EPILOGUE
Tasha rang me again, asking if I’d be interested in a job at the paper. Yet again, I politely declined. I think she still felt she owed much of her success – maybe most of it on the TellTale Killer story – to me, and this was her way of paying it back. But I told her that after I threw her phone into the creek, we were now even. She laughed and told me to call if I ever wanted something, so I thanked her and hung up.
Almost immediately, I dodged yet another call from Chlo. I’d speak to her later, after I’d finished burning the remnants of my crime wall in the garden while I tried to deter Toast from getting too close to mounting the red-hot steel drum. I was incinerating the various things in it while she enjoyed the June sunshine glistening on her shell. Today felt like the right time to do it, to finish with everything.
By the time I got back from meeting Carlota, I’d heard the rather unfortunate news that Jago had finally woken up from his coma but that was just from Nico texting me. The news didn’t even make the very edges of the BBC homepage. There was nothing left of him or the TellTale Killer now, his myth had firmly been extinguished that night. People had moved on from himin the era of twenty-four-hour news and would rarely think about him again.
‘You ready to go?’ Bill asked, as I made sure the flames were out.
I noticed that the last of the bright pink cherry blossoms had just about bloomed across the graveyard as I held the bouquet of flowers close to my chest. You know, I understood the appeal of flowers at weddings, or even as a romantic gesture for a loved one on Valentine’s Day or an anniversary. But I had never quite grasped why we so often brought them for the dead. It wasn’t as if they could admire the blooms, or breathe in their aroma, or even sneeze uncontrollably from hay fever at the mere suggestion of them. Who really were they for?
No, but then, of course, I remembered. My years working at a funeral directors had taught me that funerals and graves and the like were never really for the dead at all. They had always been for the living. That’s what I had missed, we do this all so we can keep a part of them with us. It’s never really been for them.
I’d told Aleks a few months ago that I was going to do this, and he’d asked if I wanted him to come with me. I’d said no, politely. I wanted to, I needed to do this alone, but it had still taken me a while to galvanise the courage.
Aleks had come to visit me in hospital while I was still recovering, after he’d realised that the heart in his freezer was missing, and all of the implications of that. At first, I think, just like when Chlo and Mum and Dad found out, he didn’t quite know how to process it.
I could tell he wasn’t exactly pleased with what I’d done, but he told me he understood. And, more than that, he said he was glad. Glad that, while nothing would ever bring Greta back, the TellTale Killer would never hurt anyone again.
He eventually sent me the things he had told Chlo and I that Greta would have wanted us to have. As I had carefullyunwrapped the cardboard packaging and peeled away the layers of bubble wrap, the memories came through one at a time and then suddenly all at once, to the point where I couldn’t believe I had forgotten so many fond moments between us. I couldn’t help but chuckle at the sight of her beloved stuffed toys and all the various soap opera stories they had been unwilling participants of. Then I saw it, an envelope.
It had my name on the front. It was for my birthday; the one she had forgotten to give me on the night she died. I hesitated at first, the seal was still completely intact. But before I could even have a chance to second-guess myself, I tore the paper open and yanked the card out. On the front, Borat grinned, declaring, ‘Your Birthday. Very Nice.’
‘So cringe,’ I muttered to myself, hoping she wouldn’t see me smile.
Inside, in her unmistakable messy cursive handwriting, she had written:
Hello you, Clot.
She didn’t say ‘clot’.
you are pains in my arsehole…
(I believe that was meant to be in the Borat voice)
…but you are the best anal fissure I could ever want. Have a lovely birthday, Petal.
It would have been nice if she had said something along the lines of always loving me or always being my best friend, but if this was the last-ever thing I’d hear from Greta then at least she was being true to form.
Finally, I had found my way to her grave. I had always knownwhere it was, but I had never quite made it that far up the hill at St Michael’s before. I turned to check on Ben. He was fine, leaning against the car I still hadn’t managed to crash during our driving lessons, with Bill standing a little further up by the church at the bottom of the hill.
I knew chemo had been tough for Ben over the past few months, but the doctors had said he was making great progress. It turns out that almost losing your life really makes you appreciate having it. At least for now, he had decided, he would keep trying to see how much more he could get. He had told us that, as he’d slumped there on the cold steel chair in Hammersmith, he thought about what I had said to him about Greta, how I’d do anything for one more day with her. So that’s what he said to Bill and me: ‘I’ll give you a few more days. As many as I possibly can. Maybe a clean-break death is overrated.’
Bill, meanwhile, had told me to stop paying him rent and to put that money towards moving out, which I can’t say I disagreed with.
I let out a long exhale as I walked the last few steps to Greta’s grave, the only sounds around me the distant hum of cars on the road below, the faint rustling of birds in the trees above and the few children in the park opposite kicking a ball. As I smoothed my hand over the cool granite stone, my fingers traced the words engraved for her.
I had always liked that Aleks had made sure it read:
Greta: Daughter, Sister, Friend.
You didn’t always see that word a lot on headstones – friend – but he had always said how important Chlo and I were to Greta and he wanted to make sure we knew that.
Standing there suddenly felt awfully formal, so I slowly lowered myself onto the grass. A small smile tugged at my lips, as if she could somehow see me, a connection point between now and the mythical hereafter that I was almost certain didn’t exist… almost certain.
‘I miss you,’ I whispered aloud. ‘I really do miss you, Greta. I don’t think I understood, until right now, just how much I missed you. How much space you’ve left in my life. But I just want you to know that…’
I choked on the words, words I had been thinking in my head for so long but had never quite found the courage or even the ability to say aloud.
