Luke and Jon by Robert Williams

Author:Robert Williams [Williams, Robert]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780571258611
Publisher: Faber and Faber
Published: 2010-04-07T04:00:00+00:00

It wasn’t

I didn’t think it was suicide. I knew it wasn’t. She might have stopped taking the lithium but she wasn’t depressed. I could spot the signs of depression. They were obvious to me. Dad had lived with it longer and it was instinctive to him. He could tell by the way she walked in a room or he would notice the tension across her back as she filled the kettle. He would see that she was wearing a top with a stain on the right sleeve two days on the run and he would know it was back. We had seen depression. We had seen her in bed, white and thin and clinging hard to the sheets. We had worried and fussed and been told to go away, to leave her alone. So we had sat downstairs and looked up at the ceiling and stopped on the stairs and watched the closed bedroom door and listened for a sign that she was coming out of the blackness. Silence was bad. And it could last for days. Any sound was good – the sound of the shower, the sound of wardrobe doors being opened. It didn’t matter what, it meant she was moving, it meant she had won again.

But she wasn’t depressed the day she died. The morning of the crash had been a normal ‘good’ morning. I came down to the kitchen, late as usual. Mum made me eat some cereal, which turned soggy before I got halfway through it. She told me not to forget my art folder and then flapped and hurried me into the car. Dad came out of his workroom with a cup of coffee and waved us both off. Mum sang along to a rubbish song on the radio and I pretended I was embarrassed. She checked I had my lunch money and kissed me before I climbed out of the car. As I walked away I saw her lean forward and turn the radio back up and she waved goodbye, mouthing she would pick me up later, blew me a kiss and drove off, waving as she went. There wasn’t a drop of depression anywhere near her that day.

But, of course, the police didn’t know any of that. The only facts they had were that Megan Redridge was in a massive car crash and died. And that Megan Redridge suffered from bipolar disorder and had stopped taking her medication at least two weeks before the crash. They also knew that both vehicles involved were tested and neither had any discernible faults. And they needed to know which file to put my mum’s death in: Accident or Suicide.

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