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.’
‘You were,’ he said, taking it and tipping it upside down.
‘No, I wasn’t.’
‘I thought you were – cute, complicated …’
I rolled my eyes. ‘Oh, weren’t we all?’
‘I’m not surprised that you work for the Mental Health Service – the sidelined in our society … You always liked the underdog.’
‘Me and you, too, then, hey?’
When I’d last seen Joe, three years ago, he’d been living with his girlfriend in Preston but seemed a bit lost, career-wise, working in a sports shop. In our brief email exchange during the last few days, he’d told me he was now teaching English to NEETs (Not in Education, Employment or Training) – kids who’d spent most of their lives skiving off school or inside, basically, and wanted to turn their lives around. He absolutely loved it, he said. The perfect job, if you took away the mounds of paperwork, which was exactly how I felt about my work.
‘I can’t say I’m surprised, either, Joe. All that energy had to go somewhere.’
‘We were a pair of little revolutionaries.’ He grinned.
‘Were we? I can’t remember. I just remember you used to say to me –’ I assumed the younger voice of Joe’s radical years – ‘it’s evolution, Robbie, not revolution.’
‘Did I? God, what a dick. I was so intense!’
‘Oh, Joe, you’re still intense.’
‘How would you know?’ He said, tapping my thigh, as if chastising me for not getting in touch. I ignored it.
‘Actually, you saying that really helped when things were grim,’ I said, seriously. ‘I sometimes say it to my clients.’
‘Really?’
‘Yeah, just to remind them that recovery … it takes time. Step by step. Rome wasn’t built in a day and all that.’
He smiled. He knew what I was getting at.
The room was growing dim, it was getting late, and I was here, having a heart-to-heart, the very thing I’d promised myself not to do. I stood up.
‘Look, I really should be going now,’ I said. ‘I’ll just go downstairs and say, “Hi” to your dad, okay?’
But Joe suddenly got up from the bed and went rooting in a drawer for something.
‘What are you doing?’ I asked.
‘Trying to make you stay.’
‘Joseph Sawyer,’ I said. ‘I wasn’t supposed to come in the first place!’
He turned around. He looked hurt.
‘But why?’
Why did he not get it?
‘Because,’ I sighed, exasperated. ‘Because … oh, God, it doesn’t matter.’ I’m really glad I did come.
He had something in his hand. He put it behind him and, walking backwards, picked up the bottle of JD off the table with his free hand and handed it to me. He always did have this way of making you do things. ‘Come on, drink up,’ he said. ‘This is going to take you right back.’
That’s what I’m worried about.
But then, there was a sound like someone loading a gun, a click, the whirr of a tape being rewound and then, the bluesy, achey riffs of Led Zeppelin’s ‘Since I’ve Been Loving You’ – we used to listen to this track, this album, all the time – and when I saw Joe’s face, the look in his eyes (well on his way to drunk, mainly), I understood that – even if I didn’t want to – Joe needed to. He needed to be anywhere but here.
We swayed – it’s one of those songs that make it impossible not to – but rather awkwardly, like the first self-conscious dancers on the floor at a wedding reception, and I suddenly felt old. It didn’t feel like it used to feel, and when we smiled at one another, it was because we both knew this. I took off my shoes and we danced, passing the bottle between us. It felt like undressing, like a layer of tension was being peeled back. Joe held both arms out, his eyes shimmering with tears.
‘Come here,’ he said. ‘Please? I need a hug.’
I wrapped both arms around his neck then; his suit jacket felt stiff and restrictive and so I took it off for him. We leaned our heads on each other’s shoulders and, as we danced, I could feel his whole body shudder. And I just held him like that, and let him cry as I stroked his hair. The song finished, I was still holding him. He looked up at me.
‘Do you want to go for a walk?’ He said. ‘I can’t stay here.’
We didn’t talk about where to go, we just went; it was like our feet remembered the old route and took us there: down the long, sloping lawn, through the front gate and out onto the path. I didn’t know what time it was, but everything was awash with a lilac hue and the tide was out, leaving sweeping, silver channels like liquid mercury. The air smelt like the inside of mussel shells. Were we drunk? I should hope so, the amount of Jack Daniel’s we’d put away. We were holding hands – it just felt like the right thing to do. We turned left at the gate and out of the cul-de-sac that wraps itself around the bottom of the vicarage. The houses get lower, the closer you get to the sea around here, so you have the big old houses like Joe’s and our old pink one, up on the hills, with a bottom tier of white bungalows petering out to the sea. And this is where we were now, walking – not entirely in a straight line – hand in hand, among the white underskirt of Kilterdale, with the lilac sky and the black shadows and the low houses with their big, glowing fly’s-eye windows; and I didn’t know whether it was because the houses were so low that the sky seemed so big, but it did; so big and empty, like everyone had deserted.
