Non Pratt - Trouble

I couldn’t tell. I couldn’t tell anything.

All I could think was that the last thing I said to my best friend was that he was a spineless twat.

I slide my hand into his. I’m not sure if he even notices.

It didn’t hit me until the hospital, when Dad came into the room and whispered something about Chris to Mum. She turned to me and held me, clinging to me, squeezing me as if I was the one who was never coming home. I held her back, let her cry silent, grateful tears into my shoulder, let her whisper to me that she loved me so much.

That was when I started to cry. There weren’t any thoughts, just feelings of loss and horror and grief, relief that my parents weren’t going through what Chris’s parents were, shame that I felt that way. Guilt drove me to cry harder and harder until I could barely breathe for sobbing and I was sick on the floor, but no one said anything, not my dad, not my mum, not even the nurse who quietly came and mopped it up and handed Mum one of those shiny steel bowls. I don’t know when they took me home.

During the police interview the next day I stared dully at the tabletop. I didn’t want to see the look in the officer’s eyes when I told her the truth.

“We were fighting.” I felt my dad go very still on the chair next to me. It was the first he’d heard of it.

“And…” The police officer’s voice was careful, neutral, non-committal.

“I didn’t… mean to.” The words seemed to fall out of my mouth, as if I had no control. “He was trying to get away and I was pulling him back…”

I closed my eyes, only to snap them open to avoid the memories waiting in the dark.

“You were pulling him back?”

I looked up at her then and I watched the way her jaw clenched as she looked back at me, waiting.

“I shouldn’t have let go.” I started crying so much that the interview was suspended and my father pulled me close and told me that he loved me. Told me that it wasn’t my fault, I wasn’t to blame. I didn’t believe him.

I was spared the funeral. When I couldn’t get out of the car in my new black suit, my dad simply turned round and drove home. But school was a distraction I thought I could handle. I was wrong. The sympathetic looks and hugs from the girls — except for Penny, who was absent; back pats from the boys; teachers ignoring the empty seat next to mine. But it was the gap in the morning registration, where his name should have been, that got to me most, reminding me of the space in my world that my best friend should have occupied.

At the end of the week I found Rav waiting for me by the main entrance. We’d been mates — the three of us.

“This week’s been hard,” he said.

I nodded.

“Want to come and get drunk with me and some of the lads?”

I did, and I got very, very drunk. Drunk enough that I could forget who I was for whole minutes at a time. Drunk enough to forget who my friends were and to end up sitting with the group of lads who hung out by the late-night supermarket near my house — lads that Chris and I had always been a little bit scared of.

Chris. No matter how much I drank, I could never forget Chris.

At least, not until I blacked out.

The next morning I woke up on the sofa in Rav’s room, my host telling me that I wasn’t allowed to be sick or his mum would find out what we’d been up to — not that I could remember any of it. For all the pain I was in, I realized that twelve hours had passed like twelve minutes. That night I didn’t need an invitation; I went down to the supermarket with enough money for the oldest lad — a guy called Smiffy, who was a Mark Grey of a man — to buy me a bottle of tequila and I drank the lot.

But I couldn’t pull the same stunt the next day, not on a Sunday.

The week passed by. Wake up. Remember. Go to school. Remember. Come home. Remember. Go to sleep. And repeat…

Somehow I’d managed to avoid Penny at school. We didn’t have many classes together and I’d turn up late and leave early in the ones we did share. Breaktimes I’d hide in the library, picking out a title at random and reading it for as long as I needed to lose myself, then putting it back on the shelf when the bell went. But Thursday night she rang my house.

“Ty. We need to talk.”

I told her I’d go to hers. The supermarket was between my house and Penny’s — it was seven o’clock and I wasn’t surprised to find Smiffy there with a couple of other lads. I handed him the twenty I’d taken from Dad’s wallet and asked him to buy me some vodka and cider. If I drunk enough before I went to Penny’s then she wouldn’t want to talk to me. I didn’t have much of a window, so I needed to drink fast and I cut the two together. Too focused on my own problems, I didn’t notice that Smiffy was looking for trouble when another group of kids headed into the supermarket.

There was a scuffle by the doors. It didn’t really register with me until the lad next to me yanked me up and said that Smiffy needed a hand. Not that I knew what to do with my hands, my brain was blurred with booze and I found myself stumbling into the back of one lad who turned and landed a crack to my browbone.

The world came into focus and it was red with remembering.

My guilt, my misery spilled out into violence and I plunged into the fray, grabbing a fistful of a T-shirt to land a punch so vicious I’d hear the crunch of my own bones, flooring one person to start on the next. Everything in me was unleashed, all the hatred I had for myself… I wanted to hurt, lashing out with abandon, incapable of feeling the brutal blows landed in retaliation. The more I fought, the less I seemed to feel, driving me to dismay, spurring me on, desperate to find a way to feel the pain I deserved.

Senseless with grief, I ended up laying in to one of our own.

“What the—?” Smiffy held his nose, arm up to block my next punch, missing the kick I let fly. He doubled over, grabbing me on his way to the floor. I was rabid, flying with my fists, my feet and my head, all of them making contact with something as everyone piled in to try and stop me, to calm me down. Someone shouted out that I was bleeding, but I didn’t care and I heard someone else scream — it could have been me — or the guy I’d just hammered in the nuts.

“Stop it!”

It was a girl’s voice and the bodies surrounding me started peeling back as the person who shouted pushed through.

“TY!” There was blood smeared across one of my eyes and I was having problems focusing through the other. But I would have recognized Penny anywhere. She’d grown bored of waiting and, when I didn’t answer my mobile, she’d set off to find me.

When I opened my mouth to speak something came out, blood and part of a tooth.

Penny called my parents, who drove me to hospital. I was concussed. Badly bruised. One of my teeth was chipped and I had to have stitches in a gash that ran the length of my left forearm and a cut in my jaw where you could see the bone. Although my nose remained miraculously unbroken, I’d broken my little toe and fractured one of my fingers.

No one was particularly pleased with the amount of alcohol I’d consumed but the threats to pump my stomach were just that.

The whole time my mum remained calm, listening to the painkiller doses, writing down how often she needed to wake me because of the concussion and any symptoms that signalled an immediate return to A&E. Dad cried in the car on the way back. He didn’t want me to see him, but I saw his shoulders shake and noticed Mum take her hand from the gearstick and rest it on his knee.

The next day was spent in pain. And shame. My parents sat with me, talking to me, telling me that they loved me and that I couldn’t punish myself like this.

“Why not?” I whispered. “I deserve it.”

Mum tilted my chin up, forcing me to look at her.

“We don’t.” Mum kissed my forehead, her hand on Dad’s. I leaned into her and Dad hugged us both so hard that I worried he would pop a stitch.

The hand that is not in Aaron’s has found its way to the bump. I think about the child I don’t yet know and I get an inkling that maybe I have more in common with Aaron’s parents than with him.

Penny was waiting for me in the library on Monday. She took in the damage as I sat down — the yellowing bruise around my eye, the patch of stubble where I couldn’t shave around the stitches on my jaw, the taped fingers.

“I miss him too, you know,” she said, tracing a pattern on the table with a nail coated in chipped navy varnish.

“I know. I—”

“Don’t you dare say you’re sorry, Ty. Don’t you dare.”

“I wasn’t going to.” How could sorry even start to cover the span of my guilt?

She gave me a sidelong look and a smile. “Of course you weren’t.”

I said what I should have said straightaway. “I was going to say that I’m here if you need me.”

Penny nodded, as if she was trying to shake off the tears I could see were falling. “I need you, Ty.”

I closed my eyes and dipped my forehead to rest on hers. I wanted to tell her that this was a bad idea. That I wasn’t the person she thought she needed. Only I couldn’t do that to her. Or to me. I’d already lost one best mate. I couldn’t lose the other.

That was two weeks after Chris died — eight more to live through until the inquest. Eight more weeks in which I hid the truth from Penny. I don’t know what I thought would happen after that — I’m not sure I was thinking at all — but when the time came to go to the magistrates’ court, I told Penny one last lie about having a doctor’s appointment and went with my parents to face whatever judgement was cast.

The purpose of the inquest was to go over the witness statements and confirm the circumstances that led to Chris’s death by questioning the witnesses — me and the woman driving the car — on points that had not yet been cleared up. Every word I heard myself say seemed to hammer home my guilt, discussing the fight in details that were only too easy to recall because I relived them every waking second. And I hoped for something to change, that I would finally be exposed for what I was, finally made accountable.

The verdict was death by misadventure.

Death by misadventure. That’s a phrase that plays in my head sometimes, the way a fragment of a tune, or a poem might, cropping up to remind me that nothing multiplies guilt like the implication of innocence. As if I’ve ever been close to forgetting.

As I walked out with my parents I saw Chris’s dad waiting by the doors as his wife came out of the toilets, her face blotched red from tears I’d caused. I wanted to tell her that I was so sorry — not just for what I’d done, but that I wasn’t about to be punished for it — but she beat me to it.

“You killed him!” A sentence that started in a hiss and ended in a shriek. Out of the corner of my eye I saw a few people turn towards us. “My son is dead because of you…”

“I—” But she was sobbing into her hands and I could see her tears spilling out through her fingers as Chris’s dad put his arm around her and pulled her into him. I expected him to be angry too — Mr Lam’s temper was legendary — but when he looked at me, his eyes weren’t blazing with fury, they were dull, deadened with loss.

“Go away, Ty,” he said, pulling his wife close as I felt my mum’s hand on my arm. “You’ve done enough damage.”

The next day was worse.

When I got to school, I saw one of the lads I sat with in ICT was waiting by the front doors. As I reached them he handed me a rolled-up newspaper.

“I thought you should know,” he said as he went inside.

I unrolled the paper to face a photo of Chris on the front page.

There had been a reporter from the local paper at the inquest, one who had given Chris’s parents a sympathetic ear. Chris was the fourth “youth” to die on the region’s roads in as many months and the paper was at the heart of a campaign to impose lower speed limits in residential areas. That morning the paper had been delivered to every house within a ten-mile radius of our school.

My hands started to tremble as I read the article, littered with quotes from my friend’s grieving parents. It told how their son had been fighting by the side of the road with a friend, “a typical bit of teenage rough and tumble”, which had turned to tragedy when Chris fell into the path of a car. It led on to say that though the driver hadn’t been speeding, the way Chris had fallen… I couldn’t see the words, I was shaking so much.