In Memoriam

The death of V was the single most excruciating event of my life, beating out any number of broken hearts and limbs to take the top spot. Unequivocally and without hyperbole, it is so.

So why re-open the fresh wound? I suppose because if something is constantly in your thoughts, you might as well write it down. Maybe in pursuit of some sort of catharsis too. Or to cobble together an answer or even a question that could begin to make sense of it all. But also because I owe it to her. Daft bint. She was always pushing, labouring under the illusion that I could do better, more than I thought. She was unrelenting, and perhaps if I take anything from this mess it should be a little piece of her indomitable spirit.

She was killed by a car as she crossed the road. Her body left completely unmarred, vital, but her head, her face, split open and purple-black, swollen in patches like an over-ripe plum. When I saw her in the hospital after they took her off life support, after they had emptied her as she had insisted, she was jarringly still. Still a little warm. Not V, just the casing. Her face was turned to the side, to hide the piece of skull they had taken out to let her beautiful, massive brain swell in an attempt to save her. Her mouth hung open to reveal the two front teeth that crossed ever so slightly like her brother’s. She used to watch TV like that, sleep that way too, but never so very still. I held her little sticky jam fingers that I would mercilessly mock. (She in turn would make fun of my “distinctive nose”). I told her goodbye and kissed her forehead. She smelt of nothing, not the sensual, musky scent she always wore. She felt naked without perfume. I believe she once said laughingly, pseudo-serious sloan-ranger, “to quote Coco Chanel, a woman who does not wear perfume has no future”. For my 21st birthday she bought me Provocative Woman by Elizabeth Arden – a joke about our promiscuity, but also an admission of a shared characteristic played out along differing lines of attack.

On the train home that night I cried unabashedly as I tried to trace the piece of me that simply wasn’t there any more. Hurtling through space to a destination I didn’t want. She knew more about me than any other being walking this earth. Eventually, given time, she probably would have known everything. We battled our demons together, jabbing, flailing, driving the other’s back when she was too tired and used up to carry on. Friends, work, men, madness, ourselves, we held each other through it all. Even when the bloom receded and it all got tough, we found ourselves tangled and intertwined in each other lives like two cherry trees. Only this could separate our branches, cleave us apart, leaving me splintered and broken. I know she would have felt the same.

V was so much to me. A partner in crime, a confidant, a justifier of the unjustifiable, a sister, the best friend I’ve ever had, and probably ever will have. So I will live doubly for us. I will keep on carrying her, like she would have done me. I will not give up and I will live fearlessly and devour life for her. For us.