Nicci French - Secret Smile

The doorbell rang and I laid Troy 's head gently back on the carpet and went to open it. While they were clustered round Troy, I picked up the phone.

Everything was disjointed, skewed, in a strange light, a foreign language. My flat didn't feel like my own flat any more. It was like being out in the street when there has been an accident. People were bustling in and out who had nothing to do with me. There were three people in green overalls, who at first were very urgent and quick and shouting instructions, and then suddenly were slow and quiet because, after all, there was nothing to be urgent about any more because we were all too late. I saw a policeman and a policewoman. They must have arrived quickly. I looked at my watch, but I couldn't make out the time properly, as if the numbers were far away and in the wrong order. Someone handed me a mug of something hot and I sipped at it and burnt my lips. It felt good. I wanted it to hurt. I wanted it to make me feel something, to wake me out of this numbness. I'd talked to my mother on the phone. That had been one of the first things I'd done. Initially I'd thought of trying to break it to her gradually. It felt like the right thing to do. I'd wanted to say something like, ' Troy is seriously ill. Very seriously ill.' I could have made it easier for her, except that I couldn't. He was too cold and dead, his eyes open. So I couldn't say anything to her except that Troy was dead and that maybe she should come, but that they didn't need to because I could deal with things. I heard a gasp and then some fumbling attempts at questions. 'Dead?' 'Are you sure?' And then just a sort of moan. She started to say something about how she had thought Troy was better and I think I cut her short because I couldn't concentrate on what she was saying.

There was a hand on my arm, a female face looking into mine. She was a police officer, younger than me, pale-faced, purple spots like a rash on her cheekbones. Was I all right? I nodded. She wanted details. Troy 's name. Age. My name. I started to get angry. How could they ask stupid questions at a time like this? Then I stopped getting angry. I realized that these were the questions that needed to be asked. Suddenly I saw the scene from her point of view. This was what she did for a living. She was called to events like this, one after another. The people in the green uniforms as well. They dealt with them and went home and watched TV. The policewoman was probably specially trained to deal with people like me. When she looked at me, she saw me as just one of a series of people like me that she had to deal with, people who weren't used to this. There had probably been someone a bit like me yesterday or the day before, and there would probably be someone a bit like me tomorrow or the day after. She would look at me and wonder whether I was the sort to make trouble. Some people would be difficult, some would cry, some would just be numb and unable to talk, some would become manic, a few might turn violent. Which would I be?

There would be so much to organize, I thought. Forms to fill out, envelopes to lick, people to be informed. At that moment it hit me, like a warm, wet wave that ran through every cell. I had to open my mouth wide and gasp, as if the air in my flat were suddenly hard to breathe. My head felt light and I started to sway, and the woman's face appeared in front of me.

'Are you all right, Miranda?' she said. She took the mug out of my hand. Some of it had already splashed on to my trousers. It had stung and felt hot, but now it was cold. 'Are you all right? Are you going to faint?'

All I said was 'I'm fine' because I couldn't say what I really felt: the realization, like a hot, wet wave, that this was the end of Troy 's story. My head was buzzing with memories of Troy. A little boy on a beach standing on a sandcastle, the tide washing around it. Running into a fence in the playground at primary school and losing one of his front teeth. The way he bit his lip when he was hunched over a drawing. When he used to get the giggles and roll around with them on the floor as if he were possessed. The other times, more common, when he went dark like bad weather and we couldn't reach him. When he was buzzing with ideas and it was as if he couldn't get them out fast enough, his eyes glowing with them. His very delicate long, white fingers and his large eyes, almost too big for his face. There were all those conversations about him when he wasn't there, the Troy problem. It was one of the main things I remember about growing up, the pained expression on my mother's face when she looked at him. What to do about Troy? They had tried so many things. They had taken him to a therapist and to the doctor. They had tried leaving him alone, encouraging him, warning him, shouting at him, crying, behaving as if everything were normal. Thousands of memories, fragments of stories, but now they had all ended in the same way. All the roads from all those memories led to my flat and a rope and a beam and that thing that was Troy and also wasn't Troy any more, lying on my floor, with people he didn't know and who didn't know him clustered around him.

The policewoman appeared once more. She was clutching handfuls of tissues and I realized that I was sobbing and sobbing. The people in my flat were looking at me awkwardly. I pushed my face into the tissues, wiping the tears away and blowing my nose. I couldn't stop myself crying. We'd failed, we'd all failed. It was like for the whole of my life we had watched Troy drowning. We had done this and that, we'd talked and we'd worried and we'd made plans and we'd tried to help, but in the end he had just slipped below the water and it was all for nothing. Gradually my sobbing gave way to a few snuffles and then 1 felt squeezed out.

The police officer told me that she was called Vicky Reeder. A man in a suit was standing next to her. He was a detective inspector called Rob Pryor. He asked me some questions about how I had found Troy. I was impressed by the calmness of my voice and my precision as I spoke. There was nothing I could say that wasn't obvious and the man nodded while I talked. Afterwards, he and a man in uniform looked up at the beam. I hadn't noticed that. The detective came back to me. He talked to me in a low respectful voice, as if he were an undertaker. I realized that I was now part of a particular tribe, the bereaved, who are slightly removed from normal life and have to be treated with respect and even a certain reverence. He told me that they would now be taking Troy 's body away. This might be upsetting for me, and he wondered if I might like to step into another room for a few minutes. I shook my head. I wanted to see everything. I made myself look at Troy. He was wearing his khaki trousers and a navy blue fleece. He was in old familiar boots and above them I could see his jaunty red-and-blue striped socks. I thought of him pulling them on this morning. Did he know that he would never pull them off again? Had he already decided this morning or was it a sudden impulse? If I had phoned him for a chat that afternoon, would it have made a difference? I must stop thinking like that. He was my brother and he had died in my own flat and I hadn't been there. I wondered what I had been doing at the moment when the chair tipped over and he flapped in the air for those last seconds. No. I must stop myself thinking like that.

One of the green uniformed men from the ambulance unrolled a bulky plastic bag along the length of Troy 's body. It was like a very long pencil case. One of them looked up at me selfconsciously as if he were doing something indecent. It was all very crude. They lifted him, holding him by the feet and the shoulders, and moved him the few inches across to the bag. The bag took some adjusting around him, the end of the cord around his neck had to be tucked inside and then the large zip was pulled shut. Now he could be carried out to the ambulance without members of the public being alarmed.