"We gathered for the funeral, every one of us. All in one room, it was the first time for perhaps fifteen years. No one spoke. Every eye held only bewilderment.
Luke himself I hadn't seen since the summer of 2001. At six in the morning we'd sat on a sofa, surrounded by sleeping forms covered in blankets, or not, drinking port on the rocks out of coffee mugs; Creme Egg and Twix. That detail I remember because when we finally conceded defeat we lobbed them over the garden wall into the school playground next door. There is no 'why' when you're that mashed.
We listened to Bowie, the Berlin stuff. I remember being surprised that Luke liked that shit. I always thought of him as being harder edged; aggression over introspection, class battlefields over distopian cityscapes, humour over intellect. Unfair I know. Aren't we always?
"Always crashing in the same car" he said, "That's me."
He told me how he tried but something always dragged him back, how he was a good person who made mistakes, wittingly. That's what he said: Wittingly. I'm not even sure if that's a word. Doesn't sound right. Is it a mistake if you know you're doing it? I suppose it is but it sounds wrong. A mistake is what you make when you forget to carry a 7 in a maths test. The stuff he was talking about was different.
The drugs were incidental, he told me. I believed him. Still do. Incidental to his mistakes I mean. Obviously for us that night they were instrumental.
He had more going on his head than he let on though. Two weeks later she left him. He must have known it was coming. In fact I think he'd already accepted it. He skipped town, never returned. I honestly believe he did it for her sake.
So here we all were, a decade on, milling around in ill fitting suits and single use dresses, wondering what had just happened."
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