‘Please let me lend you some money. That beach hut … you had Zane’s first birthday party there, the blessing of your tenth wedding anniversary there. Every year you couldn’t go on holiday you—’
‘You’re not helping, Fynn,’ I cut in. That moment, that little sliver of hope for a future that could be full of laughter again is gone, whisked away on Fynn reminding me of what else is about to be lost. ‘I don’t need a trip down Memory Lane.’
‘Sorry,’ he mumbles.
‘It’s a lot to ask of you, but I need you to sell it for me. I can’t do that. If you’ll talk to the estate agent and then deal with everything, and when it’s done if you could empty it, put the stuff somewhere for me. I know it’s a lot to ask, but I can’t—’
His hands cover mine, sheltering and protective, anchoring us together. ‘It’s the least I can do. You’re in real dire straits, aren’t you?’
‘You have no idea. Let this be a lesson to you. If you get married again, make sure you each have a separate account in your name in case something like this happens. And make sure you know each other’s passwords. And don’t let them out of your sight for even a second so they can’t go and do this to you.’
‘It’ll be OK,’ he reassures.
‘Do people actually believe that when they say it? Do you actually believe it?’
‘I have to, otherwise, what else is there?’
What else is there? ‘Yesterday, I saw this parking inspector walking down the middle of our road and he stopped at this one car that maybe the ticket had run out on. He looked so self-important getting his little keypad thing and camera out and I had to stop myself dashing out to remind him that it was the end of the world, so he should have something better to do. But, of course, he didn’t have anything better to do because it’s not the end of the world for him. Just for me. Just for the kids. Just for Joel’s parents. Just for Aunty Betty.’
‘Just for me.’
Fynn is so incredibly pale, the lines of his face greyed and thinned by what has happened. His dark brown hair, usually neatly cut, is messy, growing in untamed curls; his eyes are dull. He looks how I feel. ‘Yes, just for you.’
‘It does get better,’ he promises. ‘The pain doesn’t go away, but it does get easier to live with. It doesn’t feel like it’s going to consume you for every moment of every day; it’s muted a little.’
‘How do you know?’
He gives a one-shouldered shrug. ‘I know lots of things.’
‘I don’t believe you.’ I don’t believe I’ll ever not feel like this. That the world after that day could ever be less painful, less agonising than it is now.
‘I wouldn’t believe me either.’
‘Right,’ I say decisively as I stand. ‘I’d better get back to trying to magic up money from nowhere.’ After rooting through the drawer beside the fridge, I manage to pull out the three little padlock keys, looped onto a flimsy metal ring Joel and I kept meaning to change. Every time it came out of its resting place to be used, we’d say to ourselves or to each other, ‘Must get a proper keyring for this.’ I hand them to Fynn. He looks at the keys, then at me, and in that moment, he lets his guard down, and I can experience his pain: I can see the enormity of losing Joel, how it’s eating him up, how he has to steel himself constantly to get through the day.
‘Please get as much as you can for it.’ I avert my gaze because looking into his face of torment, seeing what grief looks like, how I must appear to the outside world is more than I can handle right now. ‘I’ve, erm, I’ve searched online and most of them are on sale for twelve grand so if you can get ten for ours, it’ll probably sell quicker and we could breathe a bit easier for a while.’
‘I’ll do my best.’
‘Thanks, Fynn.’ I want to hug him, but I can’t. I can’t make this any harder than it already is. For the first two weeks Fynn slept almost permanently on our sofa. He would get up in the darkest hours of the night when I’d be walking around and around the kitchen looking for something I had lost, and he would lead me back to bed. During those nights I would grip desperately to him. He was like an anchor that I tied myself to, a fixed point that kept me grounded. I mustn’t start that again now, I’ll never let him go.
Without warning, he takes me in his arms and pulls me towards his body. He buries his face in the curve of my neck, his lashes flutter against my skin as he closes his eyes and his hold around me intensifies. It’s his turn to grab onto the anchor and cling on.
3 weeks after That Day (November, 2011)
A loud, mournful squeal in the middle of the night stops my heart and yanks me fully awake from that half-conscious state that is as close to sleep as I can get. Phoebe? Or Zane? I throw back the covers, out of bed like a shot ready to dash down the corridor to them.
The sound happens again, this time louder and accompanied by a couple of clicks, and it’s obvious now that I’m upright that it is coming from outside the house. I move towards the window. The clicks – five short, ear-splitting animalistic clicks of large front teeth hitting together – are followed by an equal number of mournful, deep-throated squeals. It happens again, the clicks, the squeals, and again, and again, and each time they increase in intensity and volume, louder and louder until the sound swells enough to fill my room.
I know what the sound is without looking, but still I pull apart the slats of the blinds at the left-hand window in the bay of my bedroom, and peer out. The outside world is bathed in darkness, and despite the street lamp a little to the right of our house, I can’t locate her. I know who she is and I know that she’s just found him.
The squirrel was the first thing I saw this morning when I glanced out of the open blinds in my bedroom. He was motionless on the ground, his grey-brown fur smooth and unruffled, his body stretched out, as it would if he was leaping from one branch to another. He looked as if he’d been struck down in the midst of doing something he did a million times a day.
My eyes are too heavy and vein-threaded to make out any shapes amongst the parked cars and bases of trees, but I keep searching for her as she continues her piercing, feral keening.
A cluster of emotions – shock, fear, sadness – had imploded in my chest as I stared at the squirrel this morning. Dead. He was dead. He was dead and an unwelcome reminder of what death looked like in the physical world. I’d stared at him for several minutes before running out to move my car to hide it from view from the pavement – I didn’t want the children to see it, to notice it and be reminded what ‘dead’ meant. When being dead was talked about you could use the words ‘gone’ and ‘lost’ and ‘left’, but seeing a physical body would negate all that, would make it horrifically real. Remind them that their dad’s body was like that, somewhere ‘out there’ because we hadn’t got him back yet. I’d gone to work and called the council about having him removed and had been grateful when I hadn’t seen him when I came back from work. But now, with the clicks and squeals rising up from outside my window, I realise his body is still there somewhere and she, his mate, has just found him.
She’s probably been searching all day for him – and she can’t quite believe that she’s finally found him here, like this. I’d dropped blackberries, I’d wanted to know where my children were, I hadn’t been allowed to touch him, I’d woken up every morning and gone to bed every night, but three weeks later, I still can’t believe it. I still feel like that inside, I still feel like I am back at that day, hearing the news of what happened to Joel all over again. I still feel like screaming the world down.
I give up looking for her, she who shares my grief, and instead stand at the window, my hands over my eyes, my ears full of the clicks and squeals of the lamenting squirrel, knowing exactly how she feels.
25 days after That Day (November, 2011)
‘The estate agent can do a direct transfer to your account as soon as you sign the paperwork.’
‘Can’t you do it?’ I whine over the constant flow of traffic outside my office building. It??
?s located just behind Queen’s Road, the street from the train station that leads down to the sea, so cars, taxis, vans are always cutting down this way to lead them down into shops in the North Laine area.
A white van rumbles by as Fynn replies, ‘No, sorry, I’m not the legal owner. I can run you down there now, if you want. I know it’s a pain, but ten thousand pounds is a good price and if we go down there now, it should be in your account today. Tomorrow at the latest.’
‘I won’t be able to go now, I’ve already had so much time off—’
‘For compassionate leave.’
‘Yeah, compassion starts to wear pretty thin when they think you’re not pulling your weight,’ I whisper. I might be outside, but I know the ears have walls or is that the walls have ears? Nowadays, I often forget how phrases work, how jokes are told, sometimes how the days of the week are arranged. In this minute, all I remember is that I don’t want anyone to hear what I’m saying.
‘It’ll have to be in your lunch hour then.’
‘Lunch hour? Which century do you work in?’
‘Do you really want to wait until Saturday?’
‘No, no I don’t. What time do they close?’
‘Seven.’
‘OK, do you mind watching the kids and giving them dinner while I go down there?’
‘Sure, no problem.’ He pauses, wondering if he should say something to me, then says it anyway: ‘Do you want to know who bought it?’
I hesitate because I am curious. I want to know who’ll be sitting on my box seat, who’ll hang up different deckchairs on the brass hooks we installed, what colour parasol they’ll have. But do I really want to know? When they’ll be using the place Joel, Phoebe, Zane and I loved to make new, radically different impressions in time? I’d been saving to go travelling again when I saw the sign stuck on the front and, in an impulsive moment, bought it. I’d been dating Joel for a year and in that moment I decided not to go travelling because I had a man that I had a future with, and instead I’d bought the beach hut. And we’d used it as our holiday home ever since. It was always ours, never just mine. Did I really want to create in my mind the image of these people who would be replacing us by hearing their names? ‘No. I want to sign on the dotted line and move on.’
‘Fair enough. I’ll see you later.’
I stand on the street outside my office, my phone resting uselessly in the palm of my hand, as the recollections of our little beach hut with the bright yellow doors fall like a heavy rain on me: Joel tripping over his feet and dropping Zane’s birthday cake and watching in fascinated horror as the circling seagulls dive-bombed to swallow chunks of it, almost like a scene from The Birds. Phoebe doing a handstand outside the beach hut and Zane holding onto her leg while giving a thumbs up to the camera as though she was a huge fish he’d landed all by himself. Me falling asleep on our double deckchair while reading a book and them leaving me there to go for ice cream and a paddle in the sea, then coming back to gleefully tell me what I missed. Joel making a dent in the roof with the cork from the bottle of champagne he opened after our tenth anniversary blessing. The photo I took of our family last summer, each of them pulling a stupid face at the camera right before I hit the button.
I had to sell it, I remind myself. There was no choice, for the greater good I had to do it.
6 weeks after That Day (December, 2011)
‘Police today confirmed they have arrested a thirty-two-year-old man in connection with the brutal murder of Brighton man, Joel Mack-el-roy. Forty-year-old father of two Mack-el-roy was found on Montefiore Road in Hove, bleeding from a stab wound, and died on the way to hospital without regaining consciousness.’
I pause in the middle of the kitchen, staring at the stain on the floor, listening to the radio tell me things I do not know about my life. I didn’t know they thought they knew who did it. I didn’t know they’d arrested anyone. I didn’t know anything.
‘Police are still appealing for information in relation to the murder. In other news—’ I don’t hear the news item that comes next because I am bracing myself. The house was silent until I put the radio on ten minutes ago, and now I’m waiting for the howling, the noise of the outside world wanting to know everything they think I should know, to come for me.
My mobile wins the race, lighting up on the table; the house phone is next, trilling from its place beside the kettle. I push my hands over my ears – drowning out the radio, blocking out Mum on my mobile, silencing Joel’s mother on the house phone.
It’s all too noisy.
8 weeks after That Day (December, 2011)
‘Why do you think it’s taking so long for them to find out who did this terrible thing?’ Mum asks.
‘I don’t know,’ I reply listlessly. ‘The police are doing the best they can.’ She is sitting on my sofa while my dad is in the attic sleeping off Christmas dinner and the children are hiding upstairs.
This wasn’t how Christmas was meant to be. We had planned to spend it alone so we could start to sort out how it would work, how the three of us would cope on important occasions.
Despite me explaining that, my parents – my mum – insisted they come. At the moment we have to break up time with other people who knew him, section them into little chunks or it all becomes overwhelming. We’ve found that you’re almost expected to take on their grief, too, acknowledge what they have lost too, when really, all we want to do is focus on ourselves, examine how we feel and not worry about the others. With the grandparents it is harder still, because they are family and family always comes first, even if that means putting their grief above yours. Joel’s parents have gone to Jamaica for Christmas and have taken Aunty Betty with them, they couldn’t stand to be here this year, knowing they wouldn’t see Joel.
‘I still don’t understand why they let that man go,’ Mum says. ‘If they thought he did it, why did they let him go so easily?’
‘Because he can prove where he was at the time it happened. For the whole day it happened, in fact. He didn’t tell them straight away because he was somewhere he shouldn’t have been.’
‘But—’
‘He was innocent, Mum! OK? He didn’t do it.’
Mum’s entire body bristles and she sits back in her seat, lifts her chin slightly and fractionally purses her lips into a pout. I’ve upset her. She has been virtually no help preparing Christmas dinner, instead sitting around expecting us to serve her. She’s told me that I should still be wearing black but not near my face as it drains me. She’s explained at length – and in their hearing – that I shouldn’t let the children stay up so late, even if it is the school holidays and they are often scared to go to bed because it’s the time they cry and sometimes they simply don’t want to cry. She has told me that I should think about moving my wedding ring to my right hand because I’m not married any more. But this, my raising my voice a little because once again she isn’t listening to me, has offended and upset her. Joel made this possible. He made seeing my parents bearable.
‘Sorry,’ I mumble. I can say that because it’ll make the next two days of their visit easier on all of us. I can say that because she’s not coming back to stay again. Without Joel, there’s no way I’m going to allow this to happen again. ‘It’s been a long few days. I’m a bit tired.’
‘You look tired. And you’ve lost so much weight. It doesn’t suit you at all.’
My mouth bends into a smile. ‘You always used to say I … Never mind.’ You always used to say I needed to lose weight, I complete in my head. I was always too large for you, I was always eating too much even though I always had to clear my plate or I was a bad girl who didn’t care about all the starving people in the world. I’d have thought at least this would make you happy.
My mother doesn’t notice that I stopped mid-sentence, she continues to speak: ‘How you look you now isn’t good at all. You need to eat. You need to put on weight.’
‘Yeah,’ I say. ‘You’re probably right.’
I focus on t
he tinsel-surrounded photo of Joel and the children that stands on the mantelpiece. It’s of our first Christmas as a foursome. Phoebe is four, Zane is nine months and the four of us had the best time together. That photo, that snapshot of who we were, has sat there since our first new year together. I focus on the picture, on what we did that day, and tune out everything else around me.
9 weeks after That Day (December, 2011)
‘Mum?’ Phoebe’s voice is so quiet, so fragile-sounding, it is almost drowned out by the noise that is raging inside me.
‘Yes?’ I say. I’d had my head resting on the table, staring at the purple bruise on the kitchen floor but now I sit up as though I wasn’t doing that at all. Phoebe doesn’t turn on the light as she moves into the room.
I blink a few times, clearing my vision so I can look at her properly, clearing my head to allow myself to speak. I’d sat outside her bedroom until she’d stopped sobbing by slipping into sleep, the same with Zane. I’d been in and checked they were both asleep, both still where they were meant to be. Fynn had been and gone, and I’d come down here because I couldn’t face another night up in the attic, going through papers and filling in forms.
Phoebe’s walk is slow, cautious, like a girl approaching the gallows, like a twelve-year-old with a heavy burden on her shoulders. I open my arms to her and she comes to me, allows me to pull her onto my lap and wrap myself around her. She smells of sleep, and of Phoebe – that unique mixture of aloe vera conditioner, shea butter hair cream, mint toothpaste, and fresh air.
‘I have to tell you something,’ she says, gravely. The last time she said that in that tone, she’d been seven and had gone on to inform me that one day she was going to have to leave home and live somewhere else, but I mustn’t be sad because she would still love me.
‘What is it?’ I ask. I could do with a laugh, something that would lift the heaviness from my heart.
‘Please,’ she says inside a sob. ‘Please don’t be cross with me. Please.’
‘I won’t,’ I say without thinking. I clasp her closer to me to reassure her that whatever it is, I will understand. And I say it because my ravaged heart can’t bear to have her cry about something else when we all have so much to sob about already.