that I identified the source. Low above the bed, over the section of blankets that covered my legs and feet, I saw what must have been five hundred small flies, hovering, just hovering, as if I was a sun-rotten corpse in the desert.
For a moment, there was no fear. The sight of these creatures, moving in short oval swirls, at first had a mesmeric effect. Then something changed. As if suddenly aware that I had woken, the flies began to move in one cloudlike motion further up the bed, towards my face. Soon they were all around me, a dark blizzard, with their angry, unstoppable noise getting louder every second. I dived down, deep under the blankets, hoping the flies wouldn’t follow and with that sudden movement the noise stopped completely. I waited a second in the warm and cushioned dark, then resurfaced.
The flies had all disappeared, leaving no trace. I looked around again and, although the creatures had gone, I couldn’t help but feel that the room was different, as if every object had shared my delusion.
I remember Cynthia and me talking in the car, patching our grief with small nothings, as the funeral procession rolled through the old Saxon streets. At one point she turned to you and said: ‘You are doing so well.’ You returned your grandmother’s sad smile and I muttered an agreement. You were certainly remarkably composed, as you had been for much of the week. Too composed, I had thought, worried you were keeping it all locked in.
I tried to keep my thoughts on your brother but found them gravitating towards you, and to the effect your twin brother’s death was having on your behaviour.
You hadn’t played your cello all week. This, I told myself, was understandable. You had gone to the stables every evening, to take care of Turpin, but you hadn’t ridden him since the day before Reuben died. This too was as might be expected. You had lost your twin brother and you were stranded now, an only child of an only parent. Still, something troubled me. You had been off school, and I had closed the shop, yet I don’t think we had talked properly for the whole week. You had always found an excuse to leave the room (to check the iron, to feed Higgins, to go to the toilet). Even then, in that slow-moving car, you felt my eyes upon you and you seemed to wince, as though there was a heat to my gaze, scorching your cheek.
Cynthia’s hand squeezed mine as we approached the church. I noticed her nails, decorated with their usual black varnish, her face painted in her macabre style, and remembered her tear-stained joke that morning about how the one useful thing with regard to her sense of fashion was that she never had to think what to wear for a funeral.
We pulled up at the church. We left the car with faces filled with the grief we felt, but also knew we had to show. As we walked past those cramped old graves of plague victims I thought of all the dead parents, separated from their children. Do you remember Cynthia’s old ghost story? About the plague boy who had been buried outside York’s walls, in line with the new laws, and the spirit of his mother rising up from the graveyard to search in vain for her son? She told you both it when you were younger, walking back with your oranges and candles from Christingle, and Reuben laughed at you for being scared.
It is strange. I feel myself sinking. You remember one thing and there is always something else, lurking below, pulling you under. But I must keep my head up. I must stay gulping the fresh air.
* * *
You may wonder why I need to relive these things, when you were there too, but I must tell you everything as I saw it, for you know only your side, and I know only mine, and hopefully when you read this account you will look behind what I have done and a kind of truth will emerge somewhere in that space, that airy space, between your reading and my writing. It is a vain hope, but the last I have, so I will cling to it, as I clung to you as we walked up the path.
Peter, the vicar, was at the other end of that path to meet us, ready to give sympathy and the necessary instructions. He said something to you, and Cynthia butted in on your behalf, defending you against any obligation to speak. It was then that I turned round and saw the boy who had been there the night Reuben died. The boy whom I had hated instantly, for the blank indifference I had seen in his face. His hood was gone. He stood in a cheap suit, wearing a black tie, yet I must admit he had a striking appearance. The pale skin and black hair and those eyes that seemed to contain a dark and brooding power. Something violent, and dangerous.
I don’t know if you had seen him. Had you? I spoke a word in Cynthia’s ear and walked past those antique graves towards him.
‘May I ask what you are doing here?’
He didn’t say anything at first. He was wrestling with the sudden fury that was marked on his face.
‘Ah’m Denny,’ he said, as if it should have signified something.
‘Denny?’
‘Ah were one of Reuben’s mates.’ There was a rough arrogance to the voice, something confrontational that seemed wholly inappropriate to the occasion.
‘He never mentioned you.’
‘Ah were there when he . . . You saw us.’
‘Yes, I saw you.’ I bit back insults and accusations. It was not the time nor the place. ‘Now, why are you here?’
‘The funeral.’
‘No. You weren’t invited.’
‘Ah wanted to come.’ His eyes pressed harder than his words.
‘Well, you came. And now you can go.’
He looked past me, over my shoulder. I turned and saw you still struggling with the vicar.
‘Go,’ I said. ‘You’re not welcome here. Leave us alone.’
He nodded. A suspicion confirmed.
‘Right,’ he said, through a tensed mouth. As he turned and walked away I had the most strange and unpleasant sensation. It was a feeling I can only describe to you as a desertion, some essential part of my soul being pulled away, leaving me for a moment uncertain of where I was. My vision darkened, my brain fuzzed with a strange energy, and I grasped the stone gatepost for support.
My memory jumps at this point to inside the church. I remember the slow trudge behind the coffin. I remember the vicar’s vague niceties. I can see Cynthia, up at the lectern, delivering the bit she had chosen from Corinthians with none of her normal theatrics. ‘For since death came through a human being, the resurrection of the dead has also come through a human being . . .’
Even more sharply, I remember myself looking out as I struggled to start the poem I had chosen. I saw so many faces, all wearing the compulsory expressions of grief. Teachers, customers, undertakers. And you among them, on the nearest pew, staring over at your brother’s coffin. I looked down at the sheet in front of me, the sheet Cynthia had printed out so neatly from her machine.
For a while I couldn’t speak, I couldn’t cry, I couldn’t do anything. I just stood there.
I made those poor people live lifetimes inside that minute. I could hardly breathe. Peter was already heading towards me, raising his eyebrows, when I finally pushed myself into it.
‘To sleep,’ I said, the words echoing off the cold stone walls.
‘To sleep.’
I kept saying it – ‘To sleep’ – turning the key to an engine in my mind. ‘John Keats.’
