‘Really? I support Liverpool,’ he said, looking at me as if he wasn’t sure he could really trust me based on the football team I had lied about supporting.
I checked my nose in the mirror. It had stopped bleeding and had dried all crusty around the outside and clotted on the inside with a few globules that I blew out.
‘Has it stopped?’ Ronan asked, crouching down low to gaze up my nostrils as if calling into a cave and expecting to hear an echo back.
‘It’s stopped,’ I said, looking down at him.
There was a moment standing there where I wanted to say:
‘But maybe we should stay here for a bit longer just to make sure,’ because there’s something about being out of class when everyone else is in class that has a special kind of excitement to it. Maybe it’s because all the corridors that are usually packed are now vast stretches of free runway that only exist in that time when all classes are in progress. The playground was the same; at a time like that Ronan and me could have gone and stood in the middle and felt like we were in some kind of time freeze. There was a new feeling of bravery in me for the first time in my life at that moment and I wanted to do something with it and I wanted to do it with Ronan. But instead I said:
‘Let’s go back before Ms Toner notices we’ve been gone too long.’
‘Hardly likely when she didn’t notice all the blood pouring out of your face,’ he said, and we both fell into hysterics as we made our way back to the classroom.
It was hard to believe that was four years ago, as I stood at the front gates waiting eagerly for Ronan to arrive. That’s how every morning began; me waiting at the gates to see Ronan’s beaming face bounding out of his parents’ car and running towards me. And when it was the first day of a new school year and we hadn’t spoken in weeks I was even more excited to see him and hear all about his summer adventures. Laughing together, my sides aching, I’d realise I hadn’t laughed like that in weeks. My day didn’t begin, not without Ronan.
4
I used to wonder if other people got the same kinds of feelings as me, but I wasn’t brave enough to ask anyone, not even Ronan. As well as ‘vivid life moments’ I also got ‘the dark feeling’. I’d feel it sitting at the bottom of my stomach. It was impossible to ignore. But if other people did experience the same thing I could understand if they did ignore it because it was scary to acknowledge it was there.
In January, when Granny was in hospital, I visited her a lot with Mum. The snow was falling heavily one night as we sat by her bedside. She was drifting in and out of consciousness. On one of her drift-ins she opened her eyes and tried to reach for the bedside locker. On top of the locker was a jug of water, a plastic tumbler, a poinsettia plant, a book of crossword puzzles, a copy of January’sReader’s Digest, her watch which she couldn’t wear anymore because her wrists had swollen up too much, her glasses which the nurses had to take off because the oxygen mask was pressing on them, and her pouch of rosary beads. It was the beads she seemed to be reaching for.
‘Do you want your beads, Granny?’ I said and she nodded.They were the ones she always prayed with, they were wooden and painted a rose colour inside a black leather pouch with ‘My Rosary’ printed in cracked gold lettering on it. When I put the rosary pouch into her hands she pressed it back into mine with a gentle force. She said something that was muffled inside the oxygen mask but I knew what it was.
‘I love you too, Granny,’ I said back.
She took a few hard breaths behind the mask, storing up enough force to say,
‘I love you all.’
I told her I loved her again; I told her that everyone loved her, would always love her.
Then the dark feeling came.
‘I’ll see you tomorrow, Granny.’
The feeling lurked as I walked away down the corridor leaving Granny and Mum behind. It was growing deeper as Dad met me in the reception and we walked out into the snow and got into the car. We drove in silence but I could hear my last words to Granny over and over in my head. I said I’d see her tomorrow as if I didn’t know she’d die in the night. As if the dark feeling wasn’t inside me, telling me to stay, not to walk out into the snowy night and make sleety footprints I could never take back.
But I did.
When the phone rang after 5 a.m. I didn’t need to know what was said on the other end. I knew Granny had died. And when Mum was crying in the hospital with Granny on the other side of the sheet, and when she asked Dad what took us so long to come back to the hospital and why she had to be there on her own for hours after she’d phoned us, and when Dad looked at me not knowing what to say because he knew it was my fault we were delayed, I swore I’d never ignore the dark feeling ever again.
That September morning, standing at the school gates waiting for Ronan, the dark feeling was beginning to form.
5
Since Ronan and me only saw each other in school we hadn’t been to each other’s houses or met each other’s parents properly, but my mum and dad said I talked so much about him that they felt like they knew him already. I wondered if Ronan was any different in the real world outside school. It was only on non-uniform days twice a year that I got to see him in his normal clothes: usually a sports T-shirt and tracksuit bottoms that had stripes down the side and white trainers. He would give the same annoyed speech every non-uniform day that he couldn’t wear his Liverpool jersey because the school didn’t allow football colours to be worn. Ronan not only looked the part of the star sportsman, he acted it too. He won the Best Sportsman of the Year Award four years running on Prize Day.
On weekends Ronan played football with non-school friends and I worked at the funeral home, but every Saturday and Sunday night we talked for hours on the phone until one of our parents forced us off. The longest time we’d go without speaking was the summer holidays because Ronan went to Boston with his parents to spend time with family who lived there and didn’t come back until the end of August. So on the first day of term back at school there was loads for us to catch up on. If you added up the time we got to spend together it was probably quite a lot – six hours a day in school, five days a week for nearly ten months, for four years: that’s what amounted to a friendship;ourfriendship, at least.
In all that time there’s one thing that was guaranteed: Ronan wasalwaysin school no matter what. Whatever the weather, even if he was sick or there was bad traffic on the way to school, he was always there. Along with the Best Sportsman Award he also got the One Hundred Per Cent Attendance Award four years running and I knew he was going for the full five-year record.
I got the bus into school every morning and Ronan was dropped off by his mum or dad usually five minutes after I’d arrived. But on that September morning of our final year I was still waiting for him when the bell rang for assembly and the streams of students started to flow past me like I was a boulder in a river. Ronan had never been that late before, he’d never missed assembly. I didn’t want to walk away with all the other students, but I had no choice when Miss Hackett ushered me along. I glanced back at the gates but there was no sign of Ronan.
In the assembly hall we stood in lines according to year group. Now that we were in fifth year, the oldest, we stood at the back. The people in my year I stood with felt like strangers to me when I didn’t have my best friend beside me. Even after four years I felt like I didn’t know any of them and they definitely didn’t know me.
Kevin Sherry, who I last saw at Feeney’s Funeral Home in the summer, was standing with his girlfriend Leanne further along the line. I could hear him laughing loudly. When Ileaned forward to look up the line he caught my eye, his face dropped and he gave me that same hard look he had given me at Feeney’s yard. Except this time he didn’t look weak or small because he was in school, acting his over-confident self again. I felt bad that I didn’t get to say to him that I was sorry for his loss, but something about the way he looked at me said I better not even try or else he’d tell everyone that I was a weirdo who worked with dead bodies, even if that wasn’t true.
