5.

The world seemed colder. Framed photographs of me and my mother dotted around the house haunted me. I turned them down then faced them back up because she’d put them there. The whole situation was numbing and unbelievable. I expected a call from someone to say there’d been some mistake, but the phone sat unmoving like a piece of furniture.

One night, when the house felt especially full of emptiness, I put her records on and opened one of her bottles. I closed my eyes and tried for a moment to imagine she was in the room with me. The smell did not waft like I’d hoped, so I poured and swirled the gin in a glass, studying the stuff as it diffused light. There had to be something in it – something more than chemical. I’d watched it transform people: turn lovers into fighters and fighters into lovers; give confidence or take it away. There was power in it.

I took a gulp and immediately retched over the bench. Ice, she always had it with ice. I added some cubes and watched the gin cascade over them in little waterfalls to collect at the bottom. Again, I sipped – this time keeping it down. After a few minutes, my body was lighter and heavier at the same time. I felt better, so had another.

I kept going, expecting the cycle to be finite, but never finding a plateau. It was brilliant. Thumbing through her mammoth stack of records, past The Doors and Anita Baker, I landed on James Taylor and laid the needle down. The music seemed richer with each sip and I laughed at my hindered motor skills, leaning against the couch after dropping a glass onto the carpet. I found a pack of cigarettes in a cupboard, smoked one and felt even better. I kept drinking. The ceiling light blurred, the records turned, and I slipped away.

I woke with my first ever hangover. After a coffee and shower, I felt okay, wondering how much of the hangover’s reputation was because it often followed the best that people had felt in a long time. I reclined on the floor, the vague thud of my pulse in my arm tapping against the back of my rested head. Above, the ceiling fan rotated a lazy cadence; a tick with each revolution. For a moment, the two were in sync, and I felt as though I’d become the room. A few more beats and I could sink into the floor and be dispersed through the walls and the furniture. I could be inanimate, with the impossibility of thinking or feeling the wrong thing. I could be timeless as long as the timing was right.

I felt the calmest I had in days, but also the furthest from her. It was a selfish feeling to have. Rhythm was for the living, I decided. It was the only thing they shared. The earth flies around the sun; the moon spins around the earth; grass sways in the breeze; children rock on swings; the cursors of computers blink; and hearts beat in chests.

Death has no rhythm. It doesn’t start and end on a day or in a week; it cannot be marked on a calendar. It arrives inside the ticks of clocks, during the nothingness of a blink. What was living becomes dead – the space between immeasurable. Infinity created in an instant. A moment between moments, one which tears us down the middle and forever leaves us in two: before and after.

The days passed too slowly. I hoped they would start later and end sooner, like a prisoner serving a sentence, carving lines through a calendar hung in the kitchen. But the hurting didn’t ease with each dawn, and I began to wonder what my crime had been, and if redemption was ever coming. Before long, I found myself reaching for a bottle each time I sensed sadness seeping in through the walls.

Claire and I slept together one night.

‘I love you,’ I said, leaning in as I buttoned my shirt. She pulled back, turning wine-stained lips away.

‘God, don’t.’

‘What?’

‘Just … come on.’

‘I do,’ I said, trying and failing to kiss her again. I moved to the kitchen, poured a drink, lit a cigarette, and watched her wriggle into a skirt.

‘You’re all sorts of fucked up right now, I get it, but don’t grab onto anything you can just because it’s within reach. I’m glad to see you’re remembering how to enjoy yourself, but there are healthier ways to do it,’ she said, taking and butting out my cigarette. ‘I’ll see you soon, Mark.’

She kissed me and was gone. I stood for a moment, emptied the remainder of the bottle into my glass and lit another smoke. ‘Remembering? I’m just learning how.’