There Was A Boy...

....who - on a busy morning, at a busy station, at the busiest time, just before Christmas - walks purposefully into the shadows beyond the platform. He calmly removes his top and shoes, and throws himself under the oncoming train. Over their morning tea, his family hear news reports of a fatality causing commuter chaos. No-one thinks it's him.

In fact, X was roughly my age. But I knew him best some years ago, when we shared a flat, and even then he seemed so young, so - well - boyish. Thankfully, he never lost this quality. It was embodied in a kind of innocence, an inquisitiveness, and a wayward sense of mischief. Despite a fascination with deeply unfunny spiritual people such as Gurdjieff  - and an occasional devotee of their practices - he was never remotely dour about his quest for enlightenment. He was - literally - a clown, a performer by trade, and my memories of life in that flat are of him struggling to meditate crosslegged in our chaotic lounge, his white face panstick-ed and giggling hysterically, very loud Jungle on the sound system. We'd Hoover round him, trying to distract him even more.

I plan for his funeral, and I look out a suitably neat and ladylike handbag. It won't do to lug my usual gargantuan bag, in its jolly orange hue. I check through the temporary bag and find a few things in its depths - a reel of black thread, a tape measure and a Post-It note, which I turn over and read:
"Funeral List: Black dress, tights (2 prs), nude shoes, cardigan, speech"
I realise the last outing for this bag was a funeral, my mother's. I'm a bit startled by the list - it's spare, uncharacteristically neat and orderly. "Wasn't I distraught, bereft?" I think "How come I managed to - for once - make a list??"

When I get to the crematorium for X's funeral, and squeeze in behind the rows of his family. Though it's been years, I recognise each one of them by the shape of their shoulders, now hunched and stiff with suppressed emotion and purpose. X's mother gets through her eulogy somehow, returns to her seat clasping her notes. She's holding it together better than anyone else in the room. Then it's X's brother's turn, he reads from his iPhone, voice faltering and yet he raises much laughter in the crowd, reminiscing about much boyhood bad behaviour. Then a close friend delivers a brilliant and brave speech, explicitly acknowledging that X's death had been a brutal suicide, and eloquently describing this act's emotional ambivalence for all those who thought they knew him best. People are beginning to cry a lot now, and still X's family hold their nerve. I remember this well from Mum's funeral - you're so glad to have something to do, a role, that it's a relief to have a schedule, a list, a speech in your hand. After a death, however it came about, the haunting of those of us left behind, starts in earnest. Could I have done more, stopped this? Will I feel any different, better, tomorrow? So the distracting work of the funeral is welcome. Even a secular service, like this, has much to busy yourself with.

The final music of the service, 'Nature Boy' is devastatingly evocative of the 'very strange, enchanted boy' present in all our memories. I can't bear to think of how it ended -  the violence, the pain that must have engulfed him.

After the service, the dazed crowd mingles outside in the wintery afternoon sun, browsing the floral tributes and organising taxis and lifts to the pub where the wake is to be. I'm struck - not for the first time - by the warmth of strangers at times like these, as we realise and are glad that we were all parts of X's world, and that we aren't strangers anymore.  It feels odd but welcome to be recognising old friends here, catching up, raising a smile through our puffy and teary faces.

When I eventually reach X's father to offer my condolences, he recognises me instantly. He smiles and hugs me, then suddenly crumples against me, weeping. We stay like that for what feels like a long time, and I realise that I have unwittingly taken him back in time, to when his youngest son was that boy, that strange, enchanted boy with his uncharted life stretching limitlessly ahead of him.