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‘Things still tough then, yeah?’ Neil says.
‘Yeah.’ Words cannot possibly cover it.
‘You did everything you could, mate.’
Matt drinks but makes himself stop, leaving a drop for form’s sake. He pushes the base of his glass against the wet circle of beer on the pale beech slats of the tabletop.
‘Do you think you and Bel will ever have kids?’ he asks.
Neil leans back in his chair. ‘Jesus. Where did that come from?’
‘Sorry.’ Matt grins, holds up a hand in apology. ‘I suppose I was just thinking how good you were with Abi. You both were.’
Neil pushes his bottom lip up against the top and nods. ‘Once I get the business established, I reckon. A year? Two?’ He looks across the street, appears to study the cursive neon-green sign that readsChina Garden. ‘Just want to get to a point where I’m financially stable, we’ve done the house, and Bella has taken over one hundred per cent from her dad. She needs a duty manager she can trust to keep things ticking over for her. But yeah, we want kids.’ He drinks, licks his lips. ‘How’s Ava?’
Matt shakes his head.
‘She didn’t seem to think she was coming to the party when I spoke to her just now,’ Neil adds. ‘Hope I didn’t drop a bollock.’
‘She said she’d think about it. She’s apprehensive obviously, but I think we should aim to go and then if she doesn’t, well, she doesn’t. The four of us can still have a drink, can’t we?’
‘That’s what she said, to be fair.’
‘I mean, she’s practically a recluse. But you know that.’
‘Down to time now, isn’t it?’
A weight settles on Matt’s chest. He’s not so sure. ‘I just…’
‘Just what?’
He shakes his head.
‘Tell you what, mate. Let me get us another one, yeah? Then you can tell me.’
Neil scrapes his chair across the paving and disappears into the pub.
The moon sails out from behind a cloud – almost full, as it was that night – and he sees them standing in that haunted building site, him and Neil, the two of them in utter despair after their harrowing, fruitless search. Sees himself look up at that moon and think: Now? Now, at the end, when we’ve had need of your light for all these hours?Hears himself say: ‘Mate. I need to tell you something.’
A promise. A handshake.
Ava says it is hope that will kill them. But a year later, sitting outside this pub almost fainting with year-long hunger, Matt thinks it is regret that will be the end of him. It must be possible to die of it – or guilt, or whatever it is, this black thing growing inside him. He knows his failure to admit to things comes from his fear of his father. It was Ava who cured him of the little lies he didn’t even know he was telling, routinely, without thinking. She would catch him planning an excuse for not wanting to go to an event or plotting how he would wriggle out of some mistake at work.
‘Just tell them you’re too tired,’ she would say, bewildered. Or, ‘Tell them you made a mistake. It’s work. You’re all grown-ups and they’re not your dad, Matt. If you take responsibility, no one has any comeback, do they? Just tell the truth.’
It took Ava to show him that actually the truth is almost always easier. But now here he is drinking beer when he’s supposed to be running because the truth wasn’t easier and now the black thing has squashed all the breath out of him, filled his stomach, taken lodging in his brain. And Neil is asking him what’s the matter and he can barely stand to say that it’s the same, the same guilt, the same regret. That some days all he can think about is his daughter’s little blue coat being pulled from the river, himself facing the press, voice shaking, trying to hold on to a handwritten statement torn from a ring-bound notebook, while with the other hand he tried to hold up his broken wife. Her shoulders were thin, her neck collapsed into her collarbone somehow. It was as if she had been dropped. Even now sometimes when he looks at her, it seems to him that her head is lower, or her shoulders higher, or something, as if she is ducking for cover. His wife, Ava, who when he first met her laughed so much she snorted beer through her nose, then laughed so much more at that she got the hiccups. That laughing, optimistic girl is gone; he knows that. But then so is the boy he once was, the man he hoped to be. This is who they are now, who they became that day: broken shadows reading a scribbled note to a crowd of hungry journalists, a plea for information, for privacy, his eyes fixed on a dozen boom microphones like so many quivering dogs. This is who they became: those poor parents of that little girl, missing, presumed drowned.
Burying what he knows has not worked.
‘Here.’ Neil is back: two more pints, a bag of crisps and one of dry-roasted peanuts. He puts the pints down and throws the snacks on the table. ‘Five a day.’
‘Are nuts fruit?’
‘Think so.’ He raises his pint to his lips. ‘And wheat is a vegetable.’
‘No it isn’t, you plank.’
They drink more slowly this time, placing their glasses back on the table in unison. For a moment neither of them says a word.
