We Passengers

Chapter 15

It was a Sunday morning and I was on the way to the butchers - Mum hadn't been feeling too good and had asked me to pop round to see if Cyril had a bit of liver that we could have. As usual, my thoughts were elsewhere (well, they certainly weren't on liver or tripe) and I almost didn't spot him - Mr Dean, that is - until I practically fell over him. The shop's about a ten minute walk from our house but a lot quicker if you cut through the playground of the school, which you can do if you know that there's a big gap in the fence where Lance Worthington once crashed his bike into it and I was taking this short cut when something caught my eye. For a moment, I thought it was a towel or something, blown off somebody's line to be tossed this way and that before landing in the school yard but, when I got closer I saw that it was poor Mr Dean.

Everybody knew him of course; he taught Mum when she was at school and then me and, then, by the time it was Nancy's turn, he was headmaster and a good one at that. Never gave him much thought of course after I finished school, who does? I liked him though, as did most people - he was kind and he was fair and he deserved a more dignified end than being found by a bus conductor on her way to buy a bit of offal. There was a note but I didn't read it; I saw the blood and poor Mr Dean's white face and then I ran, not stopping until I reached the police station in Victoria Square and, within minutes, officers were on their way to see what was going on. It was Tommy Rawlinson that told me about the note and how it said that Mr Dean just couldn't go on after his wife and little girl were killed in the same bombing that took Trevor's Mum and Dad, and that he'd decided he wanted to be with them again now. Agnes from the shop said it was a sin to do what he did and I told her to shush - that's the problem with Catholics, Trevor says, they think everything's a bloody sin, even a poor man taking his own life because he can't cope with their bloody God taking his family from him. Afterward I wished that it had been somebody else that found him, wished that, for once, I'd taken the long way round rather than being so impatient as usual. Everywhere I went, people would ask me about it,

'Was it awful,’ they would ask and, ‘what did he look like?’ All the while with eager expressions on their faces as they prodded for all the gory details which, of course, I didn't give them. Pack of bloody vultures people are sometimes; you'd think that everyone would have had enough of death and loss by now but it seems that they still want to know every bit of it. I shouldn't be thinking about poor Mr Dean, not now. Whenever I think about that day, it upsets me; not just because I was sad about Mr Dean but the other thing as well. That's the worst of it, the other thing and I can't think about that - I won't - because thinking about that brings the dark back and that can't happen. Now now. Not ever.