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Thank-you to: Sarah and Celine. Does silhouette count as a French word?
The next day they took the splint off my nose. The nurse kindly brought me a mirror without me asking for one. She must have assumed some kind of vanity would make me want to check what damage had been done to my face. I held it up and turned my face from one side to the other. There was still some yellowing under my eyes but the worst of the bruising and the swelling was gone. My nose now had a distinct broadening at the bridge and it was immediately evident that it had been broken. I realised I no longer looked exactly like my mother, the change in my nose threw my face off just enough to truly make it my own and that made me smile ever so slightly.
“We can fix your nose, you know?” said the nurse. “If you give it a couple of months to heal up you can easily get an NHS nose job, especially considering how it was broken.”
“It’s better like this,” I said, lifting my hand to touch the scar that still stood out white from my eyebrow.
“They can clean up that scar too.”
“That scar is the only part of my face I actually like, “ I said.
The nurse appeared to have taken a shine to me and popped around way more regularly than she was supposed to. I’m pretty sure she told me her name but I hadn’t managed to remember it.
“I saw the police were around again this morning. What did they say?”
“The case won’t come up for another year and even when it does go to trial the chances of them getting more than a couple of years is unlikely, considering that they’re all minors.”
“That really seems so unfair,” she said.
I shrugged. “I don’t care. Nothing they do to them will bring him back.”
She put her hand on my shoulder. “When are you getting out of here?”
“Thursday,” I said.
“You should keep in touch,” she said. “You know, I’d like to find out what happens with the whole thing.”
“Yeah, sure, whatever,” I said, no longer listening.
On Thursday morning the doctor gave me a once over and declared me fit to leave the hospital.
“Is there someone to help you out at home?” he asked. “Just until you’re at your full strength again?”
“No,” I said. “There’s no one.”
I went straight to his house. I didn’t even bother to cut off the hospital bracelet attached to my wrist. In the past coming up to the home where I had fallen in love with him and eventually shared with him had filled me with butterflies. I used to be overtaken with excitement just at the thought of going through the front door. I had butterflies now but they were of a totally different kind. I was so nervous I had to constantly swallow back the nausea that was threatening to make me throw up all over the bus. The clothes that the hospital had given me to go home in were way too big. All that had survived our attack was the big black trench coat. That didn’t show bloodstains, even though I knew that no amount of dry cleaning would ever take out all the traces. I had Bear-Eric in the pocket and I clenched my hand around her as I got off the bus.
The walk up to the front door was both too long and too short. I was torn between the desire to put this moment off forever and to get it over as quickly as possible. I didn’t dare to use my key but it felt strange ringing the doorbell.
They opened the door together, her standing slightly in front of him. Seeing them there took my breath away and I had to concentrate not to completely lose it. Anthony had been the perfect combination of his parents. His wide green eyes had definitely come from his father and his mother had the thick sandy hair. Her smile was frozen on her face; a tiny dimple popping out at the side of her mouth but it only took seconds for her expression to sour.
“Eric Hayes,” she said as if my name was something so filthy she could barely bear to utter it.
“How did you know?” I asked.
“My sons whole bedroom is full of photos of you,” she said. “Photos of you and him.”
“Oh,” I said, thinking about how Anthony drove me mad with his camera, constantly wanting to document every moment of our existence.
“I came… I came to… when is his funeral?”
The truth was I wasn’t sure why I had come. I felt like I needed to reach out to them, to connect with the only people who might have had any chance of loving Anthony as much as I had.
“The funeral?” asked his mother, incredulously. “You are not welcome at Anthony’s funeral and you are not welcome here.”
“Anita,” said Anthony’s father, putting his hand on Anthony’s mother’s shoulder. “Don’t upset yourself.”
“Don’t upset myself?” she said, coldly. “He murdered our son.”
“I didn’t mean for anything to happen the way it did,” I said. “I loved him.”
“You loved him? How can you tell me you loved him when you let him go to that neighbourhood with you? When you let those people attack him! I know what happened here. You found Anthony with all his vulnerabilities and you used him. You lived in this house, you brought in your family, you ate our food and slept in our beds. You took money from him. He was so blinded by some kind of stupid teenage infatuation that he didn’t realise that you were like a sponge on him. Don’t think you can come here and getting anything from us. We know what you are. You killed him. His blood is all over your hands.”
I felt that rage coming back, burning in my stomach. I wanted to shout, you didn’t even know him. You couldn’t tell me his favourite food or what he was afraid of or the stupid things that made him laugh. You didn’t give a shit about him until it was too late. You have no concept of love or family. But I didn’t. I couldn’t. There was a part of me that felt like I absolutely deserved everything Anthony’s mother said to me. I needed to be punished and tortured for the situation I had created and the more she yelled at me the more I felt like she had every right.
“I’m sorry,” I said. “I just thought… I thought maybe you would want to know some of the things I remember about him.”
“I can’t look at you,” said Anthony’s mother. “You make me sick. You disgust me.”
She turned on her heel and went back into the house.
“Look,” said Anthony’s father, his arms folded. “I don’t know what you’re trying to do coming here and upsetting my wife. I think we’ve been through enough without having to deal with this as well. You should leave and please don’t come back again. I asked Iva to collect up the things you left here. You can see her at the back door. She’ll give them to you.”
He stepped back and closed the door in my face.
I suppose I had had some kind of desperate notion that they would be kind and soft like him and that they would let me come in and lie on his bed and touch his things. I thought they might let me remember him with them and that we could all be in pain together. I don’t know where I got the idea from since the picture Anthony had painted me was exactly what I had just seen.
Before I even knocked at the back door, Iva had opened it. She was an absolute mess. Her hair was dishevelled and her eyes were red and swollen. It looked like she had aged ten years. She grabbed me and pulled me into a fierce hug.
“Oh Eric,” she said. “This is most horrible, terrible thing. My heart, it is completely broken.”
“Mine too,” I said.
“You not listen to them,” she said, passionately. “You not listen to what that witch say to you! I hear all of it. She is not a mother. She does not even know what means the word!
“You not angry with me?” I asked.
“Oh, obi, no,” she said. “Me, I live with Anthony from when he is seven and they leave him the first time. He always sad and lost child and Iva do best to make him smile but he never happy till he meet you. You were best thing ever happened to him. He was new boy with you. What happen it not your fault. Is nobody fault but those bad bad men that hurt you. I tell the witch the same thing but she ignore me. They give me the sack. Iva go back to Bulgaria tomorrow. They say it not right I let you and Kayla stay here.”
“Oh Jesus,” I said. “I am so sorry. This is my fault.”
“No!” she said even more vehemently. “This last time, happiest time ever with you and with Kayla. I still young. Go back to Bulgaria, maybe meet nice man have babies of own.”
“I think that’s a great idea,” I said. “You’d be the best mom in the world ever.”
“Where is Kayla?” she asked. “I so scared when you not come back from go visit your mother. I not know what to do so I call police. I hope I not give too much trouble.”
I told her about Ross and Alison and how Kayla was with her new family, starting again.
Iva shook her head. “Is not right you not together!”
“I know,” I said. “But she needs a real family. I can’t give her than on my own.”
“I have for you some things,” said Iva, turning to the cupboard in the hall.
“This your cello and your clothes and some photos… and also… also this.”
She held up Anthony’s Horrors t-shirt. He had almost lived in it and he was always anxious when it was in the wash.
“You have about fifty t-shirts,” I’d tell him.
“I like that one,” he’d always say.
It was black with a white square that had a silhouette of the band on it, with Faris Rotter’s big hair standing out, making him look a bit like the offspring of Robert Smith and a broom.
“For to remember,” she said. “He would have want you have it.”
“Thank-you,” I said taking the t-shirt and holding it to my face. Even though it was clean it still held a slight residual smell of Anthony and I inhaled deeply trying to fill myself with it.
“Thank-you,” I said, feeling the constant ache in my chest turn into a flood of pain so intense that it briefly blinded me. “I’ll miss you.”
“Me also,” she said, opening her arms for me to hug her again.
Going back to my old flat felt like returning to a battlefield after the war is over when the smell of blood is still thick on the ground. It was familiar in a way that was unsettling rather than comforting. My mother was very obviously gone. Her bedroom had been hastily packed up and there were still random bits of her clothing hanging out of the dresser and trailing across the floor, as if it had vomited. I was not surprised to find that there were dirty dishes in the kitchen and an ashtray full of cigarette ends on the coffee table.
I set my possessions down in my bedroom, which was in pieces. My mother must have given it another good going over after I left to make sure there wasn’t anything else of value that I might have returned to collect. I went into the kitchen and got a bucket and a broom. It didn’t matter that my ribs ached in protest, I needed to distract myself. Between the pain and the urge to scrub every surface of the house, I could bleach my mind blank.
I cleaned for twenty-four hours straight before I eventually realised that a whole day had come and gone. A cleaned behind and under things. I scrubbed the skirting boards and picture rails. I pulled the fridge and the cooker out and cleaned behind them. I even climbed on a chair and wiped the ceiling with a mop head. I didn’t bother to go to my bed to sleep, I just lay on the couch where I had come to a stop and passed out into a dreamless slumber.
I tried to find myself things to do to create some kind of normality. I made myself get up and get dressed. I showered. I ate. I slept. But I felt like a reflection of myself. I was completely insubstantial, sleepwalking through and existence I didn’t belong in day after day. I had never been alone like this before. Before this I had not even understood the concept of loneliness. Not this kind of loneliness where their was no prospect of connecting with anyone else anywhere on my horizon. When I was a young child I had had LeRoy and his gang and even though they weren’t particularly good friends, they were a place to go when my house became too much for me and I had had Finn and then Kayla and Anthony. There had always been somewhere to go and someone to focus on or turn to but now the flat felt oppressive as if it were full of ghosts.
My phantom father lurked at every corner, Finn hid behind the doors and Anthony was everywhere. Everything reminded me of him. Every smell, every sound, every thought I had could be connected to him in some way and so he filled every space around me until he squeezed all of the air out of every room and I couldn’t breathe and they all whispered together to each other about how I had failed every one of them.
Alison rang me every night so that I could speak to Kayla. She was uproariously happy, telling me long protracted stories of her adventures with Meggie and the puppy and learning to swim and how she was going to school in the autumn. I forced myself to sound cheerful and to focus and listen and be engaged and present. She asked me every time when I was coming to visit and I told her soon. And then Alison would tell me I was very welcome to come and visit absolutely any time I wanted to and I did want to, I suppose. But the thought of conducting conversations with her and Ross and being polite and friendly and engaged was more than I thought I could possibly manage. I didn’t want to be a dark, miserable spectre in Kayla’s life. I was afraid if I visited I would unsettle equilibrium she had managed to find.
They tell you that when you lose someone you love it’s supposed to get better. Time is supposed to heal things but I didn’t feel better. Everyday I felt worse. Every moment it felt like the dark was encroaching on me and threatening to completely overwhelm me. My getting up and getting dressed and eating and sleeping was a farce and there was no one to watch me trying to be alive and I couldn’t do it anymore.
When I did my massive clean up of the flat I had found a bottle of vodka that someone had hidden behind the sink. It might have been my mother hiding it from one of the boyfriends or just as easily one of them hiding it from her but it was there, wedged against the pipes. I had put it on the kitchen counter where I could see it. Common logic told me that I should pour it down the drain but I had put it there like a strange sort of beacon and it would catch my glance occasionally, watching me like I watched it.
And so on the third of August 2009 I sat down on the kitchen floor with the vodka and the little plastic bottle of painkillers the hospital had send me home with. I hadn’t been taking them. I’m not sure if I was subconsciously saving them or if it was just another way to cause myself more physical pain and in so doing be distracted from my feelings but the bottle was still full. I laid them out on the floor one after the other in a line. There were twenty-six of them, gleaming white perfect little orbs.
I thought about all the things that they represented. Silence. Nothingness. Cold. Escape. Freedom. Conclusion. I had not written a note. There was no one to read it. Now that Kayla was no longer with me and she was safe and happy. She didn’t need me and she didn’t need to know what had made me do this. What would I have written in a note? “I was alone. I was incomplete without him and I was too weak to live like this. I’m sorry.” But I wasn’t sorry. I was excited. I suffered no illusions that I would be reunited with Anthony. I don’t believe any of that stuff, when you’re dead you’re dead but the prospect of nothingness made me feel fully awake in a way that I hadn’t since before the attack.
It had to be done properly though and so I put on Anthony’s t-shirt and I picked up my cello. I wanted to play it one last time before this all ended. I would only be able to play my bits of course but it had unintentionally become our swan song. Our Sonata, “I Love Everything About You That Hurts” by E. Hayes and A. Hawkins.
I had not touched my cello since I had brought it back from Anthony’s house. I hadn’t wanted to play. Every note was attached to him but now it seemed right. It seemed like I should open up my soul completely before I closed it forever.
When I opened the cello case there was an envelope tucked under the strings on the neck with my name on it in Anthony’s wispy, looped writing. I stared at the envelope for a long time. It was the last thing I had expected and my stomach churned at the idea of what might be in it. Eventually I picked it up and opened it. There were two pieces of paper in it. One was full of Anthony’s handwriting and the other was something official looking. I read Anthony’s letter first.
