Just Last Night

by Mhairi McFarlane

The eternity of the silence overwhelms me. The line between us buzzes with monotonous static, a line never to be busy again.

We’ve been plunged into extreme circumstances where slight misjudgments equal horrendous gaffes.

Once again, I ask myself—is it better or worse not to have an enemy, other than Fate?

If I need a nemesis, he’ll do.

“Oh!” I’d not thought of this. I’d not considered the scene, by daylight, still existing.

He’s not making me jump through the hoops or agonize about whether to say I want looking after, he’s just looking after me. Which is Ed.

Why are things, abandoned things, so hard to bear? They didn’t have that quality before. And compared to the living thing you’ve lost, they’re without value.

This lack of warning is another aspect of it that I can’t accept. Susie didn’t know her last day was her last day. She got no ceremony, no sense of occasion. Life life life . . . and in an instant, dead. Like a brutal edit in a film, a jump cut. Over. Finished.

“Are you coming in from Bridgford?” I said, not to be nosy, but because I was edgy and didn’t know how best to spin the conversation out to something of conventionally polite length. “No, I’m staying at a hotel in town,” Fin said. I didn’t know what to say to that other than “Ah.”

looking down on the buskers and the shoppers and the people whose lives are continuing. Lucky foolish unwitting bastards. How can they make being alive seem so easy,

I laugh weakly. I wish Susie’s laugh was echoing mine.

he’s intimidatingly well put together, if not actually appealing in any way.

Our environment is so extraordinarily perilous.

I sense recovery may be buried somewhere in laughter. Partial recovery.

The countdown to the funeral is awful. “Awful.” What a limp word for this experience. Queues at the supermarket on Christmas Eve are awful. Banging your elbow on a hard surface is awful. My sliding scale for “awful” has completely changed and I need an enhanced vocabulary to deal with it. You don’t realize the flippancy of your generation’s attitudes and language until you grasp for the terminology that conveys the impact, and it’s not there. It’s been shopworn by silly jokes and ironic hyperbole.

I loved it as pure exotica.

Chunks of his memory had fallen away like masonry, but tasks right in front of him were fine.

We blaze at each other, at an impasse,

Finlay Hart isn’t just dislikable, he’s frightening.

These are febrile imaginings, but I’m not able to be rational about this or anything to do with Susie.

My best friend, who I thought kept nothing from me, who I thought I knew the very bones of—nope. Her greatest secret imaginable, and Becky was someone worthy to share it with, not me. Our friendship group, which I set so much store in, people I’d go to war for—the whole time had this subset within it, people who’d shagged and hidden it, specifically from me. Did Justin know? How big a fool have I been made, here? I’m woozy.

The closest person to me was busy outmaneuvering me, over the thing that mattered to me the most?

I don’t mind her not hurting as much, but leave me in peace to hurt more.

It’s a catalyst, and as soon as it starts up, I’m back getting drunk on Aperol spritzes with her, in a bar lit by a jukebox and tealights, making plans for a future she barely got to see. My face is a flash flood.

Listening to Ed read out my tribute to Susie was going to be extraordinarily agonizing, before last night’s discovery. Now I don’t have a way of categorizing my emotional response.

It’s interesting how his forbidding attitude leaks out of every pore: despite his evident pretty boy credentials, I sincerely doubt even the Teacup Girls are giving him sidelong looks. Well, OK, maybe they are, and getting nothing back but radiation sickness.

“It’s gone off well. As well as could be expected.” The king of qualified praise.

Whenever you say something blandly sympathetic to Finlay Hart, you get batted back as if you’re a juvenile intellect, as opposed to saying the comforting, polite things people say. It riles me.

I feel myself doing that thing with someone I dislike: baiting them into saying something that proves my dislike is justified.

When there’s a sense of that’s that, then and “normality” resumes. We’ve agreed we’re not honoring the pub quiz tradition for the foreseeable, to show our respects. In truth we’re fighting shy of it because the empty chair, the comeback that never comes, the bag of chips we don’t need to buy, is going to debilitate us that much more. When this strangeness is over, the Not Hereness will truly land.

shuddering with repulsion and pity.

I don’t know who he is, who my best friend was, or why the world’s become unrecognizable to me in a matter of days.

“This isn’t the time for your super-reasonable balanced perspective. Let a shit thing be shit.”

The actual words spoken feel jagged. It’s as if I swallowed something sharp and metallic, and it tears up my insides as it makes its way out of me.

Some truths, like Susie’s passing, are too large to be digested in one go.

A combination of alcohol and incredible, soul-flattening misery has given me a malign superstrength. Every other expression of anger in my life, I realize, always came restrained with concerns about how it made me look, or how it affected the other person, or if I could get fired. Consequences, basically. I don’t care! is often said but rarely fully meant. But I don’t. I have nothing left to protect or worry about in attacking Ed over Susie. From where I’m standing, I’ve already lost everything. I’m the origins story of a dangerous comic-book villain.

Ed realizes he’s gone from one incendiary situation to an even more flammable one,

It’s one thing to know someone’s insensitive, and another to have them demonstrate just how insensitive they can be when you’re at your most sensitive.

Hester’s unused to being called on her behavior and it shows. Like an unfit person suddenly asked to run a mile, she’s out of shape when it comes to taking negative feedback, huffing and puffing. Whereas I feel like I’ve been in training for this moment for years.

She might as well have said “Heel!” to Ed, for the obviousness of the expectation that he follow.

“What for?” I say. Usually that is a response to an apology that exculpates someone, but here it’s accusatory.

It’s the forgetful twitch that’s the worst. Oh I’ll text Susie if . . . Oh I wonder if Susie wants tickets to . . . What did Susie say about that, again? I’ll just . . . Each time, the whiplash of remembering, like the spike of nausea you get coming to a very sudden halt aboard a moving object. Then the abyss of “no Susie ever again” opens up beyond it. It doesn’t change, this being gone. Who knew that the most obvious thing about it is the hardest part?

I get the feeling he has a nagging sense of leaving things unattended, but isn’t able to articulate what or how. Up until now, his dementia has seemed quite benign, if sad. Because he’s outwardly so cheerful and functioning, it wasn’t too startling. Now I see more clearly that it’s a living prison.

You cannot reason with what your senses crave, it seems.

My rights here are far from clear. It wasn’t me who Ed cheated on, yet I feel jealous, betrayed, and gut-twistingly angry. I’m presenting as indignant and righteous but, in actual fact, I’m drowning in shame and confusion of my own.

“She bottled it. As time passes it gets harder and harder to come clean. Bottlings only get bigger. It’s the cost of cowardice. The price of making the wrong choice at the outset.”

“This isn’t the person I thought you were,” I say, bleakly. And although, in my head, this wasn’t a killer line, only a spasm of pain that I couldn’t help exiting my mouth, Ed visibly crumples at it.

The truth is, it was first too precious, and then too painful, to let any sunlight in on it.

emollient Ed,

I nail the rest of the bottle of white wine in a dark red mood.