One thing about dinners, one good thing: when the room falls quiet, you can tell yourself it's only because people are focused on the food. Sometimes you have to work hard, but you can make yourself believe it if you try. Memorial dinners, perhaps you want to think that everybody's thinking of the one who isn't there. More than one, these days.
Better than memorial drinks. That time we went to the pub, to have a wake for Micky. More of us, half a dozen, it's easier to get people out for a drink; but it does make a bully of the truth, six people sat around a table and not a thing to say to each other. Nothing in common now except a history of slow deaths, and what’s to say about that, beyond we miss 'em? You miss the dead and you miss their dying too, the process that encompassed it, that sense of being out of the world, all in this together, a little bubble of sharing. You miss it, you don't want to lose it, so you try to keep it going; and you end up with the worst of reunion dos, the impertinence of questions, what do you do for money, then? and who are you shagging these days? There are less vulgar ways to ask, but that's what it all comes down to, and interrogation is always vulgar anyway. I'd far rather have this kind of silence; and at least they are both eating. Stephen used to be so hard to feed, picky even when he wasn't having a veggie day. Used to drive Quin into a conniption fit, watching him prod something around his plate as if he’d never seen chicken breast before, or a chunk of aubergine. Sometimes he’d even ask, what is this? Sometimes the answer he got was so excruciatingly polite, I'd just get the hell out of there. Good manners can be like sandpaper in the hands of the skilful, rip your skin away. Quin was expert. We learned to imitate, so much we learned to imitate, but it never was the same.
They probably think I'm waiting for a dash of manners now, waiting for compliments. Not so. It's hard to accept tribute gracefully, whether or not you've earned it. I'd sooner not have to try. There was that time I tried to tell Micky how grateful I was, for all the help he'd given me with Quin; but he was too sick himself by then to take it, and so bitter, he thought I was just being sarcastic. Or he said so, anyway.
Not a story to tell these two. I'm afraid they might have heard it differently from him, but even so. I’d rather have the silence. Trouble is, there’s just no way to say so.