be glimpsed round a corner. I will never tell her the failed one-night-stand, bald-ballsack story and feel gratified at her gurgling laughter. She will never give me her voluble and welcome scathing opinions on the ‘atrocity’ of Hester’s proposal, and soothe my suffering.
I’ve lost her standing shoulder to shoulder with me, in a matching dress, holding an identical bunch of flowers? The problems I had only hours ago were so miniscule.
You usually say old people are a ‘comfort’ to each other. But that’s what Susie and I were, I can see that so clearly, the secret formula: each other’s comfort and joy.
The eternity of the silence overwhelms me. The line between us buzzes with monotonous static, a line never to be busy again.
The only word I can think of that comes close to how I feel is: desolate.
11
I Google search: what time is it New York. Lunchtime. My hands tremble with the enormity of the task I’ve taken upon myself with offering to ring Fin and guiltily, although it’s seven at night and I lost my best friend today so I am not sure why I feel guilty, I pour myself a glass of white wine to take the edge off. It might be because Susie can’t have a glass of wine.
I can’t have any more than this, I know that: the prospect of waking up hungover tomorrow is unbearable, because the prospect of waking up tomorrow is already unbearable.
Does the fact that Susie and her brother were estranged make it easier or harder to have this conversation? More complicated, I think, barely easier. I have no gauge of his response. I’ve never had to break news like this in my life before. I see why Ed was so traumatised by calling me.
After some stiffening gulps of fridge-cold supermarket Sauvignon, I pick up Susie’s phone.
What if she changed her passcode? I can imagine her having done that, not because she didn’t trust me but because she was fastidious.
Justin is right, she guarded her privacy carefully. Not obsessively, not much more than average, but Susie had inherited her mum’s idea that it was vulgar to let it all hang out in public. Her Facebook was a tightly locked-down space for seventy or so people and no one ever knew from such a forum who she was dating. Her longer-term boyfriends were sometimes irritated at her refusal to post his’n’hers profile pictures, or change ‘Relationship Status’.
Gobbing away on Twitter or posting bikinis on Instagram were inconsistent, she said, with her being something senior and respectable in finance, which meant she spent half the week in London and earned twice as much as the rest of us.
I press the keypad of her phone with exaggerated care and the screen ripples into the small square tiles of a rainbow of apps. Oh, God. I feel the high of successful access, and the prickle of intrusion without permission.
I reassure myself – I’m here for one reason only and that’s her brother’s phone number. I won’t snoop. I’m the guardian of Susie’s world in here, and it’s a responsibility I take very seriously.
I scroll down to Contacts and go direct to ‘H’. There are a few family members in there, but no Fin, and no one who sounds like a nickname for Fin. Somehow, I don’t think she ever called him Brenda.
I try ‘F’. Nothing there, either. ‘B’, for brother? Nope. I’m at a loss. Does she hate him so much she erased him from her phonebook?
I feel sure she hadn’t taken that step (unless there’s been a huge, game-changing fight, but she’d have likely mentioned such a thing). I recall every once in a blue moon her seeing a message, Susie’s lip curling and her saying: ugh Fin, he can wait.
However disliked her brother was, not knowing it was him when he called would’ve only put her on the back foot.
I’m out of ideas about where he’s been hidden, so I scroll manually through her list, starting with Annie Butler, Aveda Salon and Andy Wightman.
I think about the ripples in the pond from this news, the many people who need to be told. I have one person to inform and I’m already failing at the task. I’ve started to give up hope, having scrolled from A to Z, when I trip over, second time round in the B section:
My Wanker of a Brother
Oh. Oh. It’s obviously him: followed by a row of digits for a mobile phone number, with the international code in front. I