‘I passed my driving test today, you know.’
‘I know,’ he’d say, ‘why are the L plates on the floor? I thought this was a celebration?’
I went over and picked them up.
‘Rip them up,’ said Mr McCoy.
‘Yeah,’ Ronan would have said, ‘rip them up!’
‘Alright,’ I said and tore them up with desperate, teary laughter. There was a boisterous release of ‘hurray’ from everyone.
‘Happy birthday,’ Ronan would have said.
‘I made a birthday wish, you know,’ I said. ‘I wished you’d wake up and celebrate with me.’
‘Sorry, man,’ he’d have said. ‘I let you down.’
I stared into his closed eyes, his blue pallor making me feel sick with pain.
‘Ronan,’ I said, tears now pouring down my face, ‘I love you. I’m going to miss you so much.’
I took his hand, limp and cool. Mr and Mrs McCoy took his other hand and we hugged ourselves down over his pumping body like a human blanket.
I don’t know when the doctor and nurses came to be in the room, I don’t know when the procedures started to take place, I just know that I never, not for one second, let go of Ronan’s hand or stopped staring into his sleeping face with his mum’s hand stroking the top of his head and his dad’s voice intoning low words into his ear. Our cluster around him, our ring of love shaking with sorrow and juddering from the rhythm of Ronan’s breath until it stopped and Ronan lay still.
Pure silence.
The thump of my heart in my throat as it broke.
It broke so loudly that it seemed like the windows of the hospital room smashed inwards.
Ringing in my ears.
A steady ring.
The machine that had metronomed Ronan’s heart held the note.
A clicking noise.
A switch.
Then there was nothing.
47
‘Time waits for no man.’
Mr Feeney was wrong.
On the day my best friend died time stopped.
There was no birthday.
There was no first day of summer.
With time having stopped it meant I could stay as close as I possibly could to the life I had lived up to that point, a life that had Ronan in it.
If time were to start again every second would take me away from that life and into a future without him.
