would have blunted my memory—but it wasn’t like that at all. I remembered it too well. It was just hard to find the words.
‘We had some biscuits when we went back in.’ I stopped. Until I said it, it might not have happened. I took a deep breath. ‘After a while, there was a knock at the door. It was the police.’
I remembered how funny I’d thought it was that policemen were calling: we hadn’t been burgled. ‘Perhaps they heard about the lemonade!’ I’d joked to Mum but she’d shoved me into the sitting room and I’d crouched with my ear to the door. I hadn’t been able to hear much. I’d heard only bits.
‘Very sorry … pedestrian crossing … didn’t stop … thrown thirty feet … nothing they could do …’
Then I’d heard Mum. She was stern. ‘No, you’re wrong! It can’t be! Not Graham! You’ve made a mistake!’
I’d heard her shoes clomp hard across the hall, like she was running, and I’d got away from the door just as she’d shoved through it. ‘Evie!’ she’d called. ‘The police are saying Graham’s been run over! Obviously they’re wrong because he was with Daddy! I’m going to the hospital to sort it out.’
‘Mum went with them,’ I said to Miss Dawson. ‘She put on her lipstick and went.’ I jabbed my needles into the wool. ‘The police were right … they were right.’ My voice cracked and I took a breath then carried on, my eyes on my knitting. ‘Graham had been hit cycling across a pedestrian crossing. Dad had seen the whole thing. They put him in hospital, too; they had to knock him out.’ I stared at the window. ‘They should have kept Mum in, too.’ I turned to look at Miss Dawson. ‘I wouldn’t have minded. But they didn’t. Mum had to come home on her own and look after me.’
It turned out that Mum had a pretty good idea where Dad’s will might be, after all. As I sat downstairs the next morning, knitting my way through the East-to-West jetlag that had had me up at 4 a.m., I heard her clomping awkwardly down the stairs.
‘Uh,’ she grunted, kicking open the living room door and depositing four sturdy box files on the dining table. Despite the early hour, she was already dressed, coiffed and scented while I—having been up for half a century—was still in my dressing gown.
‘I think the Will might be in here,’ she said. ‘Your dad kept all his papers in these. It’s a blessing that he was such an organised man. Now. Have you had breakfast?’
Before I could reply, she carried on.
‘We’re due at the funeral place at eleven. We can’t sort this out too quickly as there are waiting lists. Poor Lily had to wait two weeks for her brother’s funeral.’
And so, after taking a shower, I hunched over the dining table and, feeling as if I might be about to open a Jack-in-the-box, released the catch on the first box. I didn’t share Mum’s confidence in Dad’s organisational skills, but no horrors jumped out; there was no explosion of random papers, just a series of fat folders, each containing what looked like the year’s statements from various bank accounts and a couple more folders of credit card statements.
Encouraged, I opened the second box and found another series of neatly labelled folders, these appearing to contain receipts and guarantees for everything that my parents had bought in the last few years, from clothes and electronics to work done on the house and car.
The next two boxes told a similar story. Dad had meticulously filed all of the paperwork essential to keep my parents’ lives running smoothly, from utility bills and insurance papers to the tax returns, invoices and payment slips for every little piece of work he’d done.
I smiled a thank you to the sky. It could go either way with historians, I’d found—some of Dad’s colleagues had been so disorganised I used to wonder how they managed to dress themselves in the morning, but others, like Dad, got pleasure out of documenting their lives; creating their own historical records, I suppose.
Flicking through the folders, I stuck a Post-it on each thing I thought needed attention—companies that needed to be told of Dad’s death; accounts and bills that needed to be transferred into Mum’s name; and those that could be closed down. As I put the most recent bank statement back on top of the pile, something caught my eye. A debit of £22,000 made just last week. Strange, I thought, sticking a Post-it on that too. I’d look more closely at it later.
‘How was it when you went back to school?’ asked Miss Dawson. ‘It was after the summer holidays, wasn’t it?’
‘Yes.’
‘So … six weeks? Do you think that was long enough?’
I sighed. How should I know? I sat back in the armchair and ate my biscuit. School was difficult, but home wasn’t much easier. Graham had been the only pupil from our school ever to have died and no one knew what to say to me, his kid sister. On my first day back, everyone had spoken in clichés. ‘Don’t worry. He wouldn’t have known what hit him,’ they’d said, way too graphically. ‘He’s in a happier place now. He’s looking down on you from heaven.’ My classmates repeated what they heard the adults say. A boy in Graham’s class even said, ‘Don’t worry. He’d have been happy that it was a BMW.’
Dazed, I’d nodded at people as they spun around me, all ‘Graham this, Graham that’.
‘When someone dies,’ I said to Miss Dawson, ‘why is it all about them? They’re not there any more. Graham couldn’t hear them saying all those things. I could. Why didn’t anyone ask how I was? I’m the one who’s still alive!’ I knitted a row furiously. ‘And now no one talks to me about Graham at all. It’s like he never existed. But sometimes I just want to talk about him.’
‘That’s what these sessions are about, Evie. You know I’m here to try and help.’
I forced myself to smile but my mouth wobbled. I looked down at the knitting on my lap. Miss Dawson hadn’t known Graham. How could she talk about him? I wanted to talk about him with someone who remembered the silly pranks he used to play, what his favourite food was, the fact that he was scared of Doctor Who.
‘I’d talk to Mum, but …’
On my first day back at school, I’d come home and, out of habit, I’d pushed open Graham’s door. The room had still smelled of him, as though his dusky boy-essence had permeated the carpet, the curtains and the duvet that Mum still hadn’t stripped from his bed. I’d lain down on his bed and hugged his pillow. For the first time since he’d died, I’d fallen into a deep and natural sleep.
I didn’t hear Mum come in but I’ll never forget the sound that came out of her mouth when she saw someone asleep in Graham’s bed. It was feral, animalistic and seemed to go on forever. Mum had grabbed handfuls of books from Graham’s shelf and hurled them at me, screaming ‘Get out! Get out! How dare you? How dare you try to fool me? Do you think I’m STUPID? Do you think I don’t know my SON IS DEAD?’ She’d collapsed
