And then nothing. There is nothing after that in either direction, because of the seventeenth, and because the two of them had never in nine years had to write to each other about anything, because one of them was always on the floor.
And Bran Kessel read those two lines out and then said the thing that I have not been able to put down since.
He said: “He asked me three times. And I said yes three times. And I never did it. So I’m doing it now, and he can’t see it, and that’s the saddest thing I know.”
What I was doing while he said it.
I was working out who had let him in.
I want that recorded because it is the truest thing in this account.
While a boy of sixteen stood at the front of a room in his sister’s dress and told two hundred people that he had broken a promise to a dying friend, I was leaning forward trying to see whether it had been my brother on the door.
And then I was wondering whether Soraya knew he had taken the dress.
And then I was looking at the back row to see who was filming.
I did not hear the second half of what he said. I have it from the recording, which somebody did make, and which I have watched eleven times.
And the whispering behind me, which I have used in every telling as the thing that made it unbearable.
I turned round and asked the boys.
That is in the first part of this and I have always had it as evidence of how confused I was.
There were six of them in that row and they are all sixteen and they had all just walked into their friend’s funeral.
And a woman of forty-seven turned round in a church and asked them, out loud, whether Bran and Gabe had fallen out.
And one of them — Dov, who I have known since he was eight — said: “I don’t know, Mrs Thorne.”
And I asked again. I asked the row a second question. I said something about whether this was about something.
And they looked at the floor.
And in the February, Ilse told me that two of those boys knew about the dare. Not the detail, but enough.
And they did not say, because they were sixteen, and because the woman asking was the dead boy’s mother, and because they had worked out in about four seconds that whatever the answer was, it was not going to help.
So the whispering in that church, which I have been describing for a year as the room turning on him —
— starts with me.
Pat.
He was on his feet to walk that boy out.
And I had his sleeve, and I have told that for a year as me stopping him.
It was not. He sat down because Bran got to the microphone first.
If that boy had taken four more seconds getting out of that pew, my husband would have been in the aisle.
And I would have let go of his sleeve. I want to be honest about that. I had hold of it to stop a scene, not to stop the thing itself.
And in the November Pat said something about it that I did not expect.
He said: “I wasn’t going to put him out. I was going to stand next to him.”
And I said that was not what it looked like.
And he said: “No. I know what it looked like to you.”
And the four reasons, which he stood at a microphone and listed against himself.
A thing on that week. A test. Waiting until Gabe was well enough to hear about it properly. And the October.
And I have been going round those for fourteen months and in the May I understood what the third one actually is.
***Until he’s well enough to hear about it properly.***
That is not an excuse. That is a sixteen-year-old refusing, out loud, to accept where it was going.
Because if you do the dare now, you are doing it because he is dying.
And if you do it in the October, when he is better, then it is a normal thing between two boys and nothing has changed and nobody is dying.
He was not putting it off because he was embarrassed. He was embarrassed — that is real, that is the whole joke between them and it is why Gabe chose it.
But the reason it got to five weeks is that Bran Kessel was holding a door open.
And every week he did not put that dress on was a week in which my son was still going to be well enough to see it.
And the only adult in that house who could have told him it was not going to go that way was me.
Soraya.
Bran’s sister, who is nineteen.
He did not borrow that dress.
He told the room he had borrowed it off his sister, and she was in that room, four rows back, and she let it stand.
He took it out of her wardrobe on the morning of the sixteenth of October without asking, because he could not face the conversation, and she found out when he walked into the kitchen.
And she drove him to the church in it.
And when he said I borrowed it off my sister at that microphone, she did not move a muscle.
I only know because she told me in the February, and she told me as a funny story about her brother.
