She started the engine and I went and stood in front of the car. It was a neat little Volkswagen, all shiny and red, a gift no doubt. I felt like a shark circling a diving bell. There are times when anger makes you feel superhuman, capable of tearing metal. Alice revved the engine.

“Go on then,” I mouthed.

Bless her, I could see she really wanted to. She had more than a touch of crazy. When I stepped aside, she drove off riding the clutch. A shitty driver in a car someone bought her. I wished her ill and then I stopped wishing her ill and started crying.

Marcus didn’t come and he didn’t phone. I had left a message with his mum, but something in her voice stopped me calling back. In the run-up to the funeral, I went to see Peter, calling on him at his parents’ house as of old. We sat on the stone wall that enclosed the graveyard.

“Are they going to put her here?”

“I think so.”

Grief was making ghouls of us. Peter’s face was the color of a dead tooth. I was wearing the clothes I had slept in, the same clothes I had been wearing the day before.

“Have you seen Marcus?”

“Once,” he said.

“How is he?”

“He’s angry. He’s not thinking straight.”

“Should I go and see him?”

“I’d leave it a bit.”

I nodded. There was something I wanted to ask him.

“Pete, at the manor that summer, were you and David … I mean were you fucking him?”

Peter got to his feet.

“No, Andy. Don’t worry. You got there first.”

I stayed sitting on the wall, the cold sinking into me, staring him in the eye.

“She was wearing my coat.”

Peter gave me what I can only call a strange look.

“What would you have done if I’d said yes, Andy?” Then he walked quickly away before I could answer.

The millennium dawned. I slept through it. Back at work, I didn’t see Marcus either. He was on-site, I was told, and he stayed there. But he came to the funeral. Peter was back at Oxford by then. He took the train down for the day, and during the service we stood, the three of us, in a line. I could feel Peter trembling on one side, Marcus as hard as wood on the other.

Songs from the old lady choir, all in tears, a eulogy from Em’s younger sister, Faye, Peter’s dad leading us out into the graveyard, the bit with the dirt. The startling stab of rage—that I was expected to say goodbye to her, now, with all these people watching, that I was expected to say goodbye to her forever, and then another stab, this time with Em herself. Em, you prick, you total prick. What were you thinking? Look what you’ve done to me! And you’re going to do it forever!