The Dead Wife's Handbook (35 page)

‘How’s it different?’

‘Because you’re my daughter, you’re a part of me, and that makes my love for you completely unique. It’s what’s called unconditional love. It means I’d do anything for you, anything at all, without you even asking, if it would keep you safe and make you happy.’

Ellie ponders this for a few seconds, as if wondering how best to put it to the test.

‘Anything at all, Daddy?’

‘Yes, my angel. Anything.’

‘In that case, please can we have dessert now because I really want some chocolate mousse.’

Max laughs and pulls himself out of his chair with Ellie still clinging to him.

‘You, little one, are incorrigible. But your wish is my command. And, anyway, you can’t give me my final score until we’ve finished the whole meal.’

As Max and Ellie head for the fridge, I feel the familiar shift of air beneath me and as Max opens the fridge door, I lose both of them completely.

I’m left alone with the bittersweet recollection of today’s events. Because even the comfort of Max’s paternal care can’t detract from the evening’s critical resolution: Eve is going to be sleeping in my bed. She’s going to sleep
in my bed and wake up with my husband and in no time at all it will be her – not me, not Max even – tucking Ellie in at night and reading her a bedtime story. I just know it. Eve is stepping into a ready-made family – my family – and beginning to live my life instead of me. And there’s nothing I can do to stop it.

I thought my broken heart was already full with grief for the life I’ve lost. Now I discover there’s a whole new realm of sadness waiting for me in the wings, waiting to make its entrance when I least expected it, without so much as a formal cue – grief for the life that I’ll now never lead. For all the possibilities I’ll now never know. For the date nights I’ll never have with Max and the family holidays the three of us will never go on together. For the friends of Ellie’s I’ll never meet, the boyfriends I’ll never disapprove of, the future husband I’ll never get to know, the wedding I’ll never attend. The successes I’ll never share with my little girl and the failures from which I’ll never help her recover. The birthdays of family and friends I’ll now never celebrate, the parties and picnics I’ll miss, the Christmases and Easters and Bonfire Nights I won’t attend. All the countries, cities, towns, villages, islands and oceans I’ll never visit, the miles of planned road trips I’ll never drive, the wonders of nature that have stood for millennia that I’ll now never see with my own eyes. The books I’ll never read, films I’ll never see, music I’ll never listen to, pictures I’ll never paint, piano playing I’ll never properly master. The work I’ll never start or finish, the jobs I’ll never apply for, the professional milestones I’ll never achieve. The mornings – all those thousands of expectant mornings – that I’ll not wake up with Max
beside me and Ellie clambering over me and know what it is to be truly grateful for the familial hand life has dealt you.

All of life, from every momentous event to every microcosmic detail, every day I hadn’t yet lived and now never will. It’s grief for the life I might have led. For the life that someone else is about to embark upon in my place. For the life I so desperately want back but know, deep down, I can never have.

Chapter 25

‘I’ve schlepped all the way across bloody town to check on you, at nine o’clock in the bloody evening, and now you’re telling me you couldn’t even be bothered to go?’

The living world has come into view – and earshot – to reveal that Harriet is shouting and angry, which isn’t, in and of itself, unusual for Harriet. What is unusual is that the place where she’s shouting is my kitchen and the person she’s shouting at is Max.

‘It’s not that I couldn’t be bothered. I don’t know why you have to put it so scathingly. Ellie had drama club after school and I didn’t want her to have to miss it.’

‘That’s the lamest excuse I’ve ever heard. Why can’t you just admit that you didn’t want to go?’

Harriet isn’t just angry. She’s upset. And getting upset isn’t something Harriet does very often.

‘I don’t know why you’re attacking me like this, Harriet. Why’s it such a big deal to you what day I go?’

‘You don’t know? Really? You don’t think I should care about the fact that my best friend’s husband can’t be bothered to make the fifteen-minute trip to the cemetery on the second anniversary of her death? You don’t think I should give a shit about that?’

It’s my two-year anniversary. I had no idea. There are no calendars up here for me to know what day of the week it is, much less which date in the year, and I gave up
long ago trying to keep methodical track of time passing.

Two years that I’ve been dead. It’s strange – it feels both aeons longer and yet, at the same time, like it was only yesterday that I found myself here and wondered whether this was a version of heaven or hell or something altogether different in between.

And today Max didn’t take Ellie to the cemetery to visit my headstone. Today he’s chosen not to commemorate the moment I left them. Today he is, perhaps, allowing Ellie to forget. And if that’s the case I don’t know how to feel anything other than desolate at the prospect.

‘Harriet, I don’t need you to tell me how to remember my wife. And I don’t appreciate you coming here and shouting at me in my own house, not least while Ellie’s asleep upstairs.’

‘Well, you clearly do need to be told given that ever since Blondie came into your life you’ve been acting as though Rach never even existed.’

Max grips the wooden work surface and I can see that it’s taking all his self-control not to rise to Harriet’s bait.

Is she wrong, though? Because the only explanation I can think of as to why he’s chosen not to take Ellie today is that his preoccupation with Eve has relegated me to little more than an afterthought in his life, even today of all days.

‘Harriet, I think it’s best if you don’t bring Eve into this, if for nothing else than for the sake of our friendship. Ellie’s coming with me to the cemetery on Saturday. It’s not getting the date right that’s important for Ellie. It’s about ensuring the act of remembrance. And we’ll be doing that at the weekend.’

Harriet seems apoplectic now.

‘That’s not good enough, Max. It is about the date. It’s everything about the date. Can you imagine, for a second, that if the tables were turned Rach wouldn’t have taken Ellie to visit your headstone today?’

No, I can’t. I can’t imagine that. I like to think that I would have gone to visit him on every anniversary, for the rest of time, and ensured that Ellie was by my side on each and every occasion.

‘Really, Max, this isn’t about you. It’s about Ellie, and it’s obvious that the reason you’re getting so defensive is because you know I’m right. You know it’s a dereliction of paternal duty not to have stood before that headstone with her and honoured Rach’s memory today.’

Max has been staring intently out of the kitchen window, his back towards Harriet, as if evading her gaze will ensure the avoidance of conflict, but suddenly he swerves towards her, his eyes betraying a fury I’ve never seen in him before.

‘A dereliction of duty? I’m supposed to take this from
you
of all people, someone who doesn’t even have children, someone who thinks that money and status and having their name mentioned in some stupid lawyer’s journal once in a while is an adequate substitute for real human relationships? Don’t you dare lecture me about how to raise my daughter when you haven’t got a maternal bone in your body.’

The room erupts into a deafening silence. I’ve never known emptiness so palpable before. Max is hunched over the kitchen sink, spent, depleted, almost certainly reviling himself already for the outburst. Harriet is static,
her face rigid with shock, seemingly unsure whether she’s incapable of moving or simply unwilling. A few seconds pass, neither of them speaking, not even the sound of their breath disrupting the atmosphere.

Suddenly Harriet rushes to grab her bag from the table and all but stumbles out of the kitchen. The front door slams behind her a couple of seconds later.

Max grabs a cup from the draining board and hurls it into the sink, shattering it on impact. The crash creates a turbulence both in his world and mine; my access disappears in an explosive instant. No gradually assembling clouds this time, no faint tremor of air, no tentative mist to forewarn me of my impending exit. Just an abrupt ending, as though a light had been switched on, bathing the conflict beneath me in unbearable brightness.

I keep seeing that look of rage on Max’s face, and I fear for whether their relationship will recover. I think about Harriet and where she might have gone – to a bar? back to the office? home alone? – and about how Max’s words seemed to sting her with a sharpness against which she’d normally be able to anaesthetize herself. I think about that decisive ending, about Harriet’s incensed departure, and I can’t imagine what external force will persuade her to come back through that door again.

I think about how painful it is to watch them argue, how frustrating it is to be impotent to intervene, to mediate a resolution, to ensure that this isn’t a permanent fracture.

But Harriet’s right. Of course the date matters. And Max’s decision not to commemorate the day with Ellie is his most definitive declaration yet that he’s consigning me
to a distant corner of their lives, to the most secluded recess in the ancestral attic, to the final resting place in familial history.

Since the very beginning, from the moment I arrived here and realized that life, for me, was no longer to be lived but merely to be viewed silently and invisibly, my greatest fear has been not the netherworld’s isolation, nor the possibility of never returning, nor the fantasies about what, if anything, may come after this place. My greatest fear has been to discover one day that I’ve been forgotten. To watch on painfully, powerless, as I view my own demise in the memories of the people I love. To observe the little life I have left, the vestiges of remembrance, gradually disperse like vapour rising from a lake on the coldest of days.

It’s not the mortality of the body that’s the real tragedy of the dead. It’s the dissolution of memory. For the dead, to be forgotten is as if never to have lived at all.

But maybe that’s the fate we all face in the end. Not if we’ll be forgotten but, simply, when.

TESTING

Chapter 26

I don’t understand. I’ve surfaced in Max’s bedroom – our bedroom – to the discovery that I’m as alone here as I am in my own world. This has never happened before. I always arrive to people, to Max and Ellie and whomever they’re with and wherever they are. I’ve never descended upon an empty room before.

I haven’t been in this room for ages, not for about a year I think. In spite of the quietness there’s a nostalgic reassurance to be back here. It’s all pretty much as I remember it: the white painted iron bedstead enveloped by a now slightly off-white duvet cover and the tattered brown leather armchair which was only ever used to house discarded clothes we were too lazy to hang up in the wardrobe. There’s the chest of drawers we bought from a second-hand shop, the one Max thought I was crazy parting with cash for, until I sanded and varnished it and even he had to concede that it had been a bargain. And there’s the Braque print above the bed, a wedding present from my mum, the two blue birds that greeted me every morning for all those years.

But there, by my side of the bed, is the only unfamiliar object on display. It’s a brown leather holdall, suspiciously consistent with the kind of bag someone might use for an overnight stay. And there’s only one person I can think of who’d be leaving an overnight bag by my side of the bed.

I hear voices coming from the kitchen and head downstairs with the weight of a thousand rocks sinking in my stomach, painfully cognizant of who I’m going to find before I even get there.

Eating chocolate ice cream in the kitchen are Max, Ellie and, of course, Eve. She has, quite literally, got her feet under my table.

‘So was it today that you had to hand in your art project, munchkin?’

‘No.’

‘So, when is it?’

‘Dunno.’

‘But you’ve worked so hard on it, you must know when it is?’

Ellie shrugs her shoulders, her eyes fixed doggedly on the dessert in front of her. Max looks at Ellie, frowning, and then at Eve, embarrassed. He seems a bit bemused, leaving Eve to take up the conversational reins.

‘Did you find out any more about your end-of-year school trip, Ellie? Have they decided on the seaside or an adventure park yet?’

‘Dunno.’

‘Which one do you hope they’re going to pick?’

‘Don’t care.’

Max and Eve trade a look of concern. It’s a silent, collusive exchange, one that firmly establishes them as the adult group from which Ellie’s excluded. I feel sad on her behalf, for the little girl who, for whatever reason, just doesn’t feel like being chatty with her dad and his new girlfriend tonight.

They finish their ice cream in silence, Ellie barely raising her head and steadfastly refusing to meet anyone’s gaze.