Mike. Mike is here and holding me like I’m his own child.
“It’s okay, Dylan,” he whispers, and cradles my head to his shoulder. “Jesus, if I could just… It’s okay.”
Julia squeezes his arm. “Take him outside. El never liked these places anyway. Let him do his grieving in the open air.”
But you did like churches, I want to tell her. Not fake clinical pretend places like this. Not factories for processing the dead. You told me once you never believed in God, not even when you were little, but you loved the houses worshippers had built for Him.People say Art is about truth, you told me,but that’s bullshit. Truth is dull and frightening and soul-destroying. Art is about the wonderful lies we tell ourselves so that we can bear to live with the truth. Churches are like that. Beautiful, hideous lies.
I don’t know how Mike gets us out of the chapel. One minute I’m making this inhuman sound over your body and the next we’re under the awning where the hearses wait. I go limp. Mike has to catch me and hold me up. Because I’ve just understood something and it’s taken the last of my strength away.
I am never ever going to see you again.
You’re gone, El. Officially gone. And it’s about time I started.
I turn to Mike. “Will you do something for me?”
He nods without hesitation. “Anything. You know that.”
“Then help me find the person who rescued me,” I say. “Because I need to ask them one important question.”
“What question?”
I shake my head. “Why did they leave him to die?”
Mike removes his black baseball cap and rubs a hand across a smooth, hairless scalp. I’m an idiot. I should have realized what he’d done as soon as I saw the cap. Mike has hated hats ever since World Book Day in Year Seven when Jessie Atkins laughed at the diamanté-studded cowboy hat Carol had bought him. Mike had come as this hard-as-nails gunslinger from these old Wild West novels he read with his dad. He was so proud, and then Jessie started laughing and pointing and calling him “Brokeback Berrington”. The name stuck for a whole term and that was the end of Mike’s love affair with both hats and reading.
“I know.” He shrugs. “How hard am I rocking this look?”
“Pretty frickin’ hard.” I nod.
“So I finally took El’s advice,” he says. “Shaved off the lot. It was getting really patchy and gross-looking anyway. Do you think he’d approve?”
Mike had the most amazing hair before this fuckstorm of horribleness hit him. Honestly, girls used to ogle those thick curly locks from the other side of the canteen.
“I think El would love it,” I say. “It makes your eyes really stand out somehow. I never realized before how blue they are.”
He seems pleased with this. We’re sitting on a bench in an area of the crematorium called The Garden of Tranquillity. I guess it lives up to its name. There are these long avenues with arches of trailing flowers, pink and purple and white trumpets, and the air smells of honeysuckle.
“All right,” he says, “so do you want to tell me what’s going on?”
But suddenly I’m not ready. Saying what I need to say to Mike might reveal things about me that I’m not sure I want revealed. It has to be done, I know, but I need a moment. I press my hands between my knees and lower my gaze. “How’re you doing, Mike?”
“Well, apparently I have these incredibly sexy eyes now.” He bats his eyelids and I notice his lashes, like the rest of his hair, are gone. He catches my look and shrugs. “It’s been a week, bit more, since my last chemo, and I no longer feel like hurling my guts up every five seconds. I’ve started jogging again too, and Ollie comes round for a kickabout every now and then.”
“You were at the hospital that day,” I murmur.
He nods and looks away. “Hooked up to my favourite drip and then wheeled home. Sorry I wasn’t still there when…” He makes this wet coughing sound. “When they brought you in.”
“Dude, don’t be ridiculous.”
“But we are ridiculous, mate.” He sucks his forefinger and waggles it in my ear until I laugh and slap him away.
Ilaugh.I’m sorry, El.
“Berrington and McKee, the Incredible Twat Brothers. Remember?”
I do. Our escapology act, Year Seven. We’d seen this documentary about how magician Harry Houdini had escaped from a water tank while suspended upside down, and decided, in our stupidity, that before the summer was over we’d thrill the town with our own death-defying feat. We borrowed books from the library, built our own props, secretly printed a million tickets on my dad’s printer, and invited the whole neighbourhood to the show. The result: Mike nearly suffocated inside a sack and my mum had to call the fire brigade to cut me out of my chains. Ollie Reynolds pissed his pants laughing and came up with the name of our extinct double act: the Incredible Twat Brothers.
“Okay,” Mike says, “no more beating about the bush. Let’s hear it.”
