LITMIR.BIZ

       13

      The morning of Jamie’s funeral, she had risen at 4.30 a.m. – pitch-black outside, even though it was nearly mid-summer – and tiptoed downstairs. She had expected to be alone with her thoughts of Jamie, the burden of her guilt, but her mother was already awake, sitting at the kitchen table in her towelling robe, clutching a cup of coffee that had grown a milky film it had sat so long, untouched.

      She was holding Jamie’s school jumper, pressing it to her face, drinking in his smell. Jessie was surprised how small it was. The images she retained of Jamie, despite his illness, were larger than life, a personality that occupied a vast, fizzing space. Looking at her mum clutching his jumper, fingers stroking the balled wall, she realized how young he was, how little. Seven years, gone in a heartbeat. A life snuffed out before it had properly begun.

      ‘I thought you were asleep,’ Jessie murmured. She couldn’t meet her mother’s gaze.

      ‘How could I?’ The words barely audible.

      Distractedly, her mother took a sip of coffee, her face wrinkling in surprise at its coldness. How long had she sat here, cradling the cup?

      ‘I’ll make you another,’ Jessie said.

      She padded over to the kettle. While she was waiting for it to boil, she pulled back the kitchen curtain expecting, for some reason, to see dawn breaking; startled when all she saw was her own pallid reflection. Though she had been in the kitchen for barely two minutes, each second had elongated until it was nanometre thin, filling an hour of memories, of self-recrimination. The ticking of the kitchen clock sounded like a hammer on steel, the dim overhead lights, half the bulbs missing, interrogation-chamber bright. She was hypersensitive to every movement, her mother’s every tic.

      Filling two cups, Jessie moved back to the table.

      ‘I’ve been trying to remember Jamie before the illness.’ Her mother’s voice wavered. ‘But all I can remember is him without colour, pale and sickly. He used to have the most beautiful complexion, the most vibrant look about him.’ She plucked at her own sallow, papery skin. ‘You both did … do. Perfect Irish roses. Your father’s look.’

      Leaning over, she cupped Jessie’s chin in her fingers, their first physical contact since Jamie’s death. ‘You’re so like your father. Beautiful, like him. He was … is beautiful … on the outside, at least.’

      ‘Will he … will he be there?’

      ‘What?’

      ‘Dad? Will Dad be at …’ Jessie’s tongue felt like a wad of cotton wool in her mouth. ‘At the funeral?’

      A vague shrug. ‘How would I know?’ Her mother’s hand moved to stroke her cheek. Her touch like a chill breeze. ‘Yesterday, in the supermarket, I imagined holding Jamie when he was just an hour old. I was in bed, in hospital, my knees bent, and he was lying in the dent between my thighs. I closed my eyes, standing in the middle of the aisle, and I could feel him. Actually feel the warmth of him. The shape of his skull under my fingers, that duck’s fluff of baby hair. He clutched my hand with his tiny fingers. I remember studying his nails in wonderment. They were so perfect, every nail a perfect crescent. It always amazes me that something so small, a baby’s hand, can work at all.’ Her words ran out, her face closed down. A single tear squeezed from her eye and ran down her cheek.

      ‘Mum?’ Jessie bit her lip to stop herself from crying. ‘It’ll be all right.’

      ‘No. It won’t be all right.’ Her mum rose, turned towards the door. ‘I’m going to get dressed.’

      ‘Mum. Please.’

      To stop talking meant that time would start ticking again, the unstoppable slide towards the inevitable: a black car at the front door, the slow journey down the A3 to the crematorium, the impatient flow of traffic cutting around them, brake lights flashing as drivers caught sight of the little coffin smothered in flowers and slowed to stare, the black-garbed crowd waiting outside the crematorium, children and parents from school, children who had teased and taunted Jamie when he couldn’t run any more, couldn’t play football – Thought your sister was the Jessie, jessie.

      Jamie’s body being interred in fire.

      ‘Mum.’

      Her mother paused at the door; her dead eyes found Jessie’s. ‘When your dad left us, I thought that the unrequited love I had for him was the hardest I’d ever experience.’ Her voice cracked. ‘But I was wrong. When someone dies they can’t love us back. However hard we love them, they can never, ever love us back.’