By the time I got home I was just about dead on my feet and ready for bed, but Richie still wasn’t back and I wanted to tell him about the room and how wonderful it looked, so I ran a bath and had a lovely soak. I even nodded off for a few minutes, so I dried myself, put on my dressing gown and curled up on the sofa. He wouldn’t be much longer now, after all, it was approaching midnight and most of the pubs in town stopped taking orders at 11pm. Any minute now, he’d be jumping out of a taxi at the end of the street and walking the couple of hundred yards down to the flat. I put on the television, but soon my eyes began to droop and I could not concentrate. I would just have a little snooze.
I was awoken, not that much later, by the sound of voices outside. This was unusual, as our street was a cul-de-sac and was generally very quiet, but I was still half-asleep and inclined to ignore it when there was a loud thumping on the door. I staggered across to the window and pulled the curtain aside, and I could see a figure crouched beside something on the pavement. I couldn’t make out what it was, due to the low wall that marked our tiny patch of front garden, but there was someone else at the door, thumping and ringing the bell then standing back to look at the windows, so I hurried to the hall. Clearly something had happened outside and somebody was in need of help.
A young woman, ashen-faced, confronted me as I opened the door.
“Quick, call an ambulance, the police! There’s a knife in his chest. My mobile’s dead and Simon can’t, he’s … he’s ...”
From the front door I could see that somebody was on the ground, so I didn’t wait to find out why Simon could not phone an ambulance, but rushed inside, found my phone and called for both an ambulance and the police. I was calm and collected and I was first aid trained, so I exchanged my dressing gown for a coat and went outside to help whilst we waited for the ambulance.
That was when two things became clear, and I don’t know which came first or whether it all happened at once, but my life changed for ever in those few seconds, as I saw that the person bleeding on the ground was Richie and that he was certainly dead.
What happened after that is muddled and I don’t care to try to remember it in detail. Apparently I tried to revive him and had to be pulled from his body when the police arrived. Apparently I was covered in blood – as was the unfortunate Simon, who couldn’t bring himself to use his phone when he saw the state of his hands. When somebody is stabbed in the heart there is an awful lot of blood and they don’t take long to die. I suppose it was meant to be a comfort to me that Richie would have lost consciousness quite quickly, but I couldn’t get it out of my head that he died there alone, on the street. What would have gone through his head in whatever time he had? He would have been thinking of me, I know that, and of all we had, all we had to lose; it was all slipping away from him and he couldn’t stop it.
‘A random act of meaningless violence.’ That’s what one of the newspaper reports said, and the words ‘random’ and ‘meaningless’ were often used by people when they talked about it. I don’t know whether it would have been easier to cope with if it had been otherwise – if somebody had hated him enough to want to kill him, or if he had died saving a child from a burning house – but it was very difficult to make any sense of it, especially as no-one was ever caught. There was no CCTV in our little street. The knife was a standard kitchen knife, the sort everyone has in their homes, unmarked, no prints, not even new. Its blade had been sharpened to a lethal point, but it was unremarkable in every other way. There was no motive. No motive at all. We went over and over it, both with the police and with his family, his friends, our friends, but there was nobody who would have wanted him dead, not even a disgruntled pupil, although quite a few of them were pulled in and interviewed.
The case was never closed, and the police assured me that they would revisit it as soon as any other evidence became available, but it never did. Richie was simply in the wrong place at the wrong time, although being right outside your own home should be safe enough. He just happened to be there at the same time as somebody who was clearly deranged. We will never know what led up to it, whether there was some kind of altercation, whether it could have been avoided if only he had handed over his wallet or his phone. I have had to learn to stop thinking about it as there are no answers and no satisfactory endings. Richie died. He didn’t die of cancer, or in a road accident, or from some previously undetected heart condition. He didn’t die of anything that we might have predicted, if we had ever had such a conversation, but he was stabbed. It was random and meaningless, but there was nothing anyone could do about that.
So, people rallied round to do all the things that could be done. Practical things. I was in no condition to deal with the multiplicity of difficulties arising from Richie’s death, but my friends resolved the issues of the tenancy, my job – everything that had been put in place to secure our new future and now needed to be unpicked. Olga was particularly supportive, but Nat was there too, although he was in almost as bad a state as I was, and others. For weeks I was hardly ever alone, and the flat was returned to some semblance of order. Many of Richie’s possessions were taken away by his heartbroken family and mine were unpacked. The boxes disappeared, food appeared in the cupboards, and I functioned at some level in the weeks leading up to the funeral, although I have little memory of that time now.
Obviously the circumstances of Richie’s death meant that the funeral was delayed. There was an inquest, with the predictable outcome of unlawful killing, but that was a long time later, and at least his body was released in late August. That was how we came to be saying goodbye to him on a bright, sunny morning, with everyone in bright, sunny clothes, as he would have wanted. I don’t remember ever having had a ‘my funeral’ conversation with him, but there were plenty of people who seemed to know what his thoughts would be, if he were here to give them, and I had neither the energy nor inclination to express an opinion. I didn’t even help choose the music, although that was something we had talked about a lot, as it was simply too painful. I didn’t see the point in exposing everybody’s nerve endings in this way, but I endured it when they played Nirvana’s ‘All Apologies’ and something by The Smiths. I don’t know what it was. These were from the soundtrack of Richie’s youth, a time I hadn’t shared, and now we wouldn’t be sharing any more time and there would be no more music in my life.
There were so many people at the funeral that they had to relay it via speakers to the crowd outside and reserve seats inside the chapel for those who knew him best. There must have been a hundred students outside, sitting on the grass, and if it hadn’t been for the fact that many were in tears and others were comforting them you might have thought that a mini-festival was being held in the grounds of the municipal crematorium. Then there were his family, his colleagues, his many, many friends, some of whom would have been at the party that never took place, and were now here together in quite a different mood. And then there was me. I was right at the front, they insisted on that, but I could take no solace from Nat’s supportive arm, from the kind words of all the people who stood up to say what a great person he’d been, or to read poems, or to tell funny little anecdotes about things he had done. I was stony-faced, untouchable, detached and hiding behind my own little wall.
That was until Olga and Tim stood up and walked to the front. Tim was carrying his acoustic guitar, and a deeper hush fell upon the packed congregation.
“I hadn’t known Richie for long,” said Olga, “but I do know Amy.” She glanced over at me, and I saw her take a deep breath. “I know that Richie made Amy as happy as she has ever been, and that tells me all I need to know. This song is for Richie, but it’s also for Amy, to let her know that we will all be here for her, for as long as she needs us.”
It was Bob Dylan. It was ‘Knockin’ on Heaven’s Door’, the same song that I had sung all those months ago, when Richie was still a question mark in my mind and life stretched out before me, full of opportunity. It was not the same version I’d sung
, as Olga’s voice was stronger and huskier than mine and it was more like Dylan’s own rendition. But it broke down my defences all the same, dismantled my wall, brick by brick, until I was completely exposed and my grief and anger and despair flooded out in one long, animal-like howl.
***
So now it’s evening I suppose. It has been dark for a while, and I’ve eaten a little soup and cried quite a lot. If I carry on like this I will have no strength, no reserves to deal with Greg when he comes. Or, if he doesn’t come, if I have to spend days or even weeks here, what state will I be in, if I am ever rescued? I want to be able to throw myself back into life if I get the chance, not spend more precious months in recovery, in some kind of facility or in the flat again, the threat coming from the outside world in general rather than Greg. Surely there is more to me than this?
I stand up and walk to the door, pull the desk away, and listen hard, my ear against the wood. There is nothing, not the tiniest sound to indicate that anyone else is here, but I shout and bang on the door with my fists. Help! Help! Somebody, please help me! I pick up the chair and heave it against the door, but it only bounces off, narrowly avoiding my head before clattering to the floor. There is a long scrape on the green paintwork now, but hardly a dent. This is a solid wood door, not some flimsy panelled thing that the hero in a film could punch his way through. You would shatter your knuckles before you punched any kind of hole in this door, but I feel better all the same. Come on girl, show your spirit! Don’t let him win! Make Nat proud of you, so you are all in one piece when he comes.
Unbelievably, I smile a little. That’s what I will do. When all this is over, I will take Nat on holiday. I don’t care how much it costs, I will get the money from somewhere. Maybe Mum and Dad will lend me some, when they find out what I’ve been through and what Nat did to help. We will go somewhere peaceful and chill out, or no, maybe not. Maybe we’ll go to New York, or Mexico City! Yes, that’s it! We will go somewhere exciting, and I will not be scared, as nothing could be as scary as this and, probably, I will never be scared of anything again if only I come out the other side.
I lie back on the bed and imagine this holiday. I think about walking down the gangway of a plane with Nat behind me, feeling the blast of heat from the tarmac, hearing the endless chirp of the crickets, but then I am gripped by sadness. What am I doing? I am fantasising about a holiday with Nat, but it is Richie I want to be with. Somehow, Greg has even stolen my grief. He didn’t take Richie away from me, we know that, but I have not been able to deal normally with his death because of this constant threat to my safety. So no, there will be no celebrations if I am saved. I will not go on holiday. I will find a way to lead some kind of normal life that doesn’t have Richie in it, as that is what he would want, but I’m not ready to feel happy yet and I don’t really want to.
***
I’ve no idea what happened next. Obviously the service continued, but I had to be taken outside, with all the eyes of the assembled crowd watching as Nat helped me down the path and to his car, and the next thing I can remember in any detail is being back at the flat and a doctor shining a light into my eyes.
I only took the tablets for about three months. I’ve absolutely nothing against medication, and it did help me get through the darkest times, but I wasn’t depressed, not in the clinical sense of the word. I was bereaved, and the only way to recover from that is to let time do its work and slowly, carefully, force yourself back into the land of the living. So that’s what I did, with an enormous amount of support, and by New Year I was beginning to lead some kind of a life again. Christmas had been terrible, of course, and New Year itself, as I couldn’t help remembering all the happy times we’d had last year and that we’d never got to spend Christmas Day together. Still, the human spirit is unbelievably robust and I taught my first class for nearly six months at the start of the new term. Somebody said it would be like getting back onto a bike, and that turned out to be true. I was a bit wobbly, but I was fine.
Christmas Eve
Somehow, it is morning again. I had a terrible night, waking with a jolt I don’t know how many times, thinking I could hear somebody at the door. I had a horrible dream in which Richie and I were on a beach, somewhere idyllic, and then he got up and said he was going for a swim, so I watched him, watched the white of his body dive dolphin-like through the waves, then tracked the arch of his arms, graceful in a lazy crawl until I could see him no more. I was not worried. In my dream I knew he was a strong swimmer, so I dozed in the sun until his shadow fell on my face and he lay down beside me, wet and salty, and we kissed long and hard, his arms pulling me closer and our legs beginning to entwine. Then something happened, and I realised, suddenly, it was not Richie I was kissing, but Nat, but I told myself not to worry, Richie wouldn’t mind, and we kissed some more until I shook myself awake, gasping with guilt and regret.
I’m no psychologist, but that dream does not take a lot of interpretation. I went to sleep feeling guilty about planning a holiday with Nat, and my dream was exploring that guilt, but I could not put the idea of Nat kissing me out of my mind. It was only the product of my imagination, but is there some ambiguity in my feelings for Nat? There is a huge amount of gratitude, a huge amount of dependence on his support, but there is also that feeling of being suffocated from time to time. Poor Nat, I can’t imagine how hurt he would be if he knew it, but I could never live with him, even as a friend, and it was so difficult to deal with when the issue arose.
***
It was Olga who suggested that we should get a place together. She said it must be difficult living in the space I had shared with Richie, especially as it had been his flat, and there was some truth in that. Most of the furniture had been his, and I hadn’t lived there long enough to really make it my own before we got rid of a lot of stuff in preparation for the move to Canada. A teacher called Jack had been going to live there as part of the exchange, and we’d had to de-personalise it as much as we could. So now it was a sad place really, with most of Richie’s things gone and aching spaces where they used to be. Olga was right. It was time for a move, and her lease was coming to an end in six months so she would have to find somewhere else. I didn’t know at the time, as I had been so wrapped up in my own problems, but she had been having a painful and secret fling with Anton’s brother, who had some sort of complicated on-off relationship with someone else, and it had all ended messily. However, Olga was too concerned about me to talk about her own problems. What was a dent to her self-esteem compared to what I had been through?
So we were looking for a place. Not that actively, as it was still some time before we could move in, but I was beginning to feel quite excited about it. OK it was no substitute for what I’d lost, but I would not even consider another relationship, and if it made sense to share, who better to share with than Olga, the best friend a girl could ever have?
I’m not sure whether I’d actually said anything to Nat about it. I suppose I hadn’t, given what happened. He had been incredibly kind, phoning almost every day, popping round with a takeaway meal if he thought I sounded low, sorting out so many things. He was like my big brother, or even my dad, although the extent of my own parents’ support was to say that it all may turn out for the best, as my career could only have suffered from taking a year’s break. No surprise then, that I chose not to see a lot of them from that point.
Still, it was more than a surprise, it was a shock, when he came round to the flat one evening with a serious look on his face.
“There’s something I want to discuss with you,” he said, handing me a bottle of red, “and I think we should do it over a drink.”
I had absolutely no idea what he was going to say, although I did wonder if he’d met someone and was worried about telling me that he would have less time to spend with me. I wouldn’t have minded about that, as there was nothing I wanted more than for him to find a partner. Although he could never be the man for me, even if I’d met him before Richie, there was
no doubt that he would make a wonderful, caring boyfriend for somebody, and it was strange that it never seemed to happen for him. Richie used to say that it showed how superficial people were.
“They don’t see the real Nat,” he once said. “They can’t see what shines through. It’s a bloody travesty.”
So, there we were, sitting somewhat formally on the sofa, with glasses of wine on the coffee table in front of us, the TV off and something in the air. I couldn’t put my finger on what it was, but it was there.
“The thing is, my Great Aunt Ellen has died,” Nat said. I started to say something about being sorry, as you do, but he stopped me. “No, don’t worry, it’s OK. She was in her nineties, completely away with the fairies for the last couple of years. She’s been in a home for some years, and she has – had – a house in Camden that was rented out to pay the fees. I had to sort it all out when she started to lose the plot. Anyway, you don’t need to know about all that. The thing is, she looked after me when my grandparents got too old and nobody else could be bothered, and we became very close. She didn’t have any children of her own, and, well, she’s left me the house.”
I really wasn’t sure what to say. Why was he telling me this? Was it because he was sad really, but didn’t know how to express it? As if reading my thoughts, he took a swig of his wine, topped it up again and continued.
“Obviously there are tenants in there at the moment, but we’ve always operated short-term leases and I’ll be in a position to sell it within months. It might even sell with the tenants in place. Anyway, I was thinking about buying somewhere round here, and I thought why not get somewhere I could convert into two flats?” He looked across at me, as if for confirmation, so I nodded and smiled.
The Butterfly Effect Page 9
