1

Dave called Susanna the same night he killed himself. She hadn’t heard from him in a while. They’d been divorced for almost five years now, and while there had never really been any acrimony between them, there was a distance whenever they spoke; that wounded and tentative silence between words after a violent disagreement. Susanna had resolved herself to the fact that little would change between them. Why should it concern her that the only man she’d ever really cared about now only tended to call her at the end of the night and the end of a bottle of Scotch? But it did. Of course it did. She thought she was worth more than that. She thought, deep down, he was better than that.

“Suze?” He made it sound as if he’d called her by accident and was surprised to hear her voice. “Susanna. I should tell you from the off that I’m a bit pissed.”

“Well, that’s a relief, Dave,” she had said. “It saves us from having a civilised conversation.”

“Now don’t be like that,” he said. She could hear him settling into his leather armchair; the one between the window and the fireplace. The crowded bookcase behind him, the books and records bowing the shelves and scattered on the floor beside it. “You’re not getting ready for bed, are you?”

“No, of course not,” she said, “I’ve just got in.” She was in her pyjamas on the sofa with a blanket over her legs, watching a shopping TV channel. He didn’t need to know that.

What he said next surprised her. “I want you to know that I do still love you.” He laughed to himself. “I want you to know that this house and what money I have are yours.” He stalled for a moment, and then said: “After I’m gone.”

“That’s very civil of you, Dave, but you’re fifty-two and you have nine lives. At the very least. You’ll bloody well outlive us all.”

“It’s not that, Suze,” he said. She heard him hesitate and move in his chair, probably leaning back and glancing out of the window so he could see the street outside. There’d be leaves everywhere at this time of year. It had been such a lovely place, that house on the Edgbaston Road, not far from the cricket ground. It probably still was. Trees all down the street, the weeping willow in the pretty little front garden, the three sided bay window with its mosaic stained glass, the welcoming light of it all in the early evening… “It’s just that I did something that I’ve discovered I can’t undo, even though I have tried.” He laughed to himself. “And it’s coming back to bite me on the arse.”

She sighed and rose from the sofa. She’d muted the TV for this nonsense. She wandered into the kitchenette and put the kettle on. One of the neighbours from the flat downstairs was in the backyard staring into the night with a cup of coffee in his hand. He was divorced too. This was where they ended up, in poxy little flats in Moseley. Nursing their wounds and just about getting by on low-income jobs, wondering how on earth anything would change, knowing, deep down, that nothing would. “I’m sure it’s not that bad, Dave.”

“It seems to me that if you yearn for one thing, you have to accept that you’ll have to let something else go in order to have that thing. Do you see?”

“Not particularly, Dave,” she said.

He sighed. “Look, Suze, this is bloody important.”

“You’re drunk, Dave. You should probably be getting into bed, otherwise I’ll be moving my stuff over there sooner than you think.”

But his tone darkened then: “It won’t stop following me, Suze. It’s been fucking following me for six months now. I don’t sleep anymore because I’m terrified of it, of what it’ll do.”

She hung up on him then. She wouldn’t indulge him when he was inebriated. That was not the man she’d once loved and she sometimes only wanted to remember him like that. As a better man that the one he’d become. She un-muted the TV and forgot about it.

And then three days later, Dave was found dead. The cleaner had arrived on Monday morning and found him slumped in that leather armchair with an empty bottle of single malt in his lap and the remains of a cocktail of antidepressants and painkillers scattered across the carpet. He’d been dead all weekend. Susanna had been his final port of call.