May 1997.
A month that he prefers to not have to remember.
One that he is grateful that he will never have to re-live again.
Ever since, May has been the most difficult month of the year.
It was not that the whole month was terrible. The first half of it was perfectly pleasant, perfectly normal.
Somehow, looking back, that makes the second half so much worse.
The call came first thing in the morning.
16 May. He was hardly awake.
Darius.
Was it that the phone ringing woke him? Or did he sense that it was about to?
He missed the first call. The second he answered as the kettle was boiling for tea.
Morning calls are rarely a good thing. Too many things can happen in the night.
"Hello?"
Not Darius. Darius' niece, Patricia.
"Is this Raoul de Chagny?"
And when he answered, "yes", she told him who she was. And told him it might be best if he was sitting down.
It was then that he knew.
His heart pounding so hard he could feel it in his throat.
Darius.
Darius dead.
Dead.
It was all he could do to breathe.
Liver cancer.
He'd only known six weeks, known it was terminal.
"He said he couldn't find the words to tell you."
"There were things he wanted you to have. I'll bring them over with me when I—when I bring him."
"I can't—I won't be able to go over for the service." The water, the cold in his bones, Philippe's boat exploding—
And her voice was kind, understanding. "I know. He said to tell you it was all right, that he knew—knew how things were."
And her voice caught, and he wondered how much she knew, about them, and how they had been.
Brittas Bay.
He'd wanted to be cremated, and have his ashes sprinkled at Brittas Bay. They'd gone there several times, on holidays, and Darius found watching the waves peaceful, said that it helped him to write. And Raoul liked the scenery, the dunes, liked that it wasn't Dublin, liked that Darius was happy.
Brittas Bay, the perfect place for him.
They'd seen each other only four months earlier, for Raoul's birthday. Darius seemed tired, but he smiled and insisted he was all right, and kissed him just the same. That he could be dead—
How could he be dead?
How long he sat there in the kitchen, after the call ended, he has no idea. Hours, as it sank into him, that spreading ache, the numbness. Those words circling in his head, Darius dead…Darius dead…Darius dead…
It was almost noon, when he finally made the tea. And went to the bathroom and shaved, and combed back his hair. The water was cold on his face, so cold. Little things, done mechanically, to prepare himself.
And then he went back to the phone and rang Harry.
Harry wanted to drive down straight away to be with him, didn't want him to be alone after hearing that news, but Raoul persuaded him not to.
"Tomorrow," he said, his voice steadier than he felt, "come tomorrow. I just—I need to be alone today. Need to get my head around it."
Quiet, and then, "I'll be there right after breakfast."
"I'll have the kettle boiled."
He phoned Noël in Connemara, listened to the quiet on the line after he told him, the slight breathlessness. "If there's anything I can do—"
"I know."
Darius was dead so why were his eyes so dry? It didn't make sense. Why wasn't he weeping?
Lying still on his bed, this crushing weight of it on his chest.
He closed his eyes.
The same bed, four months earlier. Darius lying half on top of him, head tucked in against his neck, skin warm beneath Raoul's fingertips, tracing circles.
Pretending. The two of them pretending.
Shifting, Darius' lips pressed to his, Darius' tongue slipping into his mouth, and he sighed, and pressed closer to him.
Only four months—
How could Darius be dead?
Christine came, one of the later Christines, and when she found him she lay down beside him, and wrapped her arms around him, and held him, just held him.
"What is it?" she whispered, and he swallowed, his voice thick.
"Darius."
Silence, and her voice. "I'm so sorry, Raoul. I'm so sorry."
A long time later, her voice soft. "You're better off under the covers. You'll get cold."
He nodded dumbly, and let her fix the sheets around him.
All he could think of was how Darius smiled at him, just a hint of sadness in the corners of his mouth, that last time. How did he not see it sooner?
She made him tea and added whiskey to it and he slept, he must have, because the next time he came back to himself it was to the grey light of early morning and Christine was gone and the phone was ringing.
She'd left a glass of water on the bedside locker and he sat up and sipped it and cleared his throat. And then he answered the phone.
"Raoul?"
He's not sure who he was expecting, but it was not Harry's daughter Leanne, her voice hoarse.
He was wide awake in an instant, that sick feeling twisting in the pit of his stomach again.
"What is it?"
"Something terrible has happened."
Harry. A fall down the stairs. Surgery for a fractured skull, in intensive care. And the doctors didn't think—
"Mum says for you to come."
A shuddering breath. "Tell her I'm on my way."
(If he had let Harry come when he wanted to, had not told him to wait until the next morning, would it have happened?)
He found a bag already packed. Christine had known (again) and not been able to tell him (again), and the tears prickled his eyes but he changed into fresh clothes and put the bag into the car.
The drive to Belfast was a blur. He couldn't stand turning the radio on, so he left it off and rolled the window down to get air in and keep him from feeling faint.
He sees it again in his nightmares, Harry lying there in that bed, his eyes closed, his head bandaged, wires and tubes trailing out from under his hospital gown, another tube in his mouth, forcing air into his lungs.
(So still, lying there so still.)
His hand never stirred, as Raoul took it in his own.
He knew from Sheila's face, knew without ever a word spoken, that this was it.
(Why? Why did it have to happen like that? So suddenly, so cruelly?)
Sheila squeezed his hand, her face pale and splotched from tears, and whispered that she was slipping outside for a few minutes.
Say anything you want to say now, she meant, there might not be another chance.
When he was the only one left in the room, he kissed Harry's hand, and kissed his cheek, and lay his head down on the pillow beside his, to whisper in his ear.
(He hoped he could hear him, hoped some part of him could hear him.)
The quiet words he spoke that day, of old love, of twenty years of friendship. Of Jack, and that he would be waiting for him. Of being sorry for not letting him come when he wanted to. Of gratitude, for being so good him, so kind, after Sorelli.
Little words, and they could not mean enough, could not be enough, but they were all that he could say around the lump tight in his throat. And then he fell silent, and watched the slow rise and fall of Harry's chest from the machine keeping him alive.
That he would be so quiet, so still—
His hand was so cold.
Behind his eyes the flickers of cracks of memories. Harry's half-smile, his face pressed into a pillow. The golden shine of the sun on his hair. The shape of him, wrapped in his black coat, watching the raindrops slip down the window.
The breath catching in Raoul's throat.
"I'm so sorry," he whispered. "I'm so sorry."
He found a bed and breakfast to stay in, quiet, and phoned Leanne so she would know where to find him if there was any news. It could be days, could be weeks until Harry died, but he was far too tired to drive all the way back home, couldn't bear to go so soon after seeing him.
He lay down on the bed, and closed his eyes, and longed for the world to just be still.
Harry died that night, quietly, his heart simply ceasing to beat. (It had failed in the ambulance, Sheila had told him, her voice groggy from crying, but they restarted it and it failed again when he was in surgery, but they got to restart it again. And she had decided that the next time it should fail, then it would be kinder to let him go.)
Kinder to let him go, so that was what she did.
It was morning, 18 May, when Raoul heard the news, and it was in the shower, in the little en suite attached to his room, that the tears came. Just a few of them, and then they stopped, again, and he couldn't know why, but he towelled his hair dry, and combed it back, and shaved, and hardly recognised his face in the mirror, like a wraith.
And then he went to see what he could do to help with the funeral.
The great swelling ache in his chest that made it so hard to breathe.
Some of the longest three days of his life. He didn't want to intrude, but he felt so useless, good for making a few phone calls (including to Noël, but he couldn't reach him, and decided the lines might be down, always hard to know what the weather might be like in Connemara) and not much else. And there was no point driving back to Dublin when he'd only be coming up again in a few days.
So he made the phone calls, and made sure everyone was fed, kept the candles lit, and thought that if Harry had died three days earlier he'd have been ringing Darius in England to tell him and learned then that Darius, too, was dying.
What are the odds, that his two dear friends and ex-lovers would die within three days of each other?
It sounded so ridiculous he might laugh but then he'd start crying and not be able to stop, and he had to hold himself together until after the funeral. It wouldn't do to crack up before that.
Sheila asked him to be one of the pallbearers. What else could he do but accept?
They buried Harry on 21 May 1997, in Milltown Cemetery in Belfast.
The last time Raoul was in a church for a funeral it was Sylvia Daaé five years earlier. That was bad enough, but this time he was even more lightheaded, something niggling in the back of his consciousness that he pushed away. This day was for Harry, and Harry's memory, and he couldn't let himself think about Darius or Jack or Sylvia Daaé or anyone else.
He watched as John and Leanne did the readings, listened as the priest went on and on, and all he could think was if that man knew what he and Harry had been to each other once upon a time then he wouldn't be saying these nice things about Harry at all.
What he's always remembered best has been the kindness of Harry after Jack died, when they didn't really know each other at all. But Harry came to see him, to tell him where he was taking his body, and sent Sorelli the clipped-out death notice for him for when he was well. Such simple things, but they meant the world after, when the time came that he wanted to find the grave. And then Harry coming to meet him the day after Jack's first anniversary, to see how he was more than anything else.
In hindsight, that's when he fell in love with him, right there, before they ever got involved with each other.
He closed his eyes as the priest read the Gospel, that same one about Lazarus again, and could see Harry and Jack, laughing in that room in the sanatorium, and fiddling with the camera.
Just as they had been, all those years ago.
(Forty-five years. Forty-five years.)
After the funeral, after the refreshments, after Sheila hugged him and thanked him for all his help and it was all he could do not to weep there into her hair, he went back to the B&B, and resolved to try and sleep.
It was getting late, the evening coming on, and he pulled the curtains and lay down on the bed and closed his eyes. He'd bought a bottle of whiskey, and if sleep wasn't willing to come, he could drink enough of that to force it, if he wanted to.
(The tears he'd been fighting earlier didn't want to come either, but he knew they would in time.)
Mostly, he was too tired to feel much of anything.
And he did sleep, for a little while, until he felt a disturbance in the air, something that told him he should open his eyes.
So he did, and in the dim light coming through the curtains, the night deep in the shadows of the room, he saw Christine, sitting on the edge of the bed, wearing his big coat.
"I didn't mean to wake you," she whispered, her face creased, and he shook his head as he pushed himself up to sit.
It only struck him then he was still wearing his funeral clothes, and he felt as if he was burning up in them but he didn't have the energy to change into something else.
"It's fine." And he was groggy from having just woken, that hollowness of everything aching inside, but he smiled for her anyway, so she wouldn't worry about him. "It wasn't too good of sleep."
"Where are we?"
"Belfast," and when he said it she frowned, and he swallowed hard against that new lump in his throat. "Harry's funeral."
She reached for his hand and squeezed it. "I'm sorry. What date is it?"
"21 May 1997. Close to the 22nd, now." Even in the darkness of the room he could see the look that crossed her face. Something caught in his heart, and he felt the sweat cold on his skin but he had to ask the first question that came into his head because that look could hardly mean anything else. "Who's dead now?"
To his own ears, it sounded exhausted.
She looked away, and squeezed his hand again, and then looked back, and in the dim light he could see the tears shining on her cheeks.
"Noël."
Noël.
He came back to Christine shaking him, the light turned on, her face creased with concern. And she opened her mouth to say something but before she could he could only ask,
"How?"
She swallowed, her eyes damp. "Pneumonia."
Her fingertips gentle wiping the tears from his eyes.
He didn't sleep a wink after that.
He heard, once, about deaths coming in threes, but he never believed it, not until then.
He doesn't remember the journey to Connemara, but he remembers the radio talking about Noël and all he had been. He remembers being there, in Connemara, but he doesn't remember what anyone said to him. He remembers hearing Auden read at the funeral, remembers hearing the flute played, remembers feeling as if he was swaying, as if he was about to fall, even when he was standing perfectly steady.
He remembers how the numb heaviness in his chest, that started when he got the phone call about Darius and weighed heavier as he sat with Harry, how it had spread all through him, so that he couldn't even feel his fingertips.
He remembers remembering Christine talking to him, before he left Belfast, as they lay on that bed in the room he'd taken, in that long night, her telling him things to distract him, to give him something else to think about so he could breathe, and how she said that day, 22 May, because it had passed midnight by then, how that was the day that her tiny five-year-old self was going to travel into the past for the first time.
Another time he might have asked her more about it, but all he could think then, and the next day as he stood beside another open grave, was how was it all supposed to fit together? How was any of it supposed to fit together?
His three closest remaining friends, all dead within a week, and tiny Christine skipping through time. How was any of it real at all?
How he made it to Sorelli's grave in Wicklow without crashing and killing himself he will never understand. But what he remembers is his knees buckling beneath him, as he looked down at her name, and the realisation hitting him that he was the only one left. Him, out of all that they had been.
Just him.
"They're all gone," he whispered, and it was then that the tears came, then. "All gone."
(Christine found him, and held him, and put him into a taxi and took him home. She helped him to bed, and when he lay down in his own room for the first time in a week that felt like the longest of his life, he wished he would never have to leave it again. Wished he could just stop, there, and be done.)
(How could they all be dead?)