There’s a bench near a huge big tree – it might be an oak – and I sit down for a few minutes. Before my eyes, a leaf detaches from its branch and eddies to the ground. Game over for that one. And here’s another, already dark and crisping. And another. And another. All of them dying, like it’s raining leaves, raining death, and I miss Hugh, I miss him so much. I’d give all that I own just to go home and find him there, just knocking about the house, reading the paper, listening to music.
Hugh would provide an antidote to the snarly mess with Steevie. He’d pull me on to his lap and hug me, offering the warmth of his body to counteract the coldness in my gut. He’d let me rant, and he might even offer a calm counter-argument. But he’s not here.
And it’s a lot longer than six weeks that he’s been unavailable to me. It’s suddenly obvious that when he got the news his dad was dying, in August of last year, he checked out.
I’d found him in our bedroom, sitting stiffly on the bed, and the look on his face – strange and cold – made me think, He’s found out about Josh. Even though it was over a month since I’d ended things with him, my guilt was never far from the surface.
‘What’s wrong?’
‘Dad. He’s sick.’ Hugh’s expression wasn’t coldness, but shock, terrible shock – my guilt was distorting reality.
‘What kind of sick?’
Cancer. I knew before he even said it.
‘His lungs. It’s bad, Amy.’
‘But chemo –’
‘No. He’s … dying. He’s going to die.’
This wasn’t a time for platitudes. ‘Tell me.’
‘Three months.’
‘It could be longer – doctors often get it wrong.’
‘In three months my dad will be dead.’ Hugh frowned and muttered, ‘Twelve weeks’ time. That’s weird.’
When his mum, Sandie, had died eight years earlier, it had been a bitter, bitter thing. She’d been sixty-two, which was shockingly young, and she’d been such a wonderful person – warm, sensible, solid. She’d really been the heart of their home.
But within a year or so, the Durrants had rearranged themselves around her appalling absence, forming themselves into a new unit, possibly even tighter than before, always acknowledging their loss, but a family once again.
It might be odd to say but Hugh grieved his mum perfectly: he cried often; he had outbursts of inexplicable rage, which, aghast, he immediately apologized for; he looked at old photos and related fond memories of her. We grieved together, because I’d loved her too. In fact, the death of Sandie seemed to affect me more than it affected him. It felt like a small earthquake at my core, as if tectonic plates were shifting and collapsing, stopping me sleeping, propelling me to overeat and plunging me into a spell where everything seemed meaningless. It passed, but the aftershocks continued for a couple of years, and every now and then I’d have three sleepless nights in a row.
However, a powerful instinct was warning me that it would be different for Hugh this time. Maybe because this was his sole surviving parent. Whatever the reason, this time would be darker, uglier, scarier. And I needed to be there for Hugh. Fully present. Not frying rashers in my bra, daydreaming about Josh Rowan. That I’d ended things with him felt like a clean relief. ‘We have to make those three months wonderful,’ I said.
But there was no opportunity to fill Robert’s final days with pleasure, no chance to tick off a few items on his modest bucket list. Right from the start he was grotesquely sick. He survived for two months and his suffering was shocking. Every morning I sent out a silent invocation to the universe: Please let him die today. Witnessing another person in excruciating pain, standing helplessly at their bedside, hearing them plead for morphine, was gruelling and surreal.
Hugh’s brother Carl articulated what we were all thinking: ‘Can’t they do something? To … end this? Take him to that place in Switzerland? What do you think, Hugh?’
Stiffly, Hugh shook his head.
‘No,’ Carl admitted tearfully. ‘I only said it out of …’
‘Desperation,’ I supplied.
‘Yeah.’ He gave me a grateful look but Hugh was no longer engaged. He’d closed up tight. He barely spoke to his brothers – and, to my surprise, he rebuffed my attempts to persuade him to talk. ‘Don’t, Amy. Let’s just get through this.’
Finally, on a squally day in October, Robert was allowed to leave his body and my relief was so great that it took me a while to realize that he was dead. Then I cried and cried, because he’d been so nice, with his toolbox and his bad puns.
Just as Robert’s death had released Robert, I thought it would release Hugh too: he’d shut down to endure his dad’s suffering and now we’d move into a new phase of grief, a healthier, more cathartic one. But he remained shrink-wrapped and unreachable in unuttered thoughts and feelings, far, far away from me.
Sometimes it seemed there might be an opening – like the evening he announced, in the middle of Game of Thrones, ‘He was seventy-three. No age.’
‘It’s far too young.’ I grabbed the remote, all set for a heart-to-heart, but Hugh stood up and left the room.
Then there was the night in bed when he voiced, into the darkness, ‘I’m next.’
‘For what?’ But I knew. His silent preoccupation with death was saturating everything.
‘Sweetie …’ I tried wrapping my body around his, but he lay tense and unresponsive.
I switched on the light and he switched it off again immediately. ‘Night, Amy.’
‘Hugh …’ But he’d turned his back on me.
The time since Robert had got his diagnosis has been … lonely, I suppose is the word. But I hadn’t fully faced it because Hugh and I still had the infrastructure of a shared life. He was still here in body and we had our routine and were civil to each other.
And all relationships go through good spells and bad spells – I get that, I really do. Not just marriages, but me and Derry, me and Alastair, me and everyone. There are times when your heart is bursting with love for them and there are spells when you tense up at the sound of them entering the room. That Hugh and I were going through a disconnected patch had been flickering in my subconscious. It had happened a couple of times in the past: when Hugh turned forty, he disappeared deep inside himself for a couple of months. Five years ago, when I was made redundant, there was a bleak three-month period when I felt detached from everyone, even Hugh. Eventually, though, we’d always bonded again. But this time we didn’t.
56
Tuesday, 25 October, day forty-three
The key to getting people to do something they don’t want to do, is first to offer them options that are far, far worse.
‘So!’ My smile is bright, as I look at dreamy Matthew Carlisle, then at his considerably less dreamy brother. ‘I’ve had calls from the producers of I’m a Celebrity and Celebrity Big Brother.’
I have had calls from them. Not in relation to Matthew. And not recently. But technically I’m not lying …
It’s Tuesday morning and I’m in Dan Carlisle’s kitchen.
‘I’m a Celebrity?’ His voice is sharp and he actually stands up to show his displeasure. ‘Making him eat emu toes? This is your masterplan?’
I radiate control and seek the special voice that makes people do what I want. ‘Not for a second. It’s simply to illustrate that there’s a lot of interest in Matthew.’
Matthew barely reacts. He’s staring at his big, sexy hands, which are resting on his brother’s kitchen table; his handsome face is pale and sad.
The nerve of those bitches on Sunday not being impressed that he’s my client. Oh, shite, I shouldn’t have remembered that lunch – the memory makes my stomach lurch. On Monday morning, I’d had to sneak over to Steevie’s before work, to retrieve my abandoned car. Steevie’s Mini was still in her drive: there was a good chance she’d open her front door, come marching out in her suit, and spot me. Crouching low, I scurried furtively car-wards but part of me was hoping to see her. Face to face, we’d stand a better chance of getting past whatever weird shit had gone down. We’d probably hug and both apologize and laugh a little and cry a little and then we’d be grand. We’ve had scraps in the past, of course – we’ve been friends a long time – but this felt more rancorous than any of our other bust-ups.