hot.

‘God, sorry. I couldn’t resist, I just had this mad desire to—’

‘Snoop around my bedroom?’

‘Oh, shit, I’m sorry.’

‘I’m joking, Robyn.’ His eyebrows gave a little flicker of amusement. ‘It’s actually really sweet.’

He looked pale as anything, washed out. I’d forgotten about that bit, the tiredness, and he pushed the stuff to the side, collapsing on the bed.

‘I should go,’ I said. He’d come up here to be alone, lose himself, and here I was, making that impossible, but he said, ‘Don’t go. Why do you keep on wanting to go?’

He looked genuinely annoyed – Joe and his transparency.

‘I don’t know, because you want to be on your own?’

He tutted, dramatically. ‘I don’t want to be on my own. I just can’t take much more of people, of Betty. We’re only on 1978. There’s thirty-odd years to get through yet.’

I laughed, despite myself.

‘I needed someone to save me. Where were you, Robbie?’ he said, turning on his side.

‘Snooping round your bedroom?’

I sat down on the bed next to him. Up close, it was like he’d changed even less, and I had this urge to give him a hug, but wondered whether that was appropriate, him lying on a bed and all, so I said, ‘It’ll be over soon. They’ll all bugger off home and then you can go to sleep or watch a film. That’s what I did.’

‘Really, what did you watch?’

‘The Evil Dead.’

‘You are joking?’

‘I’m not, as it happens. It’s my job, you see. You start off quite PC and normal and, before you know it, you can’t operate in normal society.’

Joe thought this was really funny. ‘So, basically, you’ve become like, the world’s most un-PC mental-health nurse? Telling schizophrenics to get real?’

‘Something like that, yes.’

We were both giggling now – funeral hysteria.

‘So, anyway, let’s get back to this Evil Dead thing,’ he said. ‘Talk me through that.’

‘Well, I found that the key is distraction, not stimulation,’ I tried to explain. ‘No tear-jerkers, which rules out a lot more than you may think, for obvious reasons. No documentaries or kids films ’cause they just remind you of too much. So, yeah, slasher-horror really is your best bet. The Evil Dead is the ultimate wake-movie.’

Joe tried to be serious for a second, then smiled. ‘You always did have all the best advice,’ he said.

He turned on his back, closed his eyes and let out this huge sigh. I was looking at the shape of his lips, the Cupid’s bow, the wideness of them, the way they always looked like he was about to say something amusing, trying to remember what it felt like to kiss him. Then remembering that I shouldn’t even be here.

‘You bought me that pen,’ he said suddenly. I’d forgotten I was still holding it.

‘Funny, wasn’t I?’ I said. ‘Such a sophisticated, witty sixteen-year-old.’