One Hundred Names (Special Edition)

ease the worries of the panicking advertisers, allowing her to write for the magazine, and for that she owed him a lot. He had fought hard for her and it was time she repaid him by delivering on her promise, but she had been so busy being on the move, meeting with the people on the list, that she had barely had time to face the truth. The truth being, she was in big trouble. It was time now that she admitted it, not just to herself but to someone of far greater importance.
    Kitty knocked on Bob’s door. He was the only person she could bring herself to talk to honestly about Constance’s story, and she hoped that his understanding of the woman would help shed light on her problems.
    Bob opened the door with a tired smile. ‘I’ve been expecting you.’
    ‘You have?’
    ‘Though you’re later than I thought you’d be. Days later, my dear. Never mind, come on in.’ He opened the door wider, and made his way down the hall.
    He sounded good-humoured but he looked so tired. He walked with a weariness that Kitty felt also, a weariness that came from a constant sadness, a hollowness in their hearts. The heart knew that something was missing and it was having to work extra hard to make up for it.
    The living room was as cluttered as it always had been. Constance’s death had not changed that, though it may have helped add to it. Teresa had not managed to change Bob and Constance’s filing system, though Kitty was sure Bob would have fought her to the death if she’d tried to introduce a more linear, pedestrian form of living. Somewhere among all of that mess lay an order nobody else could decipher. It was impossible to sit at the kitchen table. The surface was covered in paperwork and miscellaneous items that spilled onto each of the six chairs that hugged the table.
    ‘Coffee?’ Bob asked, from the small kitchen.
    ‘Yes, please.’
    Kitty knew she could do with getting some sleep that night, but a cup of coffee or two was certainly not going to prevent the inevitable from happening. She hadn’t slept properly for weeks, she doubted tonight was going to improve for her, and she needed to be alert for this conversation. She needed to defog her cloudy mind, a mind that felt it had scoured every avenue of possibility for the story, ransacking every home along its path as though it were leading a manhunt. She needed to view those pillaged avenues with a fresh eye and rewind, start afresh, and she needed Bob’s help to do this. What stalled her from asking outright was his gallant support in her ability to write Constance’s last story in the face of the doubting Cheryl and Pete. Now she had to tell him she had failed to deliver on her promise. There was no doubt that she had let herself down, that she was about to let Bob down was a sure thing, but as she stood in Constance’s home, feeling and smelling her friend as if she were just in the next room, more terrifying and heartbreaking to her was the unbearable feeling she had let Constance down. She was supposed to be Constance’s voice while Constance had been silenced, but what was she doing? Stuttering and stammering, humming and hawing, not being nearly as eloquent as Constance was somehow continuing to be in death.
    A moment had passed in which Kitty had been studying the array of items cluttering every surface, then she realised she wasn’t smelling the anticipated aroma of coffee, nor was there a sound of Bob moving around in the kitchen. She found him standing in the middle of the small space, frozen solid, looking at the cupboards but not seeing them, looking more lost than she’d ever seen him. Though Bob was ten years Constance’s senior, they had always seemed to be the same age. Kitty wasn’t sure if it was Constance who acted older than her years or if it was Bob who seemed more youthful, but whatever it was they were just perfectly matched, always the same, always in sync, never seemed separated by anything as large as a decade, apart from the occasional viewpoint. It was as though they had arrived on the planet at the same time and accompanied each other through every day as though they were made to be that way. Kitty found it difficult to imagine Constance’s life before Bob, or Bob’s life before Constance, that there had been an entire ten years of his roaming the earth before she’d arrived. Kitty wondered if he’d felt it, the day she was born, but never knew why, a moment when the life of a ten-year-old boy growing up in Dublin