And I did. I didn’t deny that what she said wasn’t true. There was nothing I could do and nothing I could’ve done then. I’d replayed everything through over and over, trying to work out where I’d gone wrong and if I could’ve gone back, I didn’t know what I’d be able to change. Maybe stop Ryan from having one last drink, or let him have another, and we wouldn’t have been on the same road at the same time as the drunk driver, but that would’ve required the ability to see the future.
“Tell me about that night. Tell me about Ryan.”
I froze. No one had been so blunt apart from a therapist whose office I’d walked out of straight after she’d asked me a similar question. I wasn’t walking away from Anya, or even letting her go right now.
“He was a character. He was a bit shorter than me and always had this really neat hair cut that he had trimmed every week. I used to take the piss out of it. He was always in a suit with a waistcoat. We nicknamed him Gandy.”
“After the model?”
“Hmmm.” I nuzzled her hair. “He was always dating someone and I don’t think he ever went home alone.”
“Somehow I suspect that you were the same.”
“Kind of. But nowhere near like him. He was the same at university. Practically had a fan club.”
“Why did he become an architect?”
“He liked making models. As part of the degree, you end up making shit tons of scale models and he was really into that as a kid. I suppose we all were, but he got really geeky over it. And he was obsessed with old buildings. We went into a night club in Manchester once and he spent the evening obsessing over period features.”
“What did you do?”
I’d fucked a girl in the toilets. It was during my manwhore phase, but I wasn’t going to tell her that. “Left him to it.”
“Otherwise occupied?”
“Let’s leave it at that.”
She giggled and kissed me again. “What were the awards for that night?”
My head went straight back there, flashbacks that were always there, mosquitoes in my mind waiting to draw blood. “He won one for a building he’d restored in the city centre. It was his pet project and had shit loads of publicity. He was brilliant, but he was modest. His speech was all about the other people who had been involved and the original designer.”
“What about yours?”
My award was now in the bottom of a canal.
“Sustainability. Second year in a row I’d won it. Ryan gave me the loudest cheer.”
“Did you take dates?”
“Just each other. We tried to keep work separate, and Ryan would’ve looked a total tool taking a different woman to each event. He was seeing someone though.” I thought of Adele. She sent me texts most weeks, sometimes pictures of him. I knew she was clinging to me to keep his memory of him alive in her, but I knew that he was going to end it, even though they were as together as Ryan had been with a woman. I told Anya as much.
“You can’t tell her that.”
“I know. It would be cruel.”
“But you can ask her to stop messaging you. When someone dies it affects everyone in different ways. And no one should have the pressure of being someone’s crutch.”
“Is that what your therapist told you?” I moved a hand to run my fingers through her hair.
“No. Nan told me that. Ryan’s girlfriend isn’t your responsibility. What happened after the awards?”
I kissed her collarbone and she tipped her head to one side to give me room to kiss her neck. Talking about this wasn’t something I’d done. There hadn’t been anyone who needed to know about those last minutes of Ryan’s life or how it had felt in that split second before the car had hit us. I’d wanted to protect others from it, keep them away from the fracturing of their fucking hearts.
“I was driving. I was always the driver. He wanted one for the road, a whisky sour, which I moaned about so he downed it quickly. He was half asleep in the car on the way back.” There were no lights on the road, a dual carriageway that was always quiet at that time. I’d had the radio on, playing nineties indie music and the window open to let cool air in. I wasn’t tired as I’d had a late start before walking a property near to where I lived.
I saw the car at the point where the dual carriageway became single. I remembered blinking, thinking I was getting a migraine for the first time in my life because I knew people could see lights, only these were flashing. I swerved to try to get out of the way when I realized it was another vehicle but it was too late. He was going way above the speed limit and he caught me anyway, the car a pirouetting dancer in her swansong. Ryan was woken up by the impact and I recalled his scream, ear piercing and hellish and then he went quiet.
When I looked at him, we were upside down and he wasn’t the same person I’d gotten into the car with.
