The Drop

protested. And I had. I mean, I wasn’t there every night obviously. I was still trying to find out what had happened to Cartwright and Bobby’s money but I wasn’t on it twenty-four-seven like I should have been. I’d made sure Bobby knew Laura’s mum had died and that she had gone a little bit mad as a result, so I was home quite a bit in the evenings even if I then went out again later, after she was tucked up in bed. He was okay about it, considering. Maybe it reminded him of losing his missus and how Sarah must have felt at the time. I had to tell Finney as well but they both agreed to keep it to themselves.
    We’d had lots of long conversations, Laura and I, that dragged on for hours about how her mum’s death was such a shock and how she had always been there for her daughter and how Laura didn’t know how she was going to manage without her mother, which I didn’t really get, as Laura had been an adult for some considerable time now. I couldn’t really understand how her mum’s death had been such a shock either, considering the years of illness she’d had. It had been a bit of a shock to me admittedly but then, I’d thought the old bird was putting it on.
    ‘Yes,’ she said, as if I had somehow proven her point, ‘you’ve been here physically.’
    ‘What’s that supposed to mean?’
    ‘But I don’t think you are really here mentally.’
    She was right. I wasn’t - and with good reason. I was usually mulling over how to get myself out of the shit I was in and, to be fair to me, we had been talking about the same old stuff every night for ages. I’d made the same suggestions; take some time off work, go and see your old friends from Uni, stay with your big sister for a while? I’d also exhausted all the usual platitudes associated with bereavement. ‘Perhaps it was for the best Laura, you wouldn’t have wanted her to suffer Laura, she would have hated not being a hundred per cent Laura, but, after a while endlessly going through the same topic, who wouldn’t let their mind wander? Blokes aren’t like women. We don’t want to regurgitate everything a million bloody times.
    I felt a bit pissed-off at Laura for saying I was unsupportive considering what I could see every time I looked up from my sofa. On one of my bookshelves a space had been cleared for the squat china urn that contained the last remnants of Mrs Angela Cooper.
    ‘Do you mind?’ she’d asked as she’d brought her mum’s ashes home from the crematorium, holding them like a little baby, ‘it’s only for a while.’
    ‘Of course not,’ I’d said because at that moment, she’d looked like any objection from me might very likely push her over the edge into some form of grief-related madness. So she’d moved my books and placed the urn on the shelf with great reverence. I had to stifle a grin. After all, a bookshelf was probably an appropriate place for Angela’s Ashes .
    After a while though, their presence had started to irritate me. I couldn’t think of anything more morbid to have in my flat than my girlfriend’s late mother’s remains. Why couldn’t her big sister, her dim husband and their two overweight children take the bloody urn? It was meant to be a temporary home but just how temporary is temporary? A week, a month, two years? The problem was I couldn’t think of any subtle way of asking Laura, ‘when do you think you’ll be shifting your mother off my bookshelf then?’
    I didn’t want to get into another row with Laura about my lack of support so I asked, ‘do you want me to stay home tomorrow night instead of going to the match?’
    I’d hoped the offer of staying home would be big enough to placate her without actually having to go ahead and do it. I figured she would say something like ‘that’s really nice of you but you love the football, you should go.’ Then I could say, ‘are you really sure, I honestly don’t mind missing it just this once.’ If I was really lucky this might even lead to make-up sex. Any sex would have been preferable to the complete drought I was currently experiencing. Clearly funerals didn’t have the same effect on Laura’s libido as they did on mine.
    What she actually said was, ‘do you mind not going?’
    Yes, I thought.
    ‘No,’ I said.
    ‘Really?’ she asked
    ‘Course not,’ I said.
    Shit.
    I was driving through the city on my way home when Sarah called, ‘I need a hunky man,’ she told me.
    ‘Any particular reason,’ I asked, ‘or