I thought perhaps they had fallen out and nobody had told me.
And I actually turned round to the boys sitting near me and started asking. Had something happened. Had they argued. Is this about something.
And none of them knew. They were all just looking at him.
And I will be honest. Part of me thought he had done it on purpose. To be looked at. At my son’s funeral.
And I did not know what to do. Whether to have somebody take him outside or sit there and get through it.
We were already in pieces. And then that.
And Pat stood up. He did not say a word, he just stood, and I had hold of his sleeve because I knew exactly where it was going.
And that is when Bran walked up to the front.
And he stood there a long time without saying anything. And there was whispering behind me.
And then he looked out at that room.
“I know half of you want me out of here.”
And he stopped. He had to.
And then he looked down at it.
“And I know what this looks like. It isn’t even mine. I borrowed it off my sister. The reason I’m standing here in it is very simple. And it’s the saddest thing I know.”
And he pulled the microphone closer.
And the thing he said at the door in the January, which I put near the end of this and which I have been carrying the wrong way round.
***I wasn’t going to do it, you know. Even if he’d lived. I’d have found a way out of it.***
And for about four months I took that as a boy being hard on himself, and I have told two people so.
And in the June I understood that it is not about the dress at all.
It is a sixteen-year-old telling the mother of his dead friend that he is not the person she has decided he is.
Because by the January I had been going round Ashcott Row for eleven weeks calling him remarkable.
That is the word I used. To his own mother, twice.
And he stood in a doorway and tried to put it down — I’d have found a way out of it — and I said what, and then I let it go and went home.
He offered me, at a door, the one true thing about himself that he had left, and I took it as modesty.
And he has not said anything like it since, because he is sixteen and he tried once.
What he said.
That my son dared him to.
On the twenty-fourth of August, 2025, in that bedroom, Gabe Thorne bet Bran Kessel that he would not wear his sister’s red dress to school for one whole day.
And it was not random and it was not a joke out of nowhere.
It was the running thing between those two for about nine years.
Bran Kessel has cared what people think of him since he was about eight. He is the boy who changes his shirt twice before he goes out. And my son took the mickey out of him for it from primary school onwards, relentlessly and with enormous affection.
And by the August of 2025 my son was sixteen and in a bed and had about six weeks left, and he had got to the stage where he did not care what anybody thought of anything.
And he looked at his best friend and he said: one day. The whole day. You won’t do it.
And Bran said he would.
What Bran actually did.
Nothing.
For five weeks.
He said yes on the twenty-fourth and then there was a reason and then there was another one.
He told that room, at the front, with his hands going, that he had four reasons across five weeks.
There was a thing on in that first week. Then he had a test. Then he said he would do it when Gabe was well enough to hear about it properly. Then he said he would do it in the October.
And Gabe asked him about it. Not constantly — three times, Bran said, and he could date all three.
And the last one is the twelfth of September.
Gabe died on the third of October.
What I did on the seventeenth of September.
I asked him to stop coming.
It was not a row. I want to be clear about that because of how it has gone round Ashcott Row since.
I went down to his house and I stood in that hall with his mother there and I said that it was getting very close now and that we needed it to be family for a while.
And Ilse Kessel said of course, and Bran said of course, and he said it straight away, and he said sorry.
He apologised to me.
And he did not come back into that house.
Sixteen days.
