23

I wonder at what point Matty decided to ruin my parents’ lives, to ruin Rosaria’s life, the lives of my colleagues at school, of some of my more vulnerable pupils who, with their endless capacity for solipsism and self-blame, might well have turned on themselves and thought, I was always so horrible to Miss. Is that why she did it? The ramifications of a suicide rumble on for as long as the people who cared for the dead person are alive; they ripple out far and wide. Even someone who had only a glancing acquaintance with the dead person can agonise over their own conduct. A suicide kills many more than the individual involved – that’s why people only do it if their pain is so terrible it blinds them to the pain they are inflicting on the people they love.

I wonder at what point it happened? When the police came to my flat, perhaps? The knock on the door, the officers steeling themselves, thinking through the form of words they would use – the death message, they call it. I know all about it now from listening in to the conversations at the BTP office. I can picture the way the officers would have arranged their faces as Matty opened the door.

I imagine Matty sitting on the sofa, in shock, his head in his hands, his whole body shaking with the authenticity of his grief – he isn’t a monster, after all. I imagine an officer reassuring him that there will be a full investigation as to how I ended up on the tracks at that hour of night. People don’t know about the freight trains, after all, he says, and at 3.15 a.m., well, most people would just think the station was closed.

The officer will know about me being reported missing the month before, how I was found by his colleagues in a distressed state in the middle of the night and taken home, but he will want to spare Matty any unnecessary upset at this point, and so he will assure him that we can’t jump to any conclusions just yet. Every aspect of this tragic incident will be looked into, the officer says. He means it, as well. They are good like that, the cops.

Was it then that it occurred to you, Matty? Really? Surely, even you could not be that cold and controlled?