She wishes Nicky would stop staring. She can see a flicker – something not far off amusement – in her friends’ face. The indigo figure is so clearly Cassie: an old, sadder version of Cassie.
Cassie wrinkles her nose at the canvases. ‘I’m going to replace those.’ In fact, she wishes she could start pulling the canvases down right now, but grief always adds a sombre significance to even the simplest thing. If she took them down now, Nicky would worry that Cassie was hiding from the past, not grieving ‘well’ enough.
Honestly, managing others was far more exhausting than the thudding loss itself.
At last, Nicky turns towards Cassie. ‘Has Jack seen them?’
Cassie can’t remember showing them to Jack, these souvenirs from her old life, but she says, ‘Yeah, I think so. Why?’
‘Oh, no reason really.’ Nicky turns back to the canvases. ‘I just remember when you first met, you found it hard to talk about April with him.’
‘No, I didn’t, Nick. I told him about Mum on our first date, you know that.’ Cassie feels a queasy twinge of irritation; sometimes it feels like Nicky’s searching for drama.
Jack and Cassie met at a friend’s party, just a couple of months before April died. Cassie, made wild by her mum’s illness, had drunk so much she was sick, but Jack had still asked for her number and kept sending her the odd text until three months after April died. It was Nicky who had persuaded Cassie to put on some mascara and go for a drink with Jack. He’d been living in Islington but came down to meet her in her Brixton local on a rainy Tuesday evening.
Cassie had wanted to leave as soon as they arrived. She’d been feeling fractious; pissed off with Nicky for making her agree to a date, and pissed off with herself for not definitively refusing his offer.
‘So how’s the painting going?’ Jack had asked.
There was a big group of blokes in the pub, rugby types, slamming their fists on their table, laughing as though they were in competition with each other to have the best time. Jack had ignored them, and kept his eyes fixed on Cassie, as though he could wait forever for her answer. He’d wait for a long time; Cassie wasn’t prepared to tell a stranger how she cried every time she tried to paint, how she’d resigned herself to a mind-numbing future in soul-sucking admin jobs.
She’d taken a couple of big gulps of red wine and once the other table had quietened down she’d said, ‘Look, Jack, I’m really sorry. I probably should have cancelled tonight. The thing is that I’ve had a shitty few months – well, a shitty couple of years actually – and I thought I was ready to go for a drink, but, really, I’m not, so maybe we could do this another time?’
He’d nodded slowly again, and had looked down at his pint briefly as if deciding what to say before he’d asked, ‘Is your mum still ill?’
The pub had seemed to swell around Cassie before it shrunk to normal again; she must have told him April had cancer when she was drunk. Her jaw had felt rusty as she’d tried to answer; she’d felt it move like a ventriloquist’s dummy as she’d fired two words at him like arrows.
‘She’s dead.’
But Jack hadn’t looked away, or shifted in his seat. He’d just kept calmly looking at Cassie, as if her two hard monosyllables hadn’t hit him, as if they hadn’t even grazed his skin. Her tragedy hadn’t made him uncomfortable, not like everyone else.
Instead, he’d kept his eyes on Cassie. He’d cleared his throat gently. ‘I’m sorry to hear that, Cas. My dad died when I was fourteen. It’s still, twenty years on, the hardest thing that’s ever happened to me.’
‘Your dad died?’ She’d almost heard the hinge of her jaw creak around the words.
‘Heart attack,’ Jack had said simply. ‘He was the hero of my life, really. I idolised him. When did your mum die?’
Fat tears rolled in waves down Cassie’s cheeks; she hadn’t bothered wiping them away, and they’d disappeared under her T-shirt. Jack had handed her a napkin from the dispenser on their table.
‘July twelfth, eleven weeks and three days ago.’
‘So you’ve had, what, twenty-seven years believing she was always going to be in your life and less than three months trying to get your head around the fact she’s not alive any more. I’m not surprised you’re not ready to sit in a noisy pub with someone you don’t know that well.’
Cassie had blinked at him across the table. Suddenly, she’d felt like giving him a chance.
‘Most people don’t get it at all. They think they can fix things with tea and sympathy and it’s like they’re pissed off with me that they can’t; they think it’s my fault somehow that they don’t make me feel better.’
‘I remember that. I got so fucked off with people avoiding the fact that what felt like the worst thing in the world had happened. I was a right little shit for a while. The thing is, I think grief makes people uncomfortable. It’s so final, so unfixable. That’s why it scares people shitless; they’re just trying to make it better for themselves and for you.’
‘I know, but they’re not.’
‘Of course they’re not, they can’t. Often, through no fault of their own, they make it worse. It’s belittling; they think grief can be cured with a biscuit. Most people don’t understand. Grieving is a kind of art. You have to let yourself be creative with it, own it. You can’t let other people tell you how to do it, otherwise it won’t be done right and you might end up in a pickle.’ Jack had paused before he’d asked, ‘Why are you laughing?’
‘I’m laughing because what you just said is the best thing I’ve heard in weeks and you ended it with the phrase “in a pickle”.’
Jack had looked at Cassie and blinked. ‘Shit. That’s exactly the sort of thing my mum would say.’
Cassie had wiped her damp cheeks and neck with the napkin. She’d liked the way Jack had interlaced his fingers around his pint glass, and she’d liked his hands, big, firm hands, the sort of hands she could imagine holding her. She’d wanted to carry on looking at those beautiful, safe hands, and she’d wanted to carry on talking to Jack.
‘There’s a pizza place around the corner. They give you a fiver off if you can finish their calzone. We could give it a shot if you’re hungry?’ Cassie had asked.
Jack had drained the last of his pint in one go and stood up from the table. ‘Starving.’
Three months later, Jack had moved into Cassie’s Brixton flat, three months after that they were engaged and now eighteen months from that rainy evening in the pub, Jack is making lunch in their beautiful, newly converted three-bedroomed cottage.
Cassie, nervous at dwelling on her good fortune too much, in case it tempts fate, still can’t deny that the world has at last been good to her. Really bloody good to her.
Nicky is looking at Cassie, eyebrows raised, like she expects Cassie to cry any moment. She wraps her slim arms over Cassie’s shoulders and pulls her friend towards her.