Burying hatchets, hamsters, and Harry

CW: Death

It started with a hamster. Squeak-squeaking in the pool of his palm, it looked at me and said, I should be yours.

“This one’s mine,” my best friend said.

“I picked him first.”

“And he’s mine now,” my worst enemy insisted. “Take the black one.”

“That’s not fair.”

He gave a shrug. Then he stroked the soft, golden, furry nugget in his outstretched hand.

Both our hamsters died two years later; they now lie buried next to each other in his parents’ backyard. Some people bury hatchets. We buried hamsters.

So long ago now, but I still remember that shrug – the blasé attitude behind it, the lazy assumption it carried: that he would always hold up golden treasures right beneath my nose, and I would never dare snatch a single one away. He thought I would forever make do with a hamster the colour of coal.

And he was right – for a time. Where I got a B on an exam, he got an A. Where I ran five miles, he ran six. Where I loved a girl, he kissed her and made her his.

But then there were the pink-coloured evenings by the lake, when we swung off the rope and landed in water like two rocks formed from the same mineral. Drenched and exhausted, we sprawled on the shore and passed a cigarette between our lips. He talked about school and bands and girls. I enveloped my mouth around the paper where his had just been and said huhs and uhuhs, drawing him in.

We had been born one day apart, Harry and me. I have spent my whole life playing catch-up. Damn those twenty-four hours that granted him sleeker hair, a stronger jaw, better brains, and that relentless confidence only a man who walks hand in hand with good fortune can have. Damn those cheeks that burst alive with freckles when kissed by the sun; damn those legs that carried him farther each time we raced; damn those hands that grasped and held and have still not let go.

On one of those 3 AM nights in our early 20s – this was when we’d moved to London for university and spent most of our days using geography books for pillows in the library – Harry took me to a rooftop terrace. “No one ever comes here,” he said as he illegally strutted to the railing and leaned against it. The wind blew the curls out of his face, and the lights of the city swam in his dark eyes. That wistful smile spread across his lips, and soon, he became a pool of the world: imagine this and imagine that, what if and how about we and will you?

“I will,” I said. I always would.

I wrote my dissertation on fossils. While he researched ice caps, I dug into what had been lost and forgotten and cemented in stone. We usually left the library so tired, it was almost as if we had gotten drunk. The jokes got stupider by the minute, and we wheezed as we followed a trail of streetlights back home.

One day, just before midnight, came the biggest joke of all: “I’ve decided to switch topic,” Harry said, his voice ever-so casual but his eyes downcast. “I’ve talked to Dr Reynolds. I think I’ll do fossils.”

I blinked. “That’s my supervisor. That’s my topic.”

And there it was again: that damned shrug.

I left him by the roadside that night and chose another route to walk home. But when I got in one hour later, he wasn’t there.

As it turned out, Harry had left me, too. They say he went up to the rooftop terrace. They say he jumped, or was pushed over, or otherwise fell to his death.

I say that one moment, he was here – a body made of light that always threw me in shadow – and the next, he was air.

I imagine him thudding to the ground with the sound of a church bell, as if calling me to Mass for one last time. Here is your final prayer. Answered at last. Finally, I had bested him. I had run farther – if not in steps, then in minutes. Hours. Days.

Years.

How can a prayer come true destroy the whole religion around which it was built? How could he have left me behind, devoid of a God to measure myself against? There is no one to look up to and no one to look down on. There is just me. The weight of his death has tipped the scales for ever.

I now lie a few metres and a whole world above his body, and I damn him to hell. I damn his sun-kissed cheeks that reddened with shame when he’d told me about the dissertation. I damn his broken legs tucked nicely in a lush white-and-black coffin. I damn his hands that will just never let go, God damn it!

My fist meets the ground. And again. Once more. I punch where his beautiful face should be, and as the sun sets over the empty graveyard, all I hear is the song of ravens and that insufferable church bell ringing in my ears.

Then my fist sprawls into an open palm. I press it against the ground as it thuds with my heartbeat. Submerged deep within grief, there always comes a point when you cannot imagine giving any more of your salt away. Surely, I have run out, you think. Surely, I am now empty, and soon, I will float back to the surface. And then you weep some more.

Year by year, I lie atop Harry’s grave and try to bury the hatchet. “I forgive you,” I say. “Let me go.” But it is not true, and he does not.

And so we lie there side by side like the hamster that was golden and the hamster that was black, except he is down below and I am up above. Except he is for ever silent as I continue to tiredly thud-thud, thud-thud, thud-thud with my palm outstretched and the treasure trove that is life right inside it.

I hold it up above his nose. A smile splits a stream of tears into little droplets that fall down from my chin and splatter on the ground.

“Mine,” I say. “Want it?”

He cannot reply.

I give a shrug. Then I slowly stand up and dust the earth off my trousers. I leave the graveyard behind for yet another year. As the night rises around him, Harry is still.

In loving memory of

Harry E. Wright

1/10/1998 – 26/10/2022

Forever in our hearts