‘I don’t know, Brendan, I think you’d have found that path yourself, I just put it in words.’
‘Words that have made everything better, Miss. Today’s a better day.’
‘And what about you, Brendan? How are you today?’
The dark feeling hadn’t gone but I was still able to say a word, despite everything else, and know that it was close enough to being true.
‘Happy.’
‘Well, that makes me happy too. You’ve been a pleasure to have in my form class, I’m going to miss you, now go before I start crying.’
‘Another biblical flood, Miss?’
We both laughed.
‘I’m going to see you on prize day anyway,’ she said.
I wanted to hug her but it didn’t seem right.
‘OK, Miss. Thanks, Miss. Bye, Miss.’
I walked away from her room and through the grounds of the school one last time. Past classrooms that had younger years’ lessons continuing on; just another day for them. I walked through the gates that I used to wait for Ronan at. Those gates were always open, but when I walked through them and away from the school for the last time, in my head, they closed. They locked.
I caught the public bus home. I was the only student on board. Two other passengers were elderly women sitting together silently; another was a woman with a baby, it cried the whole way, she couldn’t make it stop. The driver let meout near the petrol station for me to make my last schoolbag-lumbered walk home. When I got there and stood on the front doorstep I could almost see myself from five years ago on that same step, posing for Mum to take a photo of my ‘first day at the big school’. A tiny trace of that little ghost version of me was still standing there and I wanted to tell him to put a pack of tissues in his pocket, he’d need them for his nosebleed later; but then maybe Ronan wouldn’t offer to help him if he did that, so I let him go on.
When I closed the front door and stood in the hallway I was hoping that the dark feeling would be gone by then so that I could run upstairs, change into my normal clothes and get Dad to drive me to Ronan’s house, but it was still there.
‘Brendan?’
It was Mum’s voice from the living room.
When I opened the door she was sitting with Dad on the sofa. As soon as I saw their faces the dark feeling engulfed me. It had been trying to warn me about this moment.
‘What’s happened?’ I said. ‘What’s happened to him?’
42
‘Ronan’s taken a turn for the worse,’ Mum said. ‘He’s had to go into hospital.’
‘When?’
‘Last week,’ she said.
‘But he’d been showing signs the week before that,’ Dad said. ‘It was hard for them to tell because Ronan was putting a brave face on it, but that’s what they think, it was slowly building in him.’
‘Theysaid?Whosaid?’
‘The McCoys. Or that’s what the doctors told the McCoys,’ said Dad.
‘You were talking to the McCoys?’
‘Yes.’
‘Last week?’
‘Yes.’
‘And they told you?’
