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face, the face that I had grown up with, the face that I relied on, the face that was as familiar as my own but was different now
    The light was out, the spark had faded away and all that we were and had and all that he was and would be was
    gone. My boy, my man, my friend, my challenger, my lover, my identity lay growing cold like stone. Tears flowed from the ocean that had once been my heart. I removed invisible dirt from the sheet that covered him. I found his hand and held it tight.
    “I love you.”
     
    Time stood still and I succumbed to the agony. I’ve no idea how long I was kneeling on the cold tiles clinging
    desperately to his hand. At some point Clo entered the room. She was crying. When she saw our boy she screamed. She didn’t mean to — it was primal, it just came out, and she couldn’t help it. She stood looking down at the body that used to be John and put her arms around me. I heard myself saying: “Bye, baby.” Clo was sobbing as I held John’s hand. The pain weighed us down, making sudden movement almost impossible. We just stayed still, still like John.
    Someone had called my mother. She arrived with my father to pick me up, he silent and four steps behind her, not quite knowing what to do or say. She took control of me and, for the first time since I was a young child, I was grateful for her strength. As they led me out of the hospital I saw Richard comforting his distraught wife and
    Sean alone in a corner, staring and broken. We went home. I remember sitting in the back seat of the car, watching the night lights blur as we passed them, the reds and yellows of the streetlamps, the shining white of the passing cars. My father’s Dean Martin tape was playing. He was singing about love. I looked up at the sky. It was black. Not a star to be seen. The skin on my face still burned. My mother kept turning to gaze at me, almost as though she was afraid that at any moment I would defy her and join John
    in death as I had done in life.
    The house was cold. My mother put on the kettle to make tea, but I just wanted to sleep. She tucked me in and rubbed the hair away from my forehead. I couldn’t feel her touch. My father stood in the doorway watching his
     
    wife and child. She turned off the light and she lay beside me in the dark and I felt her warmth and an
    overwhelming sense of exhaustion. I remembered Clodagh’s mother and how as a child I thought it odd that her reaction
    to her husband’s death was sleep. I now realised why. Sleep was the only escape.

Chapter 4
    No Goodbyes
    The funeral took place a couple of days later. John’s mother requested that Noel hold the service. It’s odd that I don’t remember much about it, but everyone said he did a beautiful job. The church was packed. People were there from our old school and college and of course people
    from work, all there to shake hands and share in the grief. They uttered words of sympathy; some were crying. I was numb. At the graveside people held one another circling the open ground. Noel’s choir sang “The Alleluia” while they lowered John into the ground. I could feel my father’s strength holding me up, his presence unobtrusive and omnipresent. His heart beat on my back as the coffin was lowered. He held my hand when I threw dirt on the glistening brass plaque inscribed with John’s name. I heard his mother’s anguish and felt her agony as people passed
    and blessed themselves. I remember being led away by the firm hands of my parents, passing the gravediggers standing
     
    by, itching to cover the hole so that they could go home, like vultures sitting on a tree waiting for a calf to breathe
    its last.
    I remember sitting in his parents’ front lounge surrounded
    by my friends and watching his mother crying while she
    handed out sandwiches. My mother and Doreen were handing out drinks and whispering to one another, concerned about who had a food plate and who didn’t. Doreen was our fifty-year-old neighbour — she had