The rumble of voices was silenced by Principal Pickereen appearing on-stage at the front. He began talking, something about welcoming all the new faces and something about all the old faces, but I wasn’t hearing him properly, I was only thinking about where Ronan could be. As Principal Pickereen continued speaking, Mrs O’Neill silently walked down the line, ticking off her register as she came to each face she knew so well. She ticked and ticked as she came along and when she came to me she paused with a look in her eyes I had never seen before; it was hard to place but I knew when she ticked me present that the next mark she made was for Ronan, marking him absent.
When assembly ended the noise erupted once again with everyone spilling towards the double doors. I stood on tiptoes to see Mrs O’Neill at the side of the hall by the climbing rungs talking with a few other teachers. I was wading my way towards her when I got shoulder barged.
‘All on your own?’ said Kevin Sherry, not linked to Leanne’s arm for once. ‘No one to talk to?’ I just looked at him with my eyes screwed up like I couldn’t make sense of him, which I couldn’t, not him or anyone else in my year except for Ronan. I was about to say I was sorry about his granda’s passing but he stopped me.
‘Don’t,’ he said with his fist at my chest, ‘alright? Don’t.’ He stared at me and then walked off to join his group of footballfriends, laughing and roughing each other in headlocks. Groups like that were a mystery to me. I was never in one, having just one really good friend was enough for me and it was enough for Ronan too. We didn’t need anyone else. But if I did have a group of friends like that, I’d like to think I’d trust them enough to tell them that my granda had died over the summer and that they’d be good enough friends to support me. That’s what Ronan did for me when Granny died. But it was clear that Kevin didn’t want his friends to know. I was glad I didn’t have friends like that, I bet it’s even more lonely than having no friends at all.
I switched my focus back to Mrs O’Neill now that the crowd had cleared and I headed straight for her.
‘Mrs O’Neill.’ She turned to look at me. ‘Ronan isn’t here today,’ I said. She excused herself from talking to Mr Maxwell and took a few steps along the wall towards me.
‘No, Brendan, unfortunately not,’ she said. Her voice had a natural kindness to it and it sounded even kinder that morning, which, combined with her hazel eyes in her perfect oval face, relaxed me just a fraction because of how comforting she was to be around.
‘Will he be coming in later, Miss?’
‘Have you not been speaking to his parents at all, Brendan?’
‘No, Miss … because …’ I felt embarrassed because I thought I didn’t need to explain anything to Mrs O’Neill, I thought she knew everything about me and Ronan and the type of friends we were. My heart sank when I realised that I probably wasn’t as known by her as I thought I was. She looked at me with that sympathetic gaze.
‘I think you’d better get to class, Brendan.’
It wasn’t like her to be so distant. I was too confused to push any further, so I wandered off to my first class of the year, Maths with Mr Wilson.
All through class I kept thinking about the last time I saw Ronan; it was the end of June when we broke for the summer holidays and I knew I wouldn’t see him again for eight long weeks. On that last day of school I watched him running towards his mum’s car with his backpack straps over both shoulders, his blazer pulled up over the top of his head so that when he put his arms out straight like airplane wings he looked like some sort of superhero in schoolboy form running towards his summer.
The next time I saw him wasn’t the 1st of September like I’d expected, it wouldn’t even be in October. The next time I saw Ronan was in November.
‘November,’ Mr Feeney always said, ‘is the beginning of the busy season.’
6
Oak.
Mr Feeney says oak is the most popular wood.
Coffins made from great tall oaks.
I think I’d choose oak.
Out there, somewhere in the world, there’s a tree and it’s growing.
It’s growing for me.
7
Ronan could really play football, not as well as Kevin Sherry, but definitely better than me. Not only was I bad, I had absolutely no interest in getting good. When we had football for PE I hated it; it meant I’d have to go through the embarrassment of the captains picking their teams. Kevin was almost always captain and never picked me. But when Ronan was captain he picked me first and positioned me in defence because he said that was where I was strongest, but I knew he was just being kind. It worked, though. I probably played better because of that, or if not better then at least happier.
Running was more my sport and Ronan was good at that too. Cross-country was where he excelled, whereas I was more suited to short distance. So it was Ronan’s encouragement that kept me going through the muddy fields on those rainy cross-country PE lessons. Kevin Sherry wasn’t a good runner. Ronan and me loved that there was a physical activity we could both beat him at easily. The thing about Ronan, though, was that he didn’t care about winning, he just loved the challenge and doing the best he could. He usually did finish first, but thetimes he finished second or third didn’t seem to bother him at all.
It was the same in lessons, he was the top of his class in most subjects even though he didn’t seem to study much. He wrote imaginative stories in English. He had a good head for numbers. He loved all the sciences and his French sounded fluent to my ear, especially since French was my weakest subject and I found it hard to speak without my Northern Irish accent underneath.
In third year there was a ski trip to Bulgaria. I couldn’t go because it was too expensive but I wasn’t surprised when Ronan came back with stories of his trips down the toughest slopes. He went on ski holidays with his family over Christmas most years too, and I’d imagine him like he was in one of those old James Bond films that were set in the Alps or somewhere like that.
Was there anything Ronan wasn’t good at? Probably not, he was just that kind of boy. I often wondered why he was friends with me because I definitely wasn’t that kind of boy. But Ronan never made me feel like I was different because he was the one who picked me first in football, who gave me answers to maths questions, who read my stories in English and said they were really good, who teamed up with me as lab partner in Chemistry and sat beside me on the bus when we went on a school trip to the planetarium and shared a packet of space ice cream on the way back, who once did my French homework for me and, when we got found out, had to do detention and never told our parents, who made me laugh, who made me feel like a good friend, a good person, a better me, who ran with me and made me run faster, who ran towards his mum’s car on the last day of June, who disappeared, who never came back.
8
They told me Ronan would be coming back to school the first week of November.
