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SIXTY-TWO
My mouth is so dry, it’s a few seconds before I can speak.
‘Matty,’ I say.
No hello, just his name. As if I can’t believe it’s him, and in a way I can’t.
The intervening years are a mist quickly clearing. He is just the same. Twenty years he’s been locked away, but his eyes have the same sparkle, his voice the same baritone, the same Irish lilt. I lost my accent within a term of starting school. He has lost nothing of himself.
With that thought, I am a child again, the twelve-year-old girl who idolised him, loved him more than anyone else in the world. And again, I think there’s been a terrible mistake, that I’ve made a terrible mistake.
We didn’t visit him after he was sent to prison. My mother said she wasn’t up to it and, having seen what the phone calls did to her, I didn’t push. As I got older, I could have gone myself, Huntersville was only a few bus rides away after all. But I didn’t. Like my mother, I couldn’t face going, not least because that would have meant facing myself.
‘You came,’ Matty says, as if reading my thoughts.
I feel my cheeks redden.
‘They said you’re dying.’
My mother would have scolded me. You can’t just blurt things out. She was always so careful with what she said, so precise. I often had the impression she tried out sentences in her head before saying them aloud. The spoken word is a spent bullet, Sophie. You can’t take it back.
Again, Matty seems to read my mind.
He chuckles softly, tells me I always did say it as it was.
‘So uncontrived. It’s refreshing.’
I won’t let him get the upper hand.
‘You’ve got cancer?’
He nods, doesn’t look particularly upset about it.
‘I’m sorry,’ I say, and I find it’s true, I am, though I’m not sure why.
Time running out to put things right, maybe. Or basic programming. Only psychopaths take pleasure in other people’s pain. They say Matty is a psychopath. Is that why he became a bereavement counsellor? I find myself wondering for the first time. Getting off on his patients’ grief?
I make a point of looking at my watch.
‘I don’t have long.’
I want him to know I can leave whenever I want. That if he’s got something to say, he’d better hurry up and say it.
He smiles that smile from twenty years ago.
‘Me neither, so I’m told.’
And just like that, he’s got the upper hand again.
‘I was sad to hear about your mam.’
He holds my eyes with his to show he means it. I believe him.
I shrug, bite my lip to stop the tears coming. From him, the words cut the scars wide.
‘You must have been what, seventeen?’
‘Eighteen,’ I correct him. Then, ‘How did you know?’
