The Pier Falls: And Other Stories

BUNNY

He loved Mars bars and KitKats. He loved Double Deckers and Galaxy Caramels and Yorkies. He loved Reese’s Pieces and Cadbury’s Creme Eggs. He could eat a whole box of Quality Street in one sitting and had done so on several occasions, perhaps more than several. He loved white chocolate. He was not particularly keen on Maltesers, Wispas and Crunchies which were airy and insubstantial, though he wouldn’t turn his nose up at any of them if they were on offer. He disliked boiled and gummy sweets. He loved chocolate digestives. He loved Oreos and chocolate Bourbons. He loved coconut macaroons and Scottish shortbread. He would never buy a cereal bar but a moist, chunky flapjack was one of the most irresistible foods on the planet.

He loved thick, sweet custard. He loved Frosties and Weetabix with several dessertspoons of sugar. He loved chunks of cheese broken from a block in the fridge, Red Leicester preferably or cheap, rubbery mozzarella. He loved Yazoo banana milk, the stuff you got from garages and service stations in squat plastic bottles with foil seals under chunky screw-tops. He could eat a litre tub of yogurt if he added brown sugar or maple syrup.

He loved hot dogs and burgers, especially with tomato ketchup in a soft white bun thickly spread with butter. He loved battered cod and chips with salt and no vinegar. He loved roast chicken, he loved bacon, he loved steak. He loved every flavour of ice cream he had ever sampled — rum and raisin, Dime bar crunch, peanut butter, tiramisu…

At least he used to love these things. His eating was now largely mechanical and joyless. It was the sugar and the fat he needed, though it gave him little pleasure. More often than not it made the cravings worse. He hated people using the phrase “comfort eating.” He had not been comfortable for a very long time, except sometimes in dreams where he ran and swam, and from which he occasionally woke up weeping.

He was twenty-eight years old and weighed thirty-seven stone.

There was a creased and sun-bleached photograph of him at nine, standing in the corridor outside the Burnside flat wearing his new uniform for the first day at St. Jude’s. His mother had run back inside at the last minute to get the camera, as if she’d feared he might not be coming home again and had wanted a memento, or a picture to give to the police. He’d been wearing grey flannel shorts and a sky-blue Aertex shirt. He could still smell the damp, fungal carpet and hear the coo and clatter of the pigeons on the window ledge. He remembered how overweight he felt, even then. Whenever he looked at the photo, however, his first thought was what a beautiful boy he had been. So he stopped looking at the photo. He dared not tear it up for fear of invoking some terrible voodoo. Instead he asked one of his care assistants to put it on top of a cupboard where he couldn’t reach it.

Three weeks before his tenth birthday his father disappeared overnight to live in Wrexham with a woman whose name Bunny was never allowed to know. At supper he was there, by breakfast he had gone. His mother was a different person afterwards, more brittle, less kind. Bunny believed that she blamed him for his father’s departure. It seemed entirely possible. His father played cricket. As a young man he’d had a trial for Gloucestershire. He was very much not the parent of an overweight, unathletic child.

To Bunny’s surprise he wasn’t bullied at St. Jude’s. Mostly the other children ignored him, understanding perhaps that isolation was both the cruellest and the easiest punishment they could inflict. His friend Karl said, “I’m sorry. I can only talk to you outside school.” Karl was a wedding photographer now and lived in Derby.

Bunny had kissed three girls. The first was drunk, the second, he learnt later, had lost a bet. The third, Emma Cullen, let him put his hand inside her knickers. He didn’t wash it for a week. But she was chubby and he was aroused and disgusted and utterly aware of his own hypocrisy, and the tangle in his head when he was with her was more painful than the longing when he wasn’t so he cold-shouldered her until she walked away.

He scraped through a business diploma from the CFE then worked for five years as an assistant housing officer for the county council until he was no longer able to drive. His GP said, “You are slowly killing yourself,” as if this had not occurred to Bunny before. He took a job in university admin, digitising paper records, but he was getting larger and increasingly unwell. He had a series of gallstones and two bouts of acute pancreatitis. He had his gall bladder removed but his weight made the operation more traumatic and the recovery harder than it should have been. Sitting was uncomfortable and standing made him feel faint so he lay down at home and after four weeks of statutory sick pay he got a letter telling him not to return to work. His sister, Kate, said it was illegal and maybe she was right but he was tired and in pain and he felt increasingly vulnerable outside the house so he applied for Disability Living Allowance.

His sister said a lot of things that were meant to be helpful, over the phone from Jesmond mostly and very occasionally in person. She had married a man with a red Audi RS3 who owned three wine bars. They had two children and a spotless house which Bunny had seen only in pictures.

Bunny’s few friends began to drift away. For a brief period his most frequent visitor was a bear of a man from the local Baptist church who was charming and funny until it became clear that Bunny was not going to see the light, at which point he too was gone.

Bunny had visited his mother every fortnight since he left home, though she had always given the impression that it was she who was doing him the favour, stepping off the merry-go-round of her busy life to make tea, feed him biscuits and chat. She worked in the Marie Curie shop and had an allotment. At fifty-seven she had started internet dating using a public terminal at the library and lightly dropped so many different names into the conversation that he didn’t know whether she was promiscuous or picky or whether no one stuck around after the second date. Despite the two miles between them she had come to his house over the past few years only when he was bedbound after his three visits to hospital. Now he couldn’t keep her away. She collected his benefit and spent most of it on his weekly shop. She made him eat wholemeal bread and green beans and sardines. She said, “I’m going to save your life.”

Once a week, using a walking frame, he made an expedition to the Londis at the end of the street where he bought a bag of sugar and a slab of butter. He left the butter out till it softened then mixed the two into a paste and ate it over three or four sittings. He would have done it every day if he had more money and cared less about what Mrs. Khan and her son thought of him.

Bunny’s paternal grandfather had been a policeman before the Second World War. He joined the 6th Armoured Division and was burnt to death in his Matilda II tank during the run for Tunis in December 1942. Bunny had a library of books and DVDs about the North Africa Campaign. He read biographies of Alexander and Auchinleck, Rommel and von Arnim. He made ferociously accurate military dioramas, sharing photos and tips and techniques with other enthusiasts around the world on military modelling forums: filters, pre-washing, pin-shading, Tamiya buff dust spray…

He watched porn sometimes. He didn’t like images of lean men with big cocks which served only to make him acutely aware of his own body’s shortcomings. He preferred pictures and videos of solitary women masturbating. He liked to imagine that he had found a hole in the wall of a shower cubicle or a dormitory.

He had thrush in the folds between his gut and his thighs. His joints were sore, which might or might not have been the beginnings of arthritis. His ankles were swollen by lymphoedema. He had diabetes for which he took Metformin every morning. God alone knew what his blood pressure was. He ate Rennies steadily throughout the day to counteract his stomach reflux. Moving from room to room made him breathless. He had fallen badly climbing the stairs a while back, dislocating his knee and giving himself a black eye on the newel post so he slept now on a fold-out sofa in what had previously been the dining room, and used the toilet beside the kitchen. Carers came in to give him a bed bath twice a week.

Sometimes the kids on the estate threw stones at his windows or put dog shit through the letter box. For a period of several weeks one of them with some kind of developmental problem stood with his face pressed to the glass. Bunny would shut the curtains and open them half an hour later only to find that the boy was still standing there.

He played Rome Total War and Halo. He watched daytime television—The Real Housewives of Orange County, Kojak, Homes Under the Hammer…He spent a great deal of time simply looking out of the window. He couldn’t see much — the backs of the houses on Erskine Close, mainly, and the top corner of next door’s Carioca motorhome. But in between, on clear days, there was a triangle of moorland. If the weather was good he watched the shadows of cloud moving across the grass and gorse and heather and imagined that he was one of the buzzards who sometimes came off the hills and drifted over the edge of town.

On the mantelpiece there were photos of Kate’s children, his niece and nephew, Debbie and Raylan, blonde, washed-out, borderline albino, in generic grey-blue cardboard frames with thin gold borders and fold-out stands at the back. He hadn’t seen them in seven years and did not expect to see them again for a long time. Next to the photos was a small wooden donkey with two baskets of tiny oranges slung across its back, a memento of his only foreign holiday, in Puerto de Sóller, when he was nineteen.

Mostly he was tired. Hunger and disappointment were, in their own way, as painful as pancreatitis and he would have willingly swapped the former for the latter. And while his mother thought she could save his life, there were days when he wondered whether it was worth saving.

Then Leah came.

It was meant to be a temporary arrangement. She would live with her father until she got back on her feet and had sufficient money in the bank to feel safe. Gavin had pushed her out of the front door with nothing, not even her wallet. In Barclays she discovered that the joint account was overdrawn. Too ashamed to put in a reverse-charge call home she spent the first night walking around the centre of Manchester, sitting at bus stops when she grew too tired to stand, kept awake by the fear that she would be preyed upon in some way. She rang her father the following morning but he took too long to arrange the money transfer. It was a further twenty-four hours before she could pick up her train fare from the building society, so she spent the second night in the women’s hostel to which the police had directed her. It was not an experience she wanted to repeat.

Leaving the estate had been the first part of the grand plan. But you never did leave the estate, not really. You carried a little bit of it inside you wherever you went, something grubby and broken and windswept. You never trusted anyone who was kind. You married a man who made you feel ugly and weak and scared just like your mother once did, because deep down there was a comfort in being hurt in the old, familiar ways. So in the end the two miscarriages seemed almost a blessing, because they would have been Gavin’s children, just like it had been Gavin’s house and Gavin’s car and Gavin’s money. He would have let her do all the hard work then rolled up one day, lifted them out of the playpen and taken them away like he’d done with everything else.

So here she was, working as a dental receptionist and returning each evening to the front room where she’d spent her childhood, sitting on the dove-grey leatherette sofa which stuck to the back of her legs in hot weather, filling the dishwasher in precisely the way her father said it had to be filled, having tea at six forty-five every day and never, ever moving the speakers off the masking tape rectangles on the carpet despite the fact that her father only played R&B and soul from the sixties and seventies which was music about dancing and sex and not giving a fuck about whether the mugs were on the top or the bottom rack of the dishwasher, because her father was coping with retirement and loneliness and ageing in the same way he had coped with her mother, in the same way he had coped with being a parent, by looking the other way and concentrating very hard on something of no importance whatsoever.

She met Bunny while scouring the neighbourhood for a strimmer. Her father’s was broken and chores which took her out of the house were becoming increasingly attractive. She rang the doorbell twice because she could hear the television and after forty strimmerless houses it was becoming a challenge. She’d given up and was walking back down the path when the door opened behind her. “Leah Curtis.” She was too shocked by the size and shape of him to hear what he was saying. The liquid waddle, the waist which touched both sides of the doorway. “You were at St. Jude’s. You won’t remember me.”

He was right. She had no memory whatsoever. “You haven’t got a strimmer, have you?”

“Come in.” He rotated then rocked from side to side as he made his way back towards the front room.

There was a yeasty, unwashed smell in the hallway so she left the front door open.

He bent his knees and rolled backwards onto a large, mustard-yellow sofa bed. Storage Hunters was on the TV. The wallpaper must have gone up circa 1975, psychedelic bamboo shoots in red and orange, peeling a little at the edges. On the table beside the sofa was a tiny model battlefield — soldiers, sand dunes, an armoured car — and beside the battlefield, a neatly organised collection of paint tubs, aerosols, brushes, folded rags and scalpels, the tips of their blades pushed into corks.

“I get out of breath,” he said. “Have a look in the utility room. Kitchen. Turn right. Bunny Wallis. I was in the year above.”

There was a garden chair, a bin liner of unwanted clothing and a broken bedside lamp. Maybe she did remember. “Chubby Checker” they called him. She hadn’t talked to him once in five years. She wondered if this was all their fault in some obscure way. She grabbed the orange cord snaking out from under the ironing board and pulled. She said she’d bring it back as soon as she’d finished.

“Whenever you want. I’m not leaving the country.”

She bought him four bottles of Black Sheep Ale as a thank-you. Only when she was standing on the doorstep did she realise that it might not be medically appropriate but he just smiled and said, “Don’t tell my mother.”

“Does she live here?”

“It sometimes feels like that. Do you want a cup of tea?”

She said yes and was sent to make it. He remembered enough about her to be flattering — that she and Abby had run away to Sheffield, that she had a signed photograph of Shane McGowan — but not so much as to seem creepy. The milk was slightly off but he was good company. He gave her a Panzer captain from the Afrika Korps together with a magnifying glass so that she could see the details in the face.

She was going to say how much her father would like it, the neatness, the precision, but she didn’t want to think of the two men as having anything in common, because in half an hour Bunny had asked more questions than her father had asked in two months.

He said his mother had put him on a penitential diet about which he could do nothing, so she came back a few days later with a box of chocolates. His doctor would probably not be happy but it would make a change from the broccoli and the Brussels sprouts.

When she was five years old Leah’s mother had taken her to the gravel pit to watch her drown Beauty’s new kittens. It was a long walk and Leah cried the whole way, hearing them mewl and struggle inside the duffel bag. Her mother said it would toughen her up. She laughed as she held the bag underwater, not out loud but quietly to herself as if she were remembering a funny story. She wanted Leah to know what she was capable of. It was so much more efficient than hitting her. After that she could make Leah feel sick inside just by narrowing her eyes.

When they had guests her mother called her “darling.” So how could Leah tell anyone? It was fathers who abused their children. Cruel mothers were the stuff of fairy tales.

Bunny didn’t find her attractive at first. She was oddly shapeless, a skinny girl carrying too much weight. Her hair was flat and there was something sour about the expression into which her face fell when she didn’t think she was being watched. But she woke something which had been going slowly to sleep inside him over the past couple of years. He pictured her naked, moving through the house, perched on the armchair, wiping herself on the toilet, standing at the sink. He could no longer get an erection let alone masturbate so there was no relief from these images and every fantasy left a small bruise on his heart. She was kind and bought him sweet, sticky things. They never talked about his weight and she understood the tyranny of mothers. Five minutes into their second meeting he realised how badly he needed her to keep coming.

The first carer Leah met was a pinched Polish woman who didn’t offer her name and acted as if Leah were not in the room. She treated Bunny like a recalcitrant child with whom she’d been saddled for half an hour. Leah could see him flinching as she dried his hair. The second, Deolinda, was a big woman from Zimbabwe who kept up a steady stream of stories about the latest episode of MasterChef, about her uncle who had been tortured by the police back home, about the proposed landfill site in Totton…Then they were replaced by two different carers who were quickly replaced in their turn, and Leah could see that Bunny would prefer someone dour and ill-tempered if only they stuck around and knew where the shampoo was kept, took care of the models and made him a mug of sugary tea without being asked.

Her father went to the Wainwright and drank a half of Guinness three nights a week. Her father played the Blackbyrds and the Contours. Her father wore a green V-neck sweater or a red V-neck sweater. Her father smoked thirty cigarettes a day standing under the little awning outside the back door. Her father put the big plates on the right and the smaller side plates on the left and insisted that all knives pointed downwards in the cutlery basket. Her father recorded TV travel programmes and watched them at convenient times — the Great Wall of China, the Atacama Desert, the Everglades.

She hadn’t hated him when she was little. If anything she had thought of him as an elder sibling who was keeping a low profile for the same reasons she was. But now, looking back? How could you turn away from your own child? She said, “You never stuck up for me.”

Her father said, “Your mother was a difficult and troubled woman.”

She said, “That’s not the point.”

Her father said, “I think something went wrong after you were born.”

She said, “That’s not the point, either.”

He never understood that she was asking for an apology. Or perhaps he understood but didn’t feel an apology was appropriate. Either way, if you had to ask then it counted for nothing.

One morning Bunny’s mother crouched on the far side of his bed and retrieved a crackly, transparent punnet which had once contained twenty Tesco mini flapjack bites and which Leah must have forgotten to remove the night before. “What in God’s name is this?”

He said, “I’ve got a friend.”

She said, “Do you know how hard I try to keep you healthy?”

After washing up and hoovering she returned to the living room and said, “Who?”

He said nothing. He had leverage for once and wanted to savour it briefly.

“Well?”

“I used to go to school with her.”

“What’s her name?”

He was surprised by how upset his mother was, and worried that she might go to Leah’s house and confront her.

“How often does she come round?”

“Now and then.”

“Every week?”

“I have a friend. She brought me some biscuits. There’s no reason to be upset.”

She punished him by not coming round for five days but found, on her return, that Leah had done the housework in her absence, and marked her territory by leaving four crumpled Cadbury’s Fruit and Nut wrappers on the draining board.

She should have gone to London with Abby and Nisha and Sam straight after college. She’d be living in a flat in Haringey now, taking the Piccadilly Line to an office in Farringdon or Bank, winding down on a Friday evening with Jägerbombs and chicken tikka skewers in the Crypt. She might be married to someone halfway human. She might have children.

There was jubilation on Facebook when she confessed that her marriage was over, perhaps a little more jubilation than she wanted. She didn’t go into detail. Nisha said, “Get your arse down here. You are going to die in that place.”

Why didn’t she pack her bags? Was she dead already? Did the memory of that close-knit foursome at school seem less rosy now that there was a real possibility of her joining them? Or was it Bunny? He was funny, he was kind, he was grateful. For the first time in her life she had someone who needed her, and she couldn’t imagine sitting by the boating lake in Ally Pally or walking down Shaftesbury Avenue knowing she’d abandoned him to a life that was shrinking rapidly to a single room four hundred miles away.

Bunny liked her to read the paper out loud. He liked to beat her at chess and lose to her at Monopoly. They watched DVDs she picked up from the bargain box in Blockbuster. Often she would bring a cake, take a small piece for herself and make no comment as he worked his way through the rest. Sometimes she would go into the back garden to smoke and come back ten minutes later smelling of cigarettes. He yearned for her to lean over one day and push her dirty tongue into his mouth. Could you ask someone to do that kind of thing? Just as a favour? Because the thought of never being kissed again tore open a hole in his chest.

One evening when they were watching a documentary about Bletchley Park Bunny’s mother let herself in. She called out a casual hello, hung up her coat, came into the living room and said, “So we meet at last,” as if this were a surprise. “I don’t think Bunny has ever told me your name.”

“Leah.” She didn’t hold out her hand.

The two women swapped pleasantries for a couple of scratchy minutes then his mother said, “You bring him biscuits.”

“Sometimes,” said Leah.

“You know you’re killing him.”

“They’re just biscuits.”

“I’ve looked after my son for nearly thirty years.”

“You don’t like me coming here, do you?” said Leah. “You want him all to yourself.”

His mother straightened her back. “I just don’t want him spending his time with someone like you.”

Bunny knew he should intervene but he was not in the habit of telling either of them what they should or should not do, and in truth he was flattered to find himself being fought over.

“Someone like me?” said Leah. “What does that mean, precisely?”

Bunny had imagined this argument many times. He had always wanted Leah to win, but now that it was happening he wondered if his mother might be right after all. Leah was not his wife, not his girlfriend, not a part of his family. She could abandon him tomorrow.

His mother stepped close to Leah and said, quietly, “You little bitch. I’ve got your number.”

On the table beside the sofa there was a diorama of five British soldiers surrounding a crashed Messerschmitt, the dead pilot slumped forward in the smashed cockpit. Bunny had spent five weeks making it. His mother swept it off the table and walked out of the house, slamming the door behind her.

It was the end of summer, but instead of cool winds and rainy days a thick grey cloud settled over the town so that the air felt tepid and second-hand. Two children at the end of the street were killed by a police car chasing a stolen van. Nasir Iqbal and Javed Burrows. The rear wheels lost traction on the bend and the vehicle mounted the pavement knocking over a brick wall behind which the boys were playing cricket. He knew their names because they were painted on the street in big white letters. The driver of the car and his colleague were spirited away before the family and neighbours fully understood what had happened. The next police officers at the scene were greeted by a volley of stones and glass bottles and one of their cars was rolled onto its roof.

There was a small riot every evening for a fortnight. Through the curtains Bunny saw the blue lights of police vans and heard whoops and explosions which sounded to him more like people celebrating a victory than mourning a loss.

He decided that for the time being he wouldn’t leave the house. He did not want to find himself surrounded by an angry crowd in search of an easy target. But when the streets finally became calm once more he found he was still afraid. He told himself that he would go out when he felt stronger, but even as he was telling himself this he knew it wasn’t true.

She got back from work one Wednesday evening to find her father sitting at the dining table with his palms flat on the placemat in front of him as if he were engaged in a one-man séance. He was wearing his red V-neck jumper. He looked directly at her and said, “My trouble.”

“Your what?” said Leah.

“My trouble leg,” he said, slurring his words.

She assumed he was drunk but when she came closer she could see that the left-hand side of his face was sagging. She tried helping him to the sofa so that he could lie down but he couldn’t hold his own weight and she had to hoist him back onto the chair. He was unable to say how long he had been in this state.

The ambulance took twenty-five minutes to arrive. Her father seemed completely unbothered by the gravity of the situation. The paramedic slipped a line into the crook of his arm and held it down with a fat crucifix of white tape. The siren was on the whole way, a dreamy mismatch between the antiseptic calm and the speed with which they sliced through the world.

When they arrived at the hospital her father was partially blind and there were many words he could no longer say, Leah’s name being one of them. It was the length of time he had spent sitting at the table, so the doctor said. However long that was. After the golden hour the odds went through the floor. Leah wondered if he had realised that he was being offered a neat, uncomplicated exit and had decided to take it, because God forbid that he should ever find himself bedbound or incontinent or needing to be fed by someone else.

He had the second stroke just after midnight.

She sat in the hard glare of the relatives’ room looking at a shitty painting of a fishing boat and a lighthouse. It was the lack of justice which hurt most, the way his cowardice turned out to have been such a good game plan, the possibility that he had never really suffered.

She took a taxi back to the house but couldn’t sleep, repeatedly dropping off then crashing back into wakefulness convinced that her mother was in the room.

She rang in sick the following morning and went round to Bunny’s house. She wasn’t sure he understood but he held her while she cried and that was enough. She told him about the kittens. She told him how her mother had called her “a mistake” and “a disappointment.” She told him how her mother had made balls of lard and peanuts and hung them from strings outside the dining-room window in the winter for chaffinches and coal tits and robins. She told him how quickly the MS had progressed, how she wasn’t allowed into her mother’s bedroom during the final months, how her mother died and how Leah kept forgetting this because nothing in the house had changed.

Bunny said, “I hate my father. I haven’t seen him for twenty years. I have no idea what he looks like. But every time there’s a crowd on TV I find myself scanning the faces, looking for him.”

She told him that she had trouble sleeping. He said she could move in upstairs if she wanted, and tried very hard not to show how pleased he was when she accepted the offer.

She took Bunny’s old bedroom. He hadn’t been upstairs for a long time. The rusted hot tap in the sink no longer turned and there was velvety green fungus in the corners of the bathroom window. On the dusty sill sat a pair of rusty nail clippers, a dog-eared box of sticking plasters and a little brown tub of diazepam tablets with a water-blurred label.

The first night she drank whisky in warm milk to get herself to sleep but was woken a couple of hours later by Bunny’s snoring. She lay motionless in the half-dark. The gaps between his snores were growing longer and she could tell that something was not right. She went downstairs and pushed the living-room door open. Bunny now slept on an adjustable bed which had replaced the yellow sofa bed. The smell was rank and cloistered. She drew the curtain back and opened the smaller window.

He was lying on his back, his skin unnaturally white, his arms swimming as if he were underwater and struggling to reach the surface. His breathing stopped for three, four, five seconds then restarted like an old motor. She wondered if she should do something. His breathing stopped again. And started. And stopped. Suddenly he was awake, wide-eyed and fighting for breath.

“Bunny?” She took his hand. “It’s Leah. I’m here.”

It was the fat around his throat, the doctor said, the sheer weight of his chest, the weakness of his muscles. If he carried on sleeping on his back he would suffocate. He had to remain propped up twenty-four hours a day.

Towards the end of the second week she returned from work to find that he had soiled himself. That morning’s carer had not turned up and he could hold on no longer. She smelt it as soon as she came in. She considered quietly reclosing the door and going back to her father’s empty house. Then Bunny called out, “Leah?”

She stepped into the living room.

He said, “I’m so sorry.”

She filled a plastic bowl with hot water. Soap, flannels, toilet rolls, a towel from upstairs. She helped Bunny roll onto his side. His flesh was raw and spotty and covered in large port-wine blotches. Some of the shit was on the sheet, some of it was wedged into the crack between his buttocks. She used wads of toilet paper to scrape most of it off, dumping the shit and the used paper in a plastic bag. She unhooked the corners of the cotton sheet and the plastic mattress protector beneath it and bunched them up, using the material to wipe him clean as she did so. She put the sheet in the washing machine and the protector into a second plastic bag.

It wasn’t as bad as she had expected. This was what she would have done for her children if life had turned out differently.

She dipped the flannels in the soapy water and wiped him, lifting the flesh to get into the folds. She towelled him dry and left him to lie on his side exposed to the air for a while. She put the flannels and the towel into the washing machine with the sheet. She bleached the plastic bowl. She remade the bed with a clean sheet and a new mattress protector from the cupboard in the kitchen. She dusted him with anti-fungal powder then let him roll back into his usual position.

He said, “You are the kindest person I have ever met.”

She found a letter from the council lying on her father’s doormat saying that the tenancy had come to an end with her father’s death and unless representations were made the house would have to be vacated by the end of the month.

She took the records to the Oxfam shop in town. “Higher and Higher” by Jackie Wilson, “Up, Up and Away” by the Fifth Dimension, “Nothing Can Stop Me” by Gene Chandler…She brought a small cardboard box home from the Co-op and filled it with the only possessions that seemed worth keeping, objects she remembered from her childhood, mostly — an owl made of yellow glass, a box of tarnished apostle spoons on faded purple plush, a decorative wall plate with a view of Robin Hood’s Bay. She locked the door and posted the keys through the letter box. She stowed the cardboard box under the bed at Bunny’s house.

It was a Friday after work. She’d just come out of Boots and was passing Kenyons en route to the bus station. The two women were sitting at a table in the window. She could see immediately that they were from out of town by the way they held themselves, the way they owned the space around them. The woman facing her had sunglasses pushed up into an auburn crop, tanned shoulders and a canary-yellow dress to show them off. Leah felt a little stab of something between envy and affront. The woman caught her eye. Leah walked away in embarrassment and five steps farther down the street realised that she had been looking at Abby and Nisha. She was about to break into a run when Nisha emerged from the doors of the restaurant. She blocked Leah’s path, looked her up and down theatrically and said, “What the fuck happened to you, girl?”

Leah had forgotten how it worked, the spiky repartee that bound them together and kept outsiders away. She looked down at her grey tights and elderly trainers. “I’ve just come from work.”

“Inside,” said Nisha, nodding towards the door of the restaurant as if it were a cell Leah was being returned to.

The two of them were back for Abby’s brother’s wedding. “Number Four. I can’t even remember her name. Albanian? Slovenian? She looks like those pictures in the papers of women who’ve killed their kids.” Abby and Vince were now living in Muswell Hill. “The Great White Highlands.” And Sam was pregnant for a second time. “Ten months. He practically fucked her in the delivery suite.”

The waiter materialised with his little flip pad. Leah tried to make her excuses but Abby held her eye. “I don’t know what you’ve got planned for this evening but I know for a fact that it will be shit compared to this.”

She ate grilled tuna with a salad of cannellini beans, roasted red peppers, olives, anchovies and rocket followed by lemon tart and crème frâiche. They drank two bottles of Montepulciano d’Abruzzo between them. A bill for a hundred and ten pounds and a fifteen-pound tip. They smoked in the little garden at the back, next to one of the patio heaters.

“How’s your dad?” asked Nisha.

“He died,” said Leah.

Nisha looked at her long and hard. No condolence, no consolation. “We’ve got a sofa bed. If you haven’t found a job and a room in a shared house by the end of the month I’ll stick you on the bus back up here.”

“I’m sorry,” said Leah. “I can’t do it.”

Nisha shrugged. “It’s your funeral.”

Two of the toes on Bunny’s left foot went black. They kept the window open all day because of the smell. There was nothing to be done, the doctor said. Leah should keep them tightly bandaged until they fell off, then wash the wounds in salt water twice a day until they healed. Ten days later she found them in the bed while Bunny was sleeping. She flicked them onto a newspaper as if they were dead bees, carried them outside and dropped them into the bin.

A fine, spitty rain was coming in off the hills. There was no one around. A wing mirror hung off a battered brown Honda. The names of the dead boys were still readable on the tarmac. At her feet grass was forcing its way up through cracks in the concrete. If everyone abandoned these streets she wondered how long it would take for the forest to take them back, roots and creepers bringing the walls down piece by piece, wolves moving through the ruins.

She was crying but she didn’t know whether it was for herself or for Bunny.

He knew that something was wrong. She was making an effort to be cheerful, to be attentive, to be patient. He had known all along that it would come to this. If he were braver he would let her go. She’d given him more happiness than he’d expected to get from anyone. But he had never been brave. And he couldn’t bring himself to have one day less of her company.

He couldn’t take his eyes off her. Now that she was about to be taken from him she had become unutterably beautiful. He finally understood the songs: the sweetness, the hurt, the cost of it all. He would be wiser next time. It was just a shame there wouldn’t be a next time.

She went to Sainsbury’s and bought a chicken jalfrezi and pilau rice, a king prawn masala and some oven chips. She bought two tins of treacle pudding, two tubs of Taste the Difference vanilla custard and a bottle of Jacob’s Creek Cool Harvest Shiraz Rosé.

He saw her negotiating the hallway with three bags. “You bought the shop.”

“I’m cooking you a posh supper.”

“Why?” asked Bunny. “Not that I’m complaining.”

“Big occasion,” said Leah.

“What big occasion?”

She could hear the anxiety in his voice. She put the bags down and stuck her head round the door of the living room. “Trust me.” She turned the oven on and poured him a glass of the rosé. “I would never do anything to hurt you.” She kissed his forehead.

While everything was cooking she lit two candles and turned the lights down. She carefully moved Bunny’s models off the table and put them out of harm’s way. Then she fetched a chair from the dining room so that she could sit and eat beside him. She laid the cutlery out and gave Bunny the chequered green tea towel to use as a serviette. She brought the dishes in one by one, the prawn masala, the chicken, the chips, the rice. She sat down and held up her glass. “Cheers.”

He said, “I know you’re leaving, and I know you’re trying to be kind about it.”

“I’m not leaving.”

“Really?” He spoke very quietly, as if her decision were a house of cards which might collapse at any minute.

“Really.” She took a sip of the rosé. It was slightly warm. She should have put it in the freezer for ten minutes.

“Wow.” He lay back against his pillows and exhaled. He was trying not to cry. “I was so scared.”

“The food’s going cold,” she said.

He was still unsure. “So what are we celebrating?”

“Eat first. Then I’ll tell you.”

He gingerly put a forkful of chicken into his mouth and chewed. She could see the tension slowly leaving his body. He swallowed, took another deep breath and fanned his face with a comedy flap of his hands. “I got a bit worked up back there.”

“There’s no need to apologise.” She refilled his glass.

They ate in silence for a while. He finished the chicken and the rice and the side plate of chips. “That was fantastic. Thank you.”

“Treacle pudding to come.”

“No expense spared.”

She put her glass down. “But first…”

“Go on.” His face tensed again.

“Bunny Wallis…” She paused for effect. “Will you marry me?”

He stared at her.

“Do I need to repeat the question?”

“Yes,” said Bunny. “You do need to repeat the question.”

“Will you marry me?” She waited. “If I have to say it a third time then I’m going to withdraw the offer.”

“Why?” asked Bunny. “Why would you want to marry me?”

“Because I love you.”

“This is the most extraordinary day of my life.”

“Does that mean ‘yes’?”

He took a deep breath. “Of course it does.”

“Good.” She leaned over and kissed him on the lips then sat down and poured him a third glass. “To us.”

“To us.” He clinked his glass against hers and drank. She could see tears forming in the corners of his eyes. He said, “I have never been this happy. Never.”

She stood up. “I think that calls for treacle pudding.”

When she came back into the room his eyes were closed. She set the bowls down and stroked his forearm. “Bunny?”

“I just…” He shook his head like a dog coming out of a pond. “I’m so sorry. You ask me to marry you and I fall asleep.”

“You’re tired, that’s all.” She handed him the treacle pudding.

He was squeezing his eyes shut and opening them again, trying to focus. He filled his spoon with pudding and custard and lifted it halfway to his mouth but had to put it down again. “Can you…?” He gave her the bowl. Taking his hand away he knocked the spoon onto the bedcovers. “Shit. Sorry.”

“It’s no problem.”

He leaned back and closed his eyes once more. She licked the spoon and scraped the dropped food back into the bowl. She dipped the corner of the tea towel in her glass of water and rubbed gently at the stain. She squeezed his hand. “How are you doing in there?” He squeezed back then slowly loosened his grip. She took the bowls into the kitchen, dumped the remaining treacle pudding into the bin and set the bowls in the sink. She went back into the living room and watched him for a while.

“Let’s make you more comfortable.” She put her hand behind his neck, pulled him forward and slipped the top pillow out from behind his head. He roused himself a little then became still. She waited for thirty seconds then pulled him forward once more to remove the next pillow. The third and last was harder to remove. Gently, she eased it free by pulling it from side to side, taking care not to wake him, until it slipped out.

He was now lying flat on his back. His breathing stopped for a few seconds then restarted. His arms circled, reaching for some invisible thing just above the bed, then they were still again. A couple of minutes later he went through the same cycle without waking. “Bunny?” she said quietly, but there was no response.

Quarter past eight. She waited till half past. The periods when he was not breathing grew longer but some automatic response kicked in every time. Had she miscalculated? Eight forty. She put her hand on his arm. “Come on, Bunny. Help me out here.”

Eight forty-five. He was no longer lifting his arms off the bed, just the ghost of a movement. He looked shattered, as if he were reaching the end of a long fight against a much stronger opponent.

“It’s OK, Bunny. You can let go.”

She could no longer see his chest rising and falling. She could no longer hear him breathing, only a tiny, broken hiss that stopped and started and stopped and started and finally, just before nine o’clock, stopped altogether.

She waited another five minutes to be sure, then she leaned over and kissed him. It was nothing, really, when you thought about it, like turning off a light. You were here, then you were gone.

She took the little brown tub from her pocket, unscrewed the lid and gently dropped both of them onto the carpet on the far side of the bed. She poured the remains of his wine onto the table and laid the glass on its side. She carried her own glass into the kitchen where she washed the crockery, cutlery and glassware and left it to dry. She double-bagged the packaging and the uneaten food and dropped everything in the bin outside the front door. She washed and dried her hands and went into the garden for a cigarette.

She would discover him when she came down in the morning. She would notice the glass but she would fail to see the diazepam. She would check his pulse and his breathing but she would know from the look of him that he had been dead for some time. She would call an ambulance and wait outside for it to arrive. She would call Bunny’s mother. She would call Bunny’s sister. She would say, “He seemed so happy.” She would wrap the owl and the apostle spoons and the wall plate in newspaper and put them at the bottom of her suitcase, but she wouldn’t leave town till after the funeral. The idea of him being rolled through those curtains without a friend in the room was almost unbearable.