Chapter One

July 21st

    It begins with me climbing further and further into smaller and smaller attic rooms, through concealed panels and tiny doors. Often I'm in flight from someone. Sometimes it starts on the turning of a staircase in a stately home. I look down from the red carpet to see mounted Prussian officers bursting through the huge doors, their brown, steaming-nostrilled, slow-motion mounts straining up the stairs towards me. A chaos of noise and hooved animals driving me upward and away. Then it gets quiet and I am big like Alice in a pale world of square holes and coolly plastered attic walls, tunnelling in my loft maze. That's where I am now. And such is my beginning. Pretentious, I guess, but what the hell you have to start somewhere. And who's going to read this? Longman, (Call me Pete!) won't.

The bereavement counsellor had suggested Louise keep a journal when she disclosed she was a teacher of English. It made it easier for her to get started writing when Peter Longman, the counsellor, had said he needn't necessarily read it. She didn't think she could face comments in her margins, especially sensitive encouraging ones. No, Longman (call me Pete) would never write anything encouraging, that would mean committing himself. He'd only lightly pencil in question marks - the bastard! He wouldn't even notice how badly she wrote. She didn't know why she was going to see him. She couldn't really talk to him, and hadn't since her second visit when she had broken down and sobbed. He didn't offer advice, and she was fast growing to hate his insipid handshake and limp professionalism.

When someone close to you dies other people rush in to fill the vacuum and for the time it takes to visit a solicitor or be visited by a priest you are caught up, buoyant and spinning on a whirlpool of other people's concern.

Do whirlpools hold you up or drag you down? For the moment Louise didn't know, but the ambiguity pleased her.

Afterwards, evenings are the worst, when the children are in bed and the day's labours are behind you and all that lies ahead is darkness and silence and a cold bed; that is when mourning bites.

    Louise looked at her last lines and contemplated a pun but instead scribbled a line through the whole page. A line like lightning; a quick violent zigzag - except the line was dark blue permanent ink and lightning was bright white light and fleeting and the collied night wasn't a ruled exercise book. Apart from that the line was exactly like lightning. And here came the storm.. Louise tried not to cry while the children were around. She made a rule for herself and endeavoured to discipline herself to abide by it, but when they were tucked away and she was out of sight the flood gates opened, the lid blew off the bottle so tears and emotions teemed from her never to be re-corked - and wasn't it all better out than in anyway?


    Louise was doing it again; letting her mind wander in all directions instead of focusing on her dead husband. It was quarter to ten and she had some free time to seriously contemplate her loss, but her mind wouldn't be bound to the job, it flitted from triviality to triviality and it would continue to, she knew, until she went to bed, and then, when she couldn't cry because the children might discover her, the enormity of it would strike home.

    This night followed the usual pattern. She would lock up the house and slip the bolt across the door to the cellar-head. Perhaps she might wash-up a mug or two left in the sink, and look out at the identical terrace of houses across the street. Next she would attempt to climb the old creaking stairs and clean her teeth without waking the children. Soon Louise would lie on her side of the double bed too tired to sustain ideas or images. Instead, she would ache with the empty panic that accompanied the thing she most feared, the echoing silence in her skull. So when Amy climbed up onto the bed and placed her toy parrot to sleep beside Mummy, Louise was too relieved, too glad of the distraction to complain that Polly's fluffy beak was jammed uncomfortably against her ear. Towards dawn their sleep would be broken by Kit's quiet summons. This was a new development. He had wet the bed. It was the first time and it confused him but he was bearing his shame with a seven-year old's silent dignity. Louise could read a sign, even in the half light and ruffled the lad's blonde hair, “It happens love.”

    She stripped the bed and the boy, then brought him to the family bed. Amy shifted Polly to make room for him: “It's all right she's asleep now.” She wrapped the soft toy in Mummy's discarded T-shirt and placed her on the floor beside the bed before climbing back in next to her brother.

July 22nd

    In the morning Louise poured cornflakes into two striped bowls and called the kids from the television to the table. Kit still looked a little sheepish about the night's misadventures, but Amy was on full form. She ascended the pine chair and then knelt up on its summit watching her mother. Kit began heaping sugar on his cereal. Amy warned him, with some relish, “All your teeth'll fall out.” He didn't respond, “They will. They'll go black and fall out, won't they Mummy?”
    Louise turned her attention to the table, “I think you've got enough, Kit.”
    Amy turned her attention to her mother again, “Polly's not having any breakfast today because Mummy's not.” She had placed the parrot on the table next to the carton of milk and now addressed her, “Aren't you hungally, Polly?” She sighed, “Oh, poor Polly, Mummy, Polly's like you she's not hunglly.”
    “Ungry!” Kit corrected her, “It's ungrrry.”
    “Ungrrrrrrry, ungrrrrrrry, ungrrrrrrrry.” Amy repeated in Polly's squawky voice. Louise went to fetch herself a bowl. Amy started to feed Polly; the toy tottered.
    “Be careful, don't knock the milk over.” Kit warned her.

    Louise looked at her children. Her son was mothering her daughter, her daughter was mothering Polly, and there she was, blackmailed into eating breakfast by the bloody parrot! She'd have to get a grip on her life.

Chapter Two

    Ian's parents were only too pleased to be asked to baby-sit. They were, of course, anxious not to lose contact with their son's family after his death. They liked Louise and wanted to do what they could to help her. Still, she felt guilty about using them. She felt inept because she couldn't cope on her own.

    With the children eventually gone - there had been a cup of tea and the last minute rounding up of toys and Kit's many excuses to keep coming back to check his mother was all right - Louise made a start in the bedroom. She'd start with the clothes. Mr Longman had said she would “know when the time was right to start sorting things out. There were different right times for different people. Everyone is different. Some people want to throw things out almost immediately, others may be
years in getting round to it.” Mr Longman - what a tosser! Not that you could argue with anything he said; just that there seemed to be so little point in anyone saying any of it.

    Armed with black plastic bin bags Louise made a start on Ian's wardrobe. Opening the doors caused waves of scent to crash out at her; smells of the backrooms in pubs where Ian had played and listened to jazz, and fainter, but just as distinct, the smell of the university where he worked - where he used to work. These were not the ways he smelt, but they were smells he brought home on him from places Louise didn't often go with him. They were the smells of his public life, the side of him that was private from her. Now, Louise wished she knew more about these aspects of him. She wanted to close the wardrobe doors before the smells escaped and diluted and were gone forever. She wished she could climb into the wardrobe, like Amy might and bury herself in these echoes of his life. But she could not. She had to sort them. She must put the decent stuff into one bag for Oxfam and the rest in another to be thrown away. She mustn't cry and get distracted by her memories; there would be time enough to note them when the job was done.
That evening she wrote:

    “Know when to hold 'em, know when to fold 'em, know when to walk away and when to run, you never count your winnings while you're sitting at the table there'll be time enough for counting when the dealing's done.” You don't know why these things come into your mind; bloody silly country songs, but they do, and suddenly you're crying over a song that you didn't even know you knew! And rhyming when you write!
    It is difficult to throw away someone's clothes, to actively get rid of them, but it's worse to give them away and imagine them going on having a life with someone else, a life beyond your partner, when he hasn't got a life, it's as if his clothes aren't being faithful to him, they're getting on with life and forgetting him when maybe they should all throw themselves on the funeral pyre, on the dustbin-van, or stay in the closet as a permanent testament to his life. The horror of seeing his clothes again, of recognising them on someone else!

    Jesus, Louise could no longer punctuate! How was she going to go back to work in September and pass herself off as an English teacher if she couldn't punctuate?

    It was half past eight and Louise considered having a glass of Ian's whisky. One glass wouldn't do any harm; it could do some good. But she was waiting for a call from the children to say goodnight and thought it best to postpone the nightcap until she had spoken to them. In the meantime she would go over the things she had found in her late husband's pockets. Old Switch receipts with his signature on; two folded tenners he'd probably taken as beer money one evening and left in his inside pocket; a paper clip; a broken clarinet reed which Louise ran across her bottom lip; a piece of chalk (though God knows when he last used chalk!) a hand full of change; a conker one of the kids must have given him; a couple of balls of kitchen roll he'd no doubt been using as tissues; three pieces of unchewed chewing gum from three different pockets; a note to phone some school about a student teacher; and his wallet. Louise wasn't aware that he'd had a wallet. She tried to remember him ever using one and couldn't. He was strictly a cash and plastic in pocket merchant. The black leather wallet looked new. He'd obviously hardly used it. She had been lucky to find it really. It had been in a jacket she had very nearly consigned to the bin bag without searching; certainly it wasn't fit for Oxfam. Louise thought Kit might like the wallet and began to make sure there was nothing in it. The telephone rang.
    “Hello, Louise speaking.”
    It was her mother in law. Louise felt her voice being listened to intently for signs of distress. She became self-conscious trying to sound normal and was relieved when the phone was handed over to Amy:
    “We're staying up late. Polly hasn't had her bath yet.”
    When Grandma was given the phone back she was most apologetic. Anxious that she hadn't spoilt her chances of baby-sitting again. One late night was a bit of a treat, though she knew how important routine was in bringing up children, and really they didn't seem tired. The children's mother reassured her that one late night wouldn't do any harm. When she put down the receiver Louise suffered a sudden fleeting panic that Ian's parents might have expected her to take a stronger line on bedtimes. They were bound to be worrying about whether she was letting
things slide now she was on her own.

    She tried to set aside her fears by returning to the business of Ian's wallet. It contained: a couple of pound notes which Louise put on one side for the kids (they were far too young to remember them and might find them interesting), a torn cinema ticket stub and a photograph. Louise recognised the young woman in the photograph as Susan Richards. The tiny re-sealable plastic pouch that held the photo also contained a lock of red hair. It was a perfect circular curl tied with a thread of blue cotton. Louise was unsure as to whether she should return it. She didn't want to meet Susan Richards again but it was perhaps a duty visit she ought to make. It was an acknowledgement of the past. She told herself she ought to return the picture to its rightful owner, but really she knew it was just an excuse. She felt she had to go and the keepsakes gave her a seeming reason.

    When she actually came to make the visit, two days later, she took the children with her for moral support.