Cooper Bartholomew Is Dead
He’s anticipated this. He leans over to click open the glove box. ‘In there. Hurry up or we’ll be late.’
She grabs the bag greedily. Collects a portion of powder with the back of her fingernail and tries to lift it to her nose. Her hands are shaking so badly the powder slides straight off. Luckily it falls back into the bag. She opens the bag wider and lifts it right up to her nose, tries again.
‘Nice one,’ he says. ‘You look desperate.’
She shrugs. Snorts. Closes her eyes.
When she’s done she seals the bag, puts it in her pocket.
‘Yeah, thanks, Sebastian,’ he says sarcastically. ‘Oh, that’s no problem at all, Claire. My absolute pleasure.’
‘I was about to say thank you.’
‘This is the last time,’ he says. ‘You’re getting too full on.’
‘God, Sebastian, just get off my case, will you? I’m sad, all right? I’m probably in shock. I just need a little something to help.’
Claire goes on. Justifying. Making excuses. More for her own benefit than his, he thinks. He lets her words flow over him and stares through the window and watches as the crowd starts moving inside. He wonders what would happen if he turned around and drove away. Would he regret it for the rest of his life? Would anyone even notice or care? He has been so knotted up inside since Cooper died, so tense and wired up and miserable, he doesn’t know how he’s going to cope. He feels like he will shatter at the lightest touch.
The last funeral he went to was his grandfather’s, when he was fifteen years old. The service was like a pressure-cooker, making his grief unbearable. Not only was he sad, he felt strangely freaked out. The solemn faces. The coffin. The thought of his grandfather’s body decaying inside. The whole unfathomable concept of death. It was the first time he really understood that the adults around him didn’t control the world. And if they didn’t, who did?
‘Come on.’ He sighs and pushes his door open. ‘Let’s do this.’
They are the last inside and are forced to take a seat up the back. He’s glad. He doesn’t want anyone to look at him. He doesn’t want to hug. Doesn’t want to share grief or be consoled.
He spots his parents on the other side of the aisle. Leonard is searching the room, his face even darker than usual. He spots Sebastian and gives him a curt nod, turns back to the front. Then the minister steps up and the church falls silent.
17
LiBBy
The funeral is devastating, almost too horrible to bear. I manage to keep my tears quiet at first. I’ve been sobbing in my bedroom on and off for days and am too exhausted to make a lot of noise.
The minister gives his sermon, and then there are the more personal eulogies. A tribute from Cooper’s boss, Cameron. A funny memorial from an old football coach. A short and teary speech from one of his aunts. I listen to their words and cry silently, tears running down my cheeks and neck, soaking my collar. I don’t bother wiping them away.
I sit next to my mother in the second row. She holds my hand through the whole thing. Cooper’s mum, Tessa, is sitting in the pew in front of me. Even from behind I can see that she’s distraught, on the verge of collapse. She can barely sit straight. Her sister and her mother stay close the whole time, holding her up, wiping her face with tissues.
The minister closes with a short talk on the tragedy of suicide. He speaks about the black dog of depression, the importance of compassion, the necessity for vigilance. He says we don’t always know when someone is suffering. He says that some people are very good at keeping their unhappiness a secret.
No, I think. No. Cooper wasn’t unhappy. He wasn’t suffering. You’re not talking about the boy I loved. You didn’t know him at all and you’re wrong. So very very WRONG.
I’m tempted to stand up and shout, to defend Cooper, but before I can collect my thoughts or gather enough courage, the minister has stopped talking and stepped to the side of the pulpit to reveal a screen.
He dims the lights and photos of Cooper appear and disappear before us, ghostly fragments of a life, from when he was a baby until just before he died. Cooper riding a bike. Cooper as a kid, grinning at the camera, his face dirty and his hair wild, two front teeth missing. Cooper with his mum. With kids I don’t recognise. The melancholy notes of Wish You Were Here by Pink Floyd, one of Cooper’s favourite songs, accompany the pictures, and I hear people behind me choking back their sobs. Tessa collapses over herself, her back and shoulders shuddering violently. Her mother and sister succumb to their own grief, burying their faces in their hands.
A picture of Cooper and me appears on the screen. We’re standing on the train platform, our arms around each other, shy smiles on our faces. We were so happy. And I’m gulping and spluttering, sobbing uncontrollably, unable to stop myself. My mother puts her arm around my back, pulls me closer. It’s excruciating, unbearable, impossible.
Only it’s not impossible at all, it has really happened, and we have no choice but to bear it.
18
CLAiRE
People give speeches, but Claire can’t bring herself to listen to the words themselves, only the broken sound beneath the words, and that’s bad enough. She stares straight ahead, trying over and over to count to one hundred. She closes her eyes and starts again each time she loses count. The little plastic bag in her pocket gives her some comfort. She imagines going to the bathroom and having another line. The very fact that this is possible makes things more bearable.
When the photos appear and that boring old song Cooper used to love comes on, she hears Sebastian make a choking noise, feels him shaking next to her. She can’t bring herself to look at him, or take his hand, or give him any comfort. The music and the pictures have broken through her shield of numbers, and she’s too busy holding herself together, making sure the steady trickle of tears on her cheeks doesn’t become an uncontrollable flood.
Cooper’s mum leads the way out of the church, but halfway down the centre aisle she stops and starts howling. She buries her face in her hands, makes a lot of noise. Claire has to blink and swallow hard to stop herself from getting equally messy. There’s a horrible moment when Tessa collapses to the ground and Claire wonders if this torture is going to go on forever and ever – all of them stuck here eternally in this claustrophobic hell – but a bunch of people surround Tessa and help her up and they all continue moving out.
Outside, they all watch the coffin being put into the back of the hearse. It’s too horrifying to picture Cooper’s rotting body inside that box, so she imagines instead that it’s full of flowers – rose petals, sweet-smelling blooms. People are sniffling, wiping their red eyes, hugging each other, and the collective grief is so overwhelming she starts to feel as if she might be sick. Shit like this shouldn’t happen.
As the car pulls away and everybody is left looking lost and miserable, Claire realises how final, how permanent this is.
Cooper is not coming back. She will never, ever, ever get the chance to make it up to him.
She’s always had it in her mind that one day she’d get a chance to explain things, apologise for the way she’d behaved when they were going out. She’s always imagined that he’d forgive her and that they might at least be good friends, if not become a couple again. Cooper was too special to lose as a friend.
It might be easier to accept his death if she could remember what had actually happened the night he died. She’d be able to grieve properly if she wasn’t so anxious and scared and full of guilt. But when she tries to recall that night the gaps in her memory are like a solid, impenetrable wall of black.
THEN
19
LiBBy
When I got home after surfing with Cooper I was still shivering. I went inside and said a quick hi to Mum, who looked startled by my bedraggled appearance. I was too cold to stop and talk, so I told her I’d explain later. I headed straight to the bathroom and ran a deep, warm bath. I took my salt-sticky clothes off and slipped into the water.
Surfing a
fter all these years had been a revelation. I’d forgotten the way time stopped, the way you completely lost yourself in the moment. There was only you and the board and the water. Weightlessness and wind and adrenaline. I’d