I put our furniture and the things Anna hadn’t taken into storage. The movers took my stuff to the rented house in Cornwall, a place I had chosen because it seemed suitably remote and I had been there on holiday as a child.
On the day that I left, when all the furniture was gone, I had one last drink, sitting on the floor in the empty kitchen. I finished my glass of vodka and then filled up my Diet Coke bottle for the train. Just before I left, I went into the sunroom to check that the French windows were locked. As I was looking out over the backyard for the last time, I noticed it. A third sunflower swaying in the wind.
Part Three
1
The rain soaks through my trouser legs as I make my way through the long grass toward the back of Hampstead Cemetery. To get to Jack’s plot, from the entrance by the church, there is a shortcut through the oldest part of the site. The gravestones here are ramshackle, resting at oblique angles, battered by the wind; the grass is overgrown.
My shoes are caked with mud but I trudge on, leaning a little into the wind. There is always one grave that catches my eye, where I have to stop and stand still for a moment. A little girl carved into stone, tortuously thin and covering her face, as if she is hiding from death itself.
As I approach Jack’s grave, I stand behind an ash tree, which always seems incongruous in company, as if it should be standing alone on a Winnie the Pooh hill, waiting for lightning to strike. I peek out from behind the tree to see if Anna is here, but the graveyard is empty. I know she comes here, because sometimes there are flowers.
Jack’s is a small headstone, not upright, but horizontal.
Jack Coates
10th August 2008 ‒ 20th January 2015
Sunshine passes, shadows fall
Love and memory outlast them all
I did not like the inscription. I thought it was trite, but Anna said we had to have something. It reminded me of the condolence cards we had received, with their platitudes, their empty sentiments. Besides, I had not wanted a grave. A grave was to accept that he was gone.
It has become a monthly ritual to come here, to get the early train before dawn and to return to Cornwall around dusk. I crouch down and scrape away some leaves from the gravestone, but the wind instantly blows them back. I sit on the ground for a while, shivering in the rain, drinking from my hip flask.
I check my watch. Even though it is early, I do not want to risk meeting Anna. I kiss my hand and touch the stone lightly with my fingers and then head back to the entrance on the pebble paths, this time avoiding the long grass. There is a greater chance of meeting Anna like this, but it is wet, I am cold and I want to find a café to have some breakfast, where I can sit and wait for the pub to open.
* * *
After a sandwich in a coffee shop, I go to The Ship, the pub I used to come to with Scott. I plug my laptop into the wall and log on to the Wi-Fi, and start working on some code. I have been working for Marc, the programmer in Brussels who Scott hired. The work is boring, but it pays the bills. I work for a couple of hours, drinking pint after pint, and by the time I leave, I am drunk, unsteady on my feet. I do not want to go up our old street, so I go the long way around, trudging up past the ponds on the other side of the heath. The words “we own the sky” come into my head, as they always do when I’m alone, and I whisper them to myself with each step as I walk up the hill. “We own the sky, we own the sky.”
At the top of Parliament Hill, I put my backpack on the ground, take a long drink from my hip flask and look out across London. The sky threatens in the distance, a callous, unfeeling wall of cloud. The heath is desolate. Just the occasional caw of a crow, hustling like grave diggers, flying from tree to garbage can to tree.
When the tripod and camera are calibrated, I take the first shot, down toward the Highgate ponds. The view is pastoral, a little England, houses nestled on the hill, the village spire of St. Anne’s peeping above the trees. Even though I used to come up here with Jack, I have never taken a panorama from Parliament Hill.
I have been busy recently. We Own the Sky has been nominated for a photography award, so I have been taking more and more panoramas, traveling around the country, going farther afield. The Seven Sisters, Three Cliffs Bay, the Cheddar Gorge. Sometimes I drive, but mostly I take the train, traveling in first class, drinking Kronenbourg and vodka in the dining car. There is something cathartic about it, something that keeps me going. Visiting the places we went together; writing my messages to Jack in the sky.
I slowly move the camera around, as the hills give way to the city, and suddenly there is Canary Wharf, like a fortress, surrounded by its chunky minions. I rotate the camera for another shot, capturing the Gherkin and then the Shard, rising above the skyline like a stalagmite.
* * *
I am standing under the departure board at Paddington Station, when I see someone who looks familiar. It takes me a while, a flash of recognition, a feeling that we have met somewhere before, perhaps one of the women I have chatted with online.
I am just trying to place her, thinking that she looks rather Bohemian, a refined artiness, like a rich gallery owner, when she catches my eye. It is then that
