but my father was leaning forwards with his elbows on his knees and his hands clasped, talking, a low even monologue, very calm. I don’t remember most of it—my mind was severing itself from all of this, I felt like I was bobbing somewhere near the ceiling and my body was some bizarrely shaped pouch full of wet sand that had nothing to do with me—but bits drifted across my mind: . . . let us eat dessert first, always apple crumble because Phil hated Christmas pudding, we’d sit under the tree and . . . followed the music downstairs and found them dancing together, cheek to cheek, I turned around very quietly and . . . And that boat, remember? the old man who would let us take it out every summer, and we would row to the middle of the lake and fish? Never caught anything because Oliver wouldn’t stop talking, but I still remember the light, the haze of it over the far edge of the lake, and the sound of the water against the side of the boat . . . When the alarm started howling, when my father jerked like he’d been electrocuted and Rafferty’s chair scraped back hard, it took me a moment to find my way back into my body and realize what was going on.
Rafferty was up and out the door: getting the others, but he wasn’t fast enough. It was so quick, after all that waiting. “Hugo,” my father said, loudly, grabbing his shoulder. “Hugo.”
More alarms, battering at me, taking my breath away. “Hugo,” I said, “can you hear me,” but his gray face didn’t change, he didn’t move, only the lines on the monitor scribbling out of control to give us a glimpse of what was going on in secret, in the dark inside him.
The nurse was there. She turned the alarms off and stood back from the machines, hands cupped together loosely in front of her, in the sudden ringing silence.
I swear, even though I know it can’t be true I swear he smiled at me, that old wonderful smile rich with love; I swear he winked one slitted eye. Then all the sharp intricate peaks on the monitor smoothed out to clean straight lines and my father made a terrible growling sound, but even without any of that I would have known, because the air around us had split open and whirled and re-formed itself and there was one less person in the room.
Eleven
The house was freezing, a solid, all-pervading, damp cold like it had been empty for months instead of a couple of days. I hot-showered myself raw and threw everything I had been wearing into a boil-wash, but I couldn’t get the hospital stench out of my nose. Everything smelled of it: the water from the kitchen tap, my shampoo, the inside of my wardrobe. I kept catching the monotonous beeping of the monitors, somewhere just beyond the edge of my hearing.
The only thing I wanted in the world was sleep, but I needed to let Melissa know. Hi Melissa, I know you don’t want to hear from me right now and I understand, but I’m afraid I have bad news. Hugo collapsed and was taken to hospital— It occurred to me that I should have texted her from the hospital, asked her to come in; maybe her voice would have made it through to Hugo. It had never even crossed my mind. —but there was nothing they could do. He died late last night—had it been late night? early morning? I need to thank you on behalf of all the family for your incredible kindness to him. It meant the world to him. He was enormously fond of you— It read like I was texting a stranger. I couldn’t find how to talk to her; she seemed like someone from another world, someone long lost. I hope to see you at the funeral, but please don’t feel obligated to come if you’d prefer not to. Love, Toby.
I slept for fourteen hours straight, woke up long enough to eat something and went back to bed. That was how I spent most of the next few days, actually: sleeping as much as I could. Not that I got much rest. Over and over I dreamed that it wasn’t Dominic I had killed, it was Hugo: Hugo sprawled on the living-room floor while I stood over him bloody to the wrists, floundering desperately to remember why I had