Before you kick the chair…

What I’d say if I could talk to you now.

It was an ordinary Sunday evening in April 2015 and I was sitting on my sofa surprised to have found MacGyver re-runs on the television. I didn’t have enough energy to really pay attention, enjoying the solitude that had become so rare since the birth of my second daughter 9 months earlier. MacGyver was on a cliff for some reason, and a female friend of his was climbing it. She slipped, he couldn’t save her and she was gone. Perfect light entertainment.

My smartphone chimed pleasantly and I lazily retrieved it from the carpet. A WhatsApp message: “Have you heard from A?

It was A’s brother, B. He was a few years older than me and had been in my sister’s class at school. A was a year older than me and whenever one of us was AWOL, the smartest thing to do was contact the other one and see what was going on. We were practically family. Like my mother would say, not even the breeze could pass between me and A. We’d been best friends since I was 14, over 20 years earlier, and we were both outsiders. It was me and A against the world, and usually we won.

I dialled B’s number straight away.

“Hey, what’s going on?”

“Hey Nas, do you know where A is, he was meant to have breakfast with me this morning but he’s not answering his phone. No one’s heard from him?”

I knew something was wrong, but I didn’t explain anything. I couldn’t. “B, get to his house.”