“Were you all right on your own?” Mum asked.
“There was a policeman with me. He was very kind.”
“They’ve all been very kind.” She needed to find something good in this. “Not fair the way the press go on at them, is it? I mean, they really couldn’t have been nicer or …” She trailed off; there was no good in this. “Was her face …? I mean, was it …?”
“It was unmarked. Perfect.”
“Such a pretty face.”
“Yes.”
“It always has been. But you couldn’t see it for all that hair. I kept telling her to put her hair up or have it properly cut. I meant so that everyone could see what a pretty face she had, not because I didn’t like her hair.”
She broke down and I held her. As she clung to me, we had the physical closeness both of us had needed since I’d got off the plane. I hadn’t cried yet and I envied Mum, as if a little of the agony could be shed through tears.
I drove Mum home and helped her to bed. I sat with her till she finally slept.
In the middle of the night I drove back to London. On the M11 I opened the windows and screamed above the noise of the engine, above the roar of the motorway, screaming into the darkness until my throat hurt and my voice was hoarse. When I reached London, the roads were quiet and empty and the silent pavements deserted. It was unimaginable that the dark, abandoned city would have light and people again in the morning. I hadn’t thought about who had killed you; your death had shattered thought. I just wanted to be back in your flat, as if I’d be nearer to you there.
The car clock showed 3:40 a.m. when I arrived. I remember because it was no longer the day you were found; it was the day after. Already you were going into the past. People think it’s reassuring to say “life carries on”; don’t they understand that it’s the fact your life carries on, while the person you love’s does not, that is one of the acute anguishes of grief? There would be day after day that wasn’t the day you were found; that hope, and my life with my sister in it, had ended.
In the darkness, I slipped on the steps down to your flat and grabbed hold of the icy railing. The jolt of adrenaline and cold forced the realization of your death harder into me. I fumbled for the key under the pink cyclamen pot, scraping my knuckles on frozen concrete. The key wasn’t there. I saw that your front door was ajar. I went in.
Someone was in your bedroom. Grief had suffocated all other emotions and I felt no fear as I opened the door. A man was inside rummaging through your things. Anger cut through the grief.
“What the fuck are you doing?”
In the new mindscape of deep-sea mourning, even my words were unrecognizable to me. The man turned.
“
“I’m sorry, I didn’t know how late it was.”
“As you said, time stops making any sense when someone you love has died.”
I wonder if he’ll follow this up. I feel the inequality of our respective situations. He’s had my feelings stripped naked for the last five hours. There’s a silence between us and I half think about asking him to strip off too.
“My wife died two years ago, a car crash.”
Our eyes meet and there’s comradeship between us—two veterans of the same war, battle weary and emotionally bloody. Dylan Thomas was wrong: death does have dominion. Death wins the war and the collateral damage is grief. I never thought when I was an English literature student that I’d be arguing with poets, rather than learning their words.
Mr. Wright escorts me down a corridor toward the lift. A cleaner is vacuuming; other offices are in darkness. He presses the lift button and waits with me for it to arrive. Alone, I get inside.
As the lift goes down, I taste the bile in my throat. My body has been playing a physical memory alongside the spoken one, and I have again felt the rising nausea as if I were physically trying to expel what I knew. Again, my heart has been pummeling my ribs, sucking the breath from my lungs. I leave the lift, my head still as viciously painful as it was the day you were found. Then the fact of your death detonated inside my brain, exploding again and again and again. As I talked to Mr. Wright, I was again blindfolded in a minefield. Your death will never be disarmed to a memory, but I have learned on some days, good days, how to edge around it. But not today.
I leave the building and the evening is warm, but I am still shivering and the hairs on my arms are standing upright trying to conserve body heat. I don’t know if it was the bitter cold or the shock that made me shiver so violently that day.
Unlike yesterday, I don’t feel a menacing presence behind me, maybe because after describing the day you were found, I have no emotional energy left for fear. I decide to walk rather than take the tube. My body needs to take cues from the real outside world, not the climate of memory. My shift at the Coyote starts in just over an hour, so I should have time to walk it.
You’re astonished, and yes, I am a hypocrite. I can still remember my patronizing tone.
