Secret Smile

CHAPTER 23

If I'd felt bad in the middle of the night, I felt unspeakably worse when I woke the next morning. I was going to die and when I was dead I was going to be pickled and put in a large jar and put on display with a label identifying me as the first person ever to die of a hangover. It was hard to think because it hurt. It hurt to do anything.

At about half past nine I made an attempt to get up and then lay down again. No hangover had ever been quite like this one. I had the usual symptoms, in a more intense form: the parched leathery tongue, the headache which felt as if small rodents were eating my brain from the inside, the general feeling of being poisoned, a shivery creepy-crawly sensation over my skin. Additional bits of my body seemed to be hurting. Even my hair was sore. The particular innovation was that I still felt drunk, but it was like an evil, stale parody of the previous night's drunkenness. All the good bits – if there had been any good bits – were gone. But the floor-swaying was still there. The room-revolving was present and correct. That was why I had to lie down again, but even so it felt as if I were on a water bed. People didn't die of hangovers, but they did die of alcoholic poisoning. Could it be that? I remembered that I had a book about medical problems. There were a couple of snags. The first was that I didn't have a maid who could get it for me. The second was that I kept it with the cookbooks, so when I finally staggered across my flat to get it, stomach heaving, I had to see things that made me think of food. I tried not to think of food, but then the idea of a huge trifle came into my mind and I could only eject that by thinking of the smell of overcooked cabbage and then I thought of Troy and that was worse, the worst of all.

I took the book back to bed. There was no entry for alcoholic poisoning, but there was one for hangovers. The book recommended me to drink plenty of water, to go for a brisk run 'even if you do not feel like it'. If nauseous, and I felt very nauseous, I was to take something called magnesium trisilicate. Right, I decided, I was going to be positive. Previously I had wanted to curl up under the bedclothes and die, like a wounded animal retreating into its hole. Now I was going to adopt the opposite plan. I was going to attack the problem. I would not only get this drug, but would also run to get it. And I would have a drink of water first.

Everything felt wrong. The water was too late for my arid mouth. It seemed to run over its surfaces without being absorbed. I could barely lift my legs to get my feet into my shorts. I pulled the T-shirt over my head. It hurt my head. It hurt my arms. I tied the laces of my shoes slowly, trying to think how to do it for the first time since I was about six years old. I clutched a five-pound note in my hand and shuffled out on to the pavement. The bright light, the cold air on my skin and in my lungs, made me gasp. I don't know if it was making me better in any way, but there was a new clarity. In a way it felt good to be hurting and I wondered if this were a welcome continuation of last night. To be drunk, to ache, to be confused, to be in pain, perhaps anything would be better than opening my eyes and looking into the sun, truly facing up to what Troy had done to himself and done to us.

The chemist was only a couple of hundred yards away. I asked the pharmacist, a very tall Sikh, for the magnesium trisilicate. It had a sickly minty taste, but I sucked it desperately and headed back for home in an approximation of a jog. I had a shower, put some grown-up clothes on and lay on my bed to think. There was a metallic taste in my mouth and when I swallowed it felt to me as if there were something bristly stuck in my throat that wouldn't go down. My skin felt clammy. I felt sick but I wasn't going to be sick.

There was no doubt about it. I was in slightly less of a dreadful state. The day could now begin. What was the time? I reached out to the bedside table for the watch, Troy 's watch, that was lying there. Quarter past ten. That was another thing. I knew why the watch was there. Part of Troy 's problem was that there was never any balance, any compromise in his life, and for him even normal behaviour was a moral challenge. He was either completely wired, wildly funny, incredibly enthusiastic, or he was somnolent, slow, detached, often just fast asleep. Even in his good times he would have big sleeps in the afternoon, like a small child or a cat. He didn't just flop in a soft chair. He pulled the curtains, took his clothes off, got into bed. It was like night time. When he was medicated he was almost in a coma. He had been sleeping in my bed, and he had taken his clothes off and put his watch on my bedside table. His clothes were on his dead body, but not his watch. He may have forgotten. He was depressed, after all.

There was another thing. I closed my eyes and made myself do it. I pictured my dear, lost Troy hanging from that beam. The rope. It was easy to remember, shiny green, synthetic, rough. I remembered the strands as I'd cut it through with the knife to bring him down. For the first time I thought of suicide as a human activity that needed organizing. You need to plan it, you need to obtain materials.

I was clear-headed now. I got up and felt a wave of nausea and dizziness, but it passed quickly. I didn't have the time to be ill. I had things to do. My flat was so small that there wasn't much to search. I couldn't remember having seen that rope before, but I had to make sure. Under the sink there was a bucket, some washing cloths, various bottles of cleaning fluid. In the cupboard there was the vacuum cleaner, a broom and a mop, a rolled-up rug, a shoebox containing screwdrivers, a hammer, nails, screws, a couple of plugs. I looked on top shelves, behind the sofa, under my bed, everywhere. There was no rope. It could be that he just found a length of rope and used all of it. Or bought the length he needed and used all of it. Or…

I phoned my mother. It was difficult not to begin every sentence I spoke to my mother and father or sister by asking how they were. We could spend the rest of our lives asking and thinking what to say in return. I just asked if I could come round and she said, yes, that would be good.

On the way, I thought of something else. A few months earlier I'd been stuck in a tube train on the Piccadilly Line for more than an hour. An announcement came over the tannoy apologizing to all customers and informing us that there was a person under a train at the next station. To which the obvious answer would be, well, tell him to get out from under it so that we can all be on our way. But of course that is a euphemism for throwing yourself in front of the train and lots of unimaginable things happening to the person on their way to being underneath. I had a lot of time to think about it and one of the things I thought about was: do you owe anything to anyone when you kill yourself? If you throw yourself under a tube train, the driver is only about three inches in front of you as you go under, with whatever godawful scrapes and bumps and crunches that ensue. The tube driver takes early retirement after a suicide, mostly. And what about all the commuters who suffer half an hour of irritation? Do all the missed dental appointments, toddlers left standing outside schools, the burned meals, do they do some damage to your karma?

I let a thought come into my mind that I had managed to exclude until that moment. In my flat. Troy had killed himself in my flat. I wondered if even thinking this was an obscenity, but I couldn't stop myself. He had hanged himself where I might find him. His dead body hung there, rotating slowly until it came to rest, in the space where I slept and ate and lived my life. How could he do that? I wanted to think to myself that Troy could never have done that. I loved Troy. And surely, even when his fog of misery was at its thickest, he loved me. Would he have done that to me? Something I could never forget. I tried to tell myself that when you kill yourself you are beyond thinking of other people in any way except that they will be better off without you. Or was it worse? I made myself consider the possibility that Troy 's suicide, and the manner of it, and the place of it, was a statement to me: There, Miranda, there. You thought you understood me. You thought you could help me. Well, here you are. Here is what I've come to. Do something to help me now.

I expected my mother to start crying when she saw me, but her mind seemed somewhere else. Even when she opened the door, she was looking over my shoulder as if she expected someone to be with me.

'I'm glad you came, Miranda,' she said, but it sounded as if she were speaking lines someone else had written for her. 'Your father's out.'

'Where?' I said. Where did he have to go at a time like this?

'Where?' my mother said, foggily, as if she were on something.

'What about Kerry and Brendan?'

'They've gone out. Would you like some tea?'

'Love some. I'll just pop upstairs.'

That's the good thing about your parents' house. It's still sort of your home, even if it's not the one you grew up in. You can go anywhere in it, open cupboards. I was going to do something terrible. I hardly knew why. It was as if I had an abscess in a tooth and I was getting a penknife and jabbing it into the abscess, flooding myself with more and more pain so that it would just overwhelm me and be gone, or I would be gone. My mother had gone to the kitchen and I ran up the stairs and into the bedroom where Kerry and Brendan were staying. I felt a tension like electricity in me. My ears were humming with it. I could hear my pulse, hear the blood rushing through my veins.

The arrangement in the bedroom was obviously temporary. They had barely unpacked. Kerry's dressing gown and nightie were tossed over the bed. A suitcase was half open, leaning against the wall, her clothes neatly folded. On the corner table there were a number of bottles, shampoo, conditioner, creams, scent, all of it Kerry's. I looked around. That was a funny thing. Kerry could have been staying here alone. I couldn't see a single object or item of clothing that belonged to Brendan. Next to the bed was another, closed, suitcase. I laid it flat on the floor, flicked the catches and opened it, revealing Brendan's clothes. It wouldn't take a minute. One by one I lifted shirts, trousers, underpants and turned them over so that I could replace them in the right order. The case was almost empty when I felt as much as heard steps running up the stairs. I didn't even have time to move from my knees when the door opened and Brendan appeared. For about a tenth of a second I had thought, well, what does it matter? But by the look on his face, I thought, Oh fuck. At first he just looked surprised, and no wonder, with me rooting around in his case, his clothes arranged around me.

'Miranda?' he said. 'What the…?'

I tried to think of something, but my brain had turned to thick soup.

'I'd forgotten something,' I said randomly. 'I mean I thought you'd taken something by mistake.'

Now his face turned angry.

'What the fuck?!'

And then Kerry appeared behind him.

'Brendan?' she said. 'What…?' And then she too caught sight of me.

'The rope,' I said. 'I thought you'd taken my rope by mistake.'