‘I guess better than fairly skint and strange, like mine.’
‘Hey now! Don’t misspeak Connie, please.’
Did I mention Ed has completely charmed my mum? Sigh.
‘Do you want to go round to Susie’s house tomorrow morning and help me do some sorting out?’ Ed adds. ‘I know it sounds weird but it needs doing and I can’t bear the thought of sitting doing nothing. Justin’s on a morning shift. I already know I won’t be able to lie in.’
‘Sorting out?’
‘I don’t know what the status of her dad’s mental state is, but he’s still next of kin.’
‘Along with her brother,’ I say. I should visit her dad.
‘Yes, when he’s over here. They’ll have rights to do the house clearance.’ That her house needs clearing, makes me wince. So soon? So fast? Her property not belonging to her. ‘I’m thinking, as her best mates, she might want us to do some preparatory tidying up for her? Take away anything she might find … compromising, not want her family or other authorities to see?’
‘Oh. Yes.’
My brain plays a clip of me looking quizzically at a giant dildo.
‘Thing is, E … you are OK to see the corner? Where it happened?’
‘Oh!’ I’d not thought of this. I’d not considered the scene, by daylight, still existing. ‘Yes. I think so. She’s not there.’
‘Yeah. But thought I’d flag. Pick you up at eleven?’
‘Yes, sure.’
Given where Ed lives, picking me up involves driving miles past Susie’s and back south across the city again. He is being solicitous and caring in a taking charge kind of way, and I’m hugely grateful for it. He’s not making me jump through the hoops or agonise about whether to say I want looking after, he’s just looking after me. Which is Ed.
13
I don’t recommend the sensation of emerging from fitful rest, face so sodden with tears that you have wet collarbones, momentarily wildly elated that your best friend dying violently was only a disturbing creation of your subconscious. Before the murky world of 4.14 a.m. on your digital alarm clock swims into focus, and you remember that she has.
Ed looks as knackered as I feel when he knocks on the door.
‘Morning,’ he says, balefully.
‘Hi. Coffee?’
‘I want to get going with it, you?’
‘Same.’
We exchange sleepy monosyllables on the way there, lulled by the familiar drive. Everything’s the same and everything will always be different.
‘I suppose in the modern world we should each of us nominate someone to do this,’ Ed says. ‘Wipe our browsing history. Get rid of the secret shoebox we’re directed to under the bed. Without opening it.’
‘Hah. Yes.’
‘I’ll be your nominee if you’ll be mine,’ Ed says, smiling, and I say ‘OK, deal’ while squirming at how it reminds me of his ill-fated letter. Also, why isn’t his fiancée that person to him?
Why indeed.
‘Hester wanted me to give you her love, by the way,’ Ed says, flipping the indicator.
‘That’s nice of her,’ I say, blandly. ‘Say thank you for me.’
‘I will.’
‘She and Susie clashed antlers from time to time, but Hester was very fond.’
Like hell.
‘Yes, of course.’
‘I didn’t want to say on the phone, I don’t know why, but – Susie liked recreational pharma sometimes, didn’t she. With her sister wives.’
‘Huh?’ I say.
Ed swings a look at me. ‘Lauren? Aisha? Jennifer-Jane? Who has two forenames outside the mid-West, that always got me, such a pseud.’
‘Oh, the cokey berks!’ I say. ‘The Teacup Girls.’
Those nicknames for Susie’s work friends are Justin’s. The former is self-explanatory (Justin loves his ironic revival of exasperated dad words like ‘berk’ and ‘wazzock’) and the latter – the Teacup Girls – is because he said they’d had so much Botox, if they want to express amazement they’d have to drop one.
Susie kept this gang entirely separate from us, and only dipped in and out of it herself, not a core member of the cast, a guest star.
They all had cosmetic work, huge kitchen extensions, white off-roaders they drove to the hairdressers, handbags with logos, wealthy husbands, took skiing holidays in Whistler and drank rosé when the kids were in nursery. And sometimes they put on things covered in sequins to get smashed on champagne cocktails, get off with men who weren’t their husbands and do lines in the toilets.
Susie would tell us about their antics and we’d revel in a good gasp and tut. She gloried in their excesses and, sometimes, she partook in the Class As.
‘Any idea if she has any in the house, or where she’d keep it, if so?’