An Education
It fell to me to clear the flat after he died. Not very mysterious circumstances, though perhaps if we knew more about what he had it wouldn’t have killed him. Everybody else was too busy, though his Mum was also too upset.
There weren’t a lot of books- well, not to me anyway. The shelves of them were only in reasonable places. The rest of the flat was given over to CDs. Music was everywhere there- I wasn’t surprised, it had been his life. He would give me albums he thought I should listen to every year. Even, yes, even when he got sick. I knew something was wrong when the kind of music he gave me changed.
But it was the books that grabbed my attention on that cold, wet autumn morning. The ones I’d given him, for Christmas or birthdays, in a neat stack next to the bed. And I realised that even though he had never admitted it, he had read every single one. The poetry books were well-thumbed, especially. TS Eliot was on the top, with a note inside it, telling me to give them to someone else who I wanted to understand me a little better, saying he was sorry that he never had.
I was sorry too. He’d given me all that music, and I’d only listened to the first one- a best of Captain and Tennille that he’d bought me for a joke.
I got a box from the living room and started packing up the books.
“Love,” I sang quietly to myself, “love will keep us together…”
