The Drop

put an arm out through the window and she wrapped her arms around me and this time the hug was for real. God she smelt so good and I knew I should let go of her, but it was way too nice.
    Her voice was muffled by my shoulder but I could still make out every word when she said them back to me, ‘not every day a girl turns 21,’ she agreed and there was a second’s hesitation, ‘and I’ve not even had a birthday kiss… from any one.’
    ‘A birthday kiss?’ I asked, like I was a simpleton.
    ‘Yep.’
    ‘Right,’ I said and before I could think of anything cool or dismissive or safer to say than that, she pulled her head out of my shoulder, placed her cool palms gently on either side of my face and quietly said, ‘Just one,’ and softly planted her lips against mine, then kissed me long and slow. And I did nothing about it, even though I knew this was the dumbest, most dangerous thing I’d probably ever done in my life. I just let her go on kissing me, even when she slid her tongue into my mouth, in fact I kissed her back, until I forgot everything; who I was, who she was, who her dad was, somebody called Laura, everything. And just when I was liking it the most, she stopped.
    ‘Phew,’ she said, like she had enjoyed it too, ‘time to say goodnight.’
    ‘Goodnight Sarah,’ I managed.
    ‘It’s true by the way,’ she added, as she walked slowly away from the car, ‘what Jo said.’ And she laughed, loud and embarrassed like she couldn’t quite believe she’d admitted it to me then she was off, walking down the gravel drive way - but not before turning back and shouting at me, ‘mull that one over on the way home to your wife!’
    And I did. Of course I did, I didn’t think about anything else if I’m honest, which is exactly what she wanted, the distracting little bugger.
    When I got home Laura was still up. She was sitting on the couch all by herself and her eyes were smudged with tears. I instantly tried to work out what I had done to cause them or, more accurately, I thought about what I had done that she knew about that could have caused them.
    ‘What’s the matter?’ I said while my panicked, inner voice told me not to be such an idiot. She wasn’t outside Bobby’s house hiding in the bushes. She hadn’t bugged my car. Had she?
    ‘It’s mum,’ she said softly, ‘she’s dead.’

TWENTY-TWO
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    T he funeral was pretty grim, even by normal standards. I always hate them but Laura and her sister seemed to be competing in the waterworks stakes and I had to play the dutiful partner of the grieving daughter, which made me feel like the proper hypocrite, as I didn’t like the old girl and she never bothered to hide the fact that the feeling was mutual.
    The service seemed to drag on and on and I began to feel completely trapped. There’s just something I can’t stand about funerals. It might sound obvious but it’s the way they have of making you think about your own inevitable demise. They seem such a pointless exercise. The person doing the dying has gone and it’s very sad but they are not coming back and we’ve got to carry on. So there’s no point moping about it. Some people are comforted by funerals but I think they are a load of old bollocks. All those long-lost relatives crawling out of the woodwork, the old ones treating it like a day out, barely able to hide their glee that they are still here and they’ve outlived someone else. Then there’s all the inane chit-chat about a good turn-out and the weather being nice on the day, as if the person in that little wooden box is aware of any of it.
    Death might be an inevitability but I don’t want to think about dying. Funerals always make me want to go out, get pissed and fuck somebody, just so I can prove to myself that I’m still here. Must be some sort of putting-two-fingers-up-at-death thing. I guess that’s not something I should admit to but you are what you are and there’s no changing it.
    ‘I feel as if you haven’t been here for me,’ said Laura as she leant forward on the couch to face me. Since the funeral we’d had a number of conversations about the way Laura had been feeling. Mostly she’d been feeling bad and it turned out this was usually my fault. I was beginning to wonder if she had been secretly visiting a therapist who had urged her to ‘tell your boyfriend how you feel. Make him feel shit instead’.
    ‘But I have been here for you,’ I