Page 2

TWO

Ash thanks the delivery driver, then closes the front door behind her and carries the flowers to the kitchen.

Here, her mother, Nina; her brother, Arlo; her grandmother; her uncle; her aunt; her three cousins; and her best friend all sit around the big wooden table, which is littered with wine-stained glasses, dirty plates, the gelatinous-looking remains of the canapés.

The atmosphere is both brittle and unburdened.

The worst of it is over, the day is done.

Now Ash is shoeless in black tights, her heels abandoned earlier, once most of the other guests had left.

“Who are they from?” asks her mother. Her voice is ragged.

“Er…” Ash feels around the pale pink bag for a card, peels it off, and hands it to her mother.

“Please,” says her mother. “You do it.”

Ash pulls a small card from the envelope; it is the same shade of antique pink as the bag and has a linear rose embossed on the front, over which she subconsciously runs her fingertip. Inside is a note scribbled in messy florist’s handwriting with a water blotch on the ink.

Thinking of you all

Love and condolences,

The Tanners

“Who are the Tanners?”

Ash’s mother sighs. “Literally no idea. Can you put them in some water?”

“We’ve run out of vases.”

Her mother sighs again, and Ash knows that she must not mention anything more to do with flowers today. She sticks them in a vase that already holds a bouquet—the two bouquets look wildly mismatched, aesthetically unpleasing—then joins her family at the table.

Ella slops some white wine into Ash’s empty glass. Ash makes a kiss at her.

The sun didn’t come out today, not once, which is ironic as Ash’s father was obsessed with sunshine, chased it around the garden, chased it around the world, kept a UV lamp in his home office for gray days, studied forecasts religiously, insisted on barbecues at the merest hint of spring.

He’d wanted this house because it was south-facing; he had his favorite suntrap spots in the garden, one in particular where he could sunbathe even in February, which he referred to as “Ibiza.” “I’m going to Ibiza for a bit,” he’d say on a sunny morning, a coffee in one hand, sunglasses on his head.

There was always a bottle of sun cream by the back door. All year round.

But today, the day they said goodbye to him, the sun stayed away. Ash liked to think maybe he’d taken it for himself. But on the other hand—no. She very much believes that dead people have no influence.

He was fifty-four.

He was killed by a stranger.

Pushed onto the tracks.

Under a train.

He was on his way home from a restaurant opening, not one of his but a friend’s, in Soho. He was very drunk. He’d been drinking tequila slammers, according to his friend. The life and soul. Always the life and soul, Paddy Swann.

The man who pushed him was called Joe Kritner.

There. Done. One moment. Two lives. More, if you include the train driver, the witnesses, the paramedics who had to pull the bits of him off the tracks.

There’s a photo album on the table; Ash and her brother, Arlo, had put it together.

They’d left space in the final pages for guests to add their own photos of Dad, of Paddy.

Ash opens it at a random page and sighs at the sight of her dad wearing a bucket hat and sunglasses, holding a pint of beer in a plastic cup at some kind of festival.

Peak nineties, Ash thinks. He was born in 1970, so must have been about twenty-five here. Same age as she is now.

“Where’s that?” she asks her mum, turning the album toward her mother.

“Ha, Glastonbury. Of course.”

“Of course,” says Ash drily. “Were you there too?”

“Yup. Oasis. Pulp. The Cure. Boiling hot. We went with Lena and Johnny. Dad got very, very…”

“Drunk?” Arlo suggests.

“And the rest.”

They all smile wryly. Everyone knows what Paddy was like. He liked to drink, he liked to take party drugs, he liked to get stoned. He liked to listen to music all the time, always walked around in headphones. He liked vinyl, liked T-shirts, liked live music, liked people, liked food.

Paddy Swann was the most uncomplicated human being in the world, and then, two weeks ago, a very complicated person used Paddy Swann as a character in his own very complicated internal story and pushed him under a train. And now he is dead.

The remains of his clan are loud now, they don’t know how to be quiet, even in the fading light of the day that they buried him.

But the noise is riven through with something piquant and terrible.

The lack of his voice, his laugh, his bulk.

The fact that at the other end of today, everyone’s lives will continue without him.

Ash slams the album shut and grabs her wineglass, tips it back, ignores the sugary, cloying warmth of it in her mouth, the way it leaches into the stale insides of her cheeks. How will they go to bed tonight? How will they say that this day is over, and the next bit begins?