Dil y, blue rubber inside a nylon-fur cover fashioned to look like a Dalmatian, its caricatured spotted face closing down over the stopper in a padded mask.
One of the girls had put some tea by her bed. And a tumbler of what turned out to be whisky. She never drank whisky. Richie had liked whisky, but she always preferred vodka. Or champagne. Richie would have made them drink champagne that evening; he always said champagne was grief medicine, temper medicine, disappointment medicine. But they couldn’t do it. There was a bottle in the fridge – there was almost always a bottle in the fridge – and they took it out and looked at it and put it back again. They’d drunk tea, and more tea, and Amy had had some cereal, and Tamsin had gone to telephone her boyfriend – not very far away – and they could hear her saying the same things over and over again, and Dil y had tried to pick some dried blueberries out of Amy’s cereal and Amy had slapped her and then Chrissie had broken down at last herself, utterly and total y, and shocked them al into another silence.
That shock, on top of the other unbearable shock, probably accounted for the whisky. And her bed being turned down, and the bedside lamp on, and the bathroom al lit and ready, with a towel on the stool. But there was stil a second towel on the heated rail, the supersized towel he liked, and there were stil six pil ows on the bed, and his reading glasses were on top of the pile of books he never finished, and there were his slippers, and a half-drunk glass of water. Chrissie looked at the glass with a kind of terror. His mouth had been on that glass, last night. Last night only. And she was going to have to lie down beside it because nothing on earth could persuade her either to touch that glass or to let anyone else touch it.
‘Mum?’ Amy said from the doorway.
Chrissie turned. Amy was stil dressed, in a minidress and jeans and bal et slippers so shal ow they were like a narrow black border to her naked feet.
Chrissie said, gesturing at the bed, at the whisky, ‘Thank you.’
‘S’OK,’ Amy said.
She had clamped some of her hair on top of her head with a red plastic clip and the rest hung unevenly round her face. Her face looked awful.
Chrissie put her arms out.
‘Come here.’
Amy came and stood awkwardly in Chrissie’s embrace. It wasn’t the right embrace, Chrissie knew, it wasn’t relaxed enough, comforting enough.
Richie had been the one who was good at comfort, at subduing resistant adolescent limbs and frames into affectionate acquiescence.
‘Sorry,’ Chrissie said into Amy’s hair.
Amy sighed.
‘What for?’ she said. ‘You didn’t kil him. He just died.’
For being here, Chrissie wanted to say, for being here when he isn’t.
‘We just have to do it,’ she said instead, ‘hour by hour. We just have to get through.’
Amy shifted, half pul ing away.
‘I know.’
Chrissie looked at the Nurofen.
‘Want something to relax you? Help you sleep?’
Amy grimaced. She shook her head.
Chrissie said, ‘What are the others doing?’
‘Dil y’s got her door shut. Tam’s talking to Robbie.’
‘
‘Stil ,’ Amy said. She looked round the bedroom. Her glance plainly hurried over the slippers, the far pil ows. ‘I don’t know what to do.’
‘Nor me,’ Chrissie said.
Amy began to cry again. Chrissie tightened the arm round her shoulders, and pressed Amy’s head against her.
‘I know, baby—’
‘I can’t
‘Do you,’ Chrissie said, ‘want to sleep with me?’
Amy stopped crying. She looked at the extra pil ows. She shook her head, sniffing.
‘Couldn’t. Sorry.’
‘Don’t have to be sorry. Just a suggestion. We’l none of us sleep, wherever we are.’
‘When I wake up next,’ Amy said, ‘there’l be a second before I remember. Won’t there?’
Chrissie nodded. Amy disengaged herself and trailed towards the door. In the doorway she paused and took the red clip out of her hair and snapped it once or twice.
‘At least,’ she said, not turning, not looking at her mother, ‘at least we’ve got his name stil . At least we’re al stil Rossiters.’ She gave a huge shuddering sigh. ‘I’m going to play my flute.’
‘Yes,’ Chrissie said. ‘Yes. You do that.’
