Chapter seven

I had fallen asleep with no thought of the next day, comforted by his presence. That was enough for the time being. Simon had decided to carry me home when the rain stopped. Mona told me later how she had peeked into my bedroom that night to find me missing, she shook my father awake and they phoned the police in a panic. Apparently a few policemen went to look for me but the short time of my absence and age meant they clearly didn’t try very hard. She told me how they both sat on the front step through the rest of the night and saw, around half five in the morning, Simon carrying me towards them. The cold air and adventurous night had made me pale, and to Mona it had looked like the hero carrying his dead lover. To my father it perhaps seemed like something more tinged with the reality of Simon’s position in society he lunged at us without a second thought. I can remember hitting the ground. Cold, hard cement grazed my face. Mona’s little hands grabbed my collar, dragged me to my feet. I don’t know when I opened my eyes. I don’t know when I woke up but I remember her weeping. She was weeping into my neck and stroking my messy hair as we knelt on the hall carpet, leaning on the stairs. I was so confused and it felt like hours past when it must have been little more than a minute. There was a screech on the road and Mona screeched at the sound. She curled up and I didn’t know why. I got to my feet and walked out. My father and some man were yelling, the man had gotten out of his car and was crying. On the road Simon was lying there, silently. For some reason I couldn’t understand it. I couldn’t really hear anything. I knelt by his side, I smiled at him and ran my hands down his arms to wake him. I whispered his name. I kissed his cheek. Soon I was begging him, screaming at his to wake up. I shook his shoulders and saw the warm blood on the back of his head. He looked as he always had but his Christmas eyes were under a blanket of snowy skin. He was still warm. I didn’t say a word as I lay my head on his chest, feeling tears on my face without knowing where they came from. Then in a swelling moment I broke out into a howl. I felt my ribcage burst with grief and I shrieked until the ambulance came. I was shaken and pulled and heaved from him but I didn’t let go until I saw the paramedics. I couldn’t look at my father but clung to Mona’s skinny arms, squeezing them and biting back tears until I got to my room. I held my mother’s tin bird to my heart and wept dry tears. There was no fluid in my, every tear was in Simon’s shirt.
The horror of his death hung before me for months. I was hysterical. I entirely ignored my father and when embraced by Mona, at best I flinched, at worst I threw anything I could grab. I wanted to sink into the pain. I wanted to be without anyone if I was without him. But Mona did see me through.
The loss of my mother had been painful but it had seemed inevitable. It was the tragic slipping from life early but quietly. She had had dignity and she has extinguished like a lovely candlelight. Simon had given the impression of immortality but he had ceased to be with one loud noise in a suburban street on a chilly, crisp autumn morning. It was that sudden loss of everything in his being that made the core of my bones become cold. It was warmed slowly by my timid step-mother. She is now to this day my dear friend and still in a hollow coupling with my father. I still have no affection for my father; the chance of such a thing died when he made no effort to help the police explain why Simon was run down. His having no home or relations left him without justice; neither my father nor the driver was convicted.
It took me a long time to heal. I can still make myself cry by simply remembering that night. There is some perverted romantic nostalgia in revisiting the cool blue morning I emptied my grief on Simon’s chest. But most days I can remind myself he is as real today as he ever was. Simon, or Sir Granham, is as dear a companion to me as he ever was. On a summer day I can sit in the park, sitting in a carriage, or on a bench, stroking the mysterious tin bird and watch the playful looks and grand strides of my eccentric gentleman as clouds pass above us across our dear red sky.