We’re at three thousand metres, my parents and me, playing Scrabble in a faux-log chalet and drinking thin red wine (although not as much and as fast as I want). The mountains are thick with snow, but the ski season hasn’t officially started yet and the lifts don’t open until December. Even so, Mum thought the scenery and fresh air would be good for me.
‘I’m suffering from vowel obstruction,’ my dad says – a familiar joke around this dog-eared board – then, nervously, glances up from his tiles, checking whether this mild humour has upset or offended me.
I harrumph a short laugh, and while Dad drops his eyes back to the board I take a long sip of my wine, aware of my mother watching me from the corner of her eye.
‘Have some of mine, I think I’ve got all of them,’ I say.
Mum laughs lightly, putting her hand on my wrist.
It’s been almost three weeks; a fragmented and disjointed sequence of grief, shock, guilt, compassion and bureaucracy – as random and incomprehensible as the seven letters sitting in front of me.
E-E-E-I-G-L-V
One letter short of L-O-V-E. One shy of L-I-K-E. Funny how the two words begin and end with the same letters, identical on the surface, entirely different at their core. Live, too, ironically. This tragic coincidence should jolt me into spontaneous tears, but it doesn’t. In the first days after Alex’s accident, I cried myself to sleep and cried myself awake. I cried myself sick, literally; sobbing hysterically until I dry retched and tasted bile mixed in with the snot and salt of my tears.
Less so since the funeral, though. Since the slow mechanism wound Alex’s coffin towards the flames, the main thing I feel is numb. Numb and guilty.
They say you grieve for yourself. Although no one has said it to me personally. But it’s one of those things we trot out in the days following death. To your face, they say, I’m sorry for your loss, which amounts to pretty much the same thing – the idea that we cry for our personal loss, more than for the lost themselves.
What else they say is, You were so good together. And I nod and say Yes, and Thank you, and I let them hold my hand while I cry. But they’re wrong; we weren’t so good together. We were okay together, and as much as I try to live up to the role I’ve been thrown into, I’m not crying for me, I’m crying for Alex.
He was kind, sensitive and considerate more often than he wasn’t. He was a good man. Funny, clever, cool. He loved his mother and brother, was loyal to his friends, loved me, I think, and it breaks my heart that his life was stopped short. But a part of me (a cold, dispassionate part I don’t like very much) knows that Alex’s death has given me a way out of a bad situation. It’s a thought I try very hard not to think, and if I could bring Alex back, I would, but not for us to be together again.
‘Here we go,’ says Dad, laying down two tiles on the back end of a dormant word. ‘Wrongly, what’s that . . . fourteen, not too shabby, considering.’
If I woke up now to find it were nothing more than a dream; if I woke to the sound of Alex returning from the shops, clattering through our front door with a bag full of provisions, then I would cry into my pillow with relief. We would eat breakfast, ride our bikes, drink a bottle of wine and maybe have an early night. And then the next day, or week or certainly not longer than a month later, I would tell him it’s over. Certain in the cold knowledge I had acquired during this nineteen-day nightmare of death and grief, I would break his heart, and it would be horrible. We would fight, call each other names, cry and drink and make accusations and let our worst qualities bubble up to the surface and we would come to loathe each other. But his death has spared me that, so no, I don’t cry for me, I cry for Alex. I have cried my eyes dry out of grief and guilt and relief.
‘Just going to get another,’ I say, picking up the empty wine bottle.
‘I could make hot chocolate,’ Mum says. ‘Marshmallows!’
‘Thanks, but I’ll stick with wine. Anyway, it’s your go.’
Mum glances at Dad. ‘I’ll make it,’ he says. ‘Just don’t go looking at my tiles.’
‘Sure,’ I say. ‘Thank you.’
Mum rearranges her tiles while Dad moves through to the kitchen. ‘You okay?’ she asks.
‘Yeah, I’m fine. Numb, you know, but . . . just a bit numb.’
‘Did you speak to work?’
I nod. ‘I’m going to go back in on Tuesday. Start off with short days.’
‘That sounds sensible.’
‘Means I don’t have to cry in front of the other commuters,’ I say, still not sure how much humour is appropriate two and a half weeks after your boyfriend was killed while crossing the road.
Mum wraps her hand around my fingers and squeezes. ‘Damn letters,’ she says.
My mother is a fiercely competitive Scrabble player, taking longer than everyone else over her turn, playing tactically and challenging frequently. But looking at the board now with its primary school vocabulary, I’m pretty sure she’s going easy on me.
‘Will someone stay with you?’ she asks.
‘They would if I asked, but . . . I think I’ll be okay on my own now.’
‘Are you sure, Zoe? You’ve had a dreadful shock, a . . . a heck of a shock.’
I nod – I’m sure. Of all the emotions I’m going through, loneliness is not one of them. The compassion that people have gently wrapped around me, I don’t deserve it. While Alex lay dying on the side of the road, I was lying in bed thinking unkind thoughts. Maybe he was already dead as I curled up under a warm blanket, cataloguing all of his faults and indiscretions. I don’t deserve sympathy, and the weight of it is suffocating. I don’t want to be protected and hugged and looked at like I’m about to break. I want to be by myself. I need space – not to think, necessarily, I’ve done too much of that – but just to breathe.
Rachel met me at the hospital, held my hand while the policewoman – the family liaison officer – asked me to describe Alex: his hair, any scars, any tattoos or distinguishing marks. My friend for more than ten years, Rachel was the first person I called after Alex invited me on a date. She put her arm around my shoulder while the policewoman showed me a photograph of a tattoo taken from the body they had removed from the road several hours earlier. Alex’s tattoo, a Thai character on his left shoulder meaning love. When I’d teased him about its significance – Was it for Ines, your German girl? – Alex had denied it, saying the tattoo was a snap decision made high on weed. But I was never convinced.
When they took me to Alex’s body, the man pulled the sheet back just far enough to show me one half of Alex’s face. His eye closed, his stubble in need of a shave.
We spent that night at Rachel’s, staying up late, drinking, scrolling through photographs, crying. Her fiancé, Steve, cooked supper, kept our glasses full and did his best to stay out of the way. On Sunday Vicky went over to the house and filled a bag full of clothes, underwear and toiletries, and in the evening the three of us went through the same vigil on the sofa. A far cry from our university days, alternately crying and laughing at weepy movies, never imagining these fictional dramas could ever reach out into our own worlds. They took alternate days off work, so I wouldn’t be alone. My parents wanted to come up immediately, but the prospect of too much sincere compassion filled me with a hot destabilizing dread. They arrived the following weekend; bags of food and an inflatable mattress in the boot of the Land Rover. They insisted on sleeping in the spare room while I slept in our bed. I’d have preferred it the other way around, giving me a good reason to change the sheets Alex and I had made love on just seven days previously.
On Tuesday morning, we set off early and drove to Yorkshire for the funeral. I sat in the back, pretending to sleep so I didn’t have to speak. After the service, at Alex’s mother’s house around a buffet of over-buttered sandwiches and dry sausage rolls and too much wine, the other thing people say is: I can’t imagine how you feel. And you think to yourself, No, you really can’t.
Remembering how I sat on the bed in Alex’s old room on the morning of the funeral, crying with his mother and telling her how much I loved him and how devastated I was, I feel hot with embarrassment and shame. As we cried with our arms around each other, I underwent something like an out-of-body experience, and I wondered how long it would be before I could stop calling or returning her emails.
‘Three chocolat chaud,’ says my father, setting a tray down on the table.
‘Thought we’d lost you,’ says Mum, the short laugh dying on her lips as she realizes what she’s just said. She glances at me and I pretend not to have noticed. A strategy I have had ample opportunity (dead even, heaven help us, you’re killing me!) to perfect since the accident.
‘Right,’ says Mum, clicking down four tiles. ‘And all through the house, not a creature was stirring, not even a M-O-U-S-E. Double on the S, eight points.’
After the funeral my parents stayed one more night, during which arrangements were made to reconvene in France the following weekend. I promised that one of my friends would be staying with me, but after eleven days of constant watch and pity I was desperate for space and silence. I changed the sheets the minute my parents drove away, waving and blowing sad kisses through the Land Rover’s window. I cleaned all day and all night and well into the morning, dusting every square inch of the house, vaguely aware that dust was human skin; mine, my parents’ and my dead boyfriend’s. For reasons I’m not sure I understand – momentum, perhaps – I emptied every item of food from the fridge and then the cupboards. Vegetables, milk, packets and cans and jars of condiments. Every consumable item, with the exception of a single bottle of champagne, consigned to bin bags. I vacuumed the carpets, cleaned the windows, the mirrors, toilet, sinks and the tiles on the bathroom floor. I pulled the cushions from the sofa and the armchair, vacuuming up the dust and crumbs and pennies and pen tops. I polished door handles, light switches, the banister and every lampshade in the house before falling asleep on the sofa sometime in the early hours of the morning.
On Saturday, the night before we flew to France, Alex’s London friends met for drinks in his memory. No one used the word ‘wake’, but that’s what it was. I realized early on that my presence was killing the atmosphere, so stayed as long as was decent before making my excuses and calling a taxi. Besides which, I had to leave for the airport at eight the next morning. So this was not Zoe the magnanimous, this was Zoe the knackered with half a pizza and an entire bar of chocolate in the fridge.
As I opened the door to the taxi, a voice called my name. One of Alex’s closest friends, Tom.
‘Tom, hey.’
‘Zo, I . . . I’m sorry we didn’t get to talk. It’s a bit . . . you know.’
I noticed Tom had his coat on. ‘Are you not staying?’
Tom shook his head. ‘Hugh’s doing my head in, to be honest. The whole overdone grief thing. “To Al!”’ he said, raising an invisible pint, mocking Hugh’s loud and repeated toasts. ‘Sorry.’
‘It’s fine,’ I said, smiling, then, despite myself, laughing. I know how close Tom and Alex were, and I don’t doubt his grief. ‘I don’t think Alex liked him all that much.’
‘Well,’ said Tom, rubbing a hand over his stubble, ‘I’m afraid that if I stay much longer I might twat him.’
‘Share a cab,’ I said, and I knew exactly what I was doing.
‘It’s not really on your way, Zo.’
‘I know. I . . . I don’t feel like being on my own tonight. Watch a movie with me?’
We didn’t even turn the TV on. Instead, we opened a bottle of wine and sat at opposite ends of the sofa with the bar of chocolate sitting on a cushion between us like a gradually diminishing barrier. When we started kissing, with instant and urgent intensity, I stood up from the sofa, taking Tom’s hand and motioning for him to come with me.
He shook his head, ‘Let’s stay down here,’ and pulled me back onto the seat beside him. Maybe it made him feel less guilty; fucking me on the sofa instead of his best friend’s bed. But Alex and I had made love on those three cushions more than once, so there was no such leniency for my conscience.
‘We can’t sleep on here,’ I said afterwards, the wine, the chocolate and the urgency finished.
‘I’ll take the bed, you take the sofa,’ Tom said, laughing. And I was grateful for that; that he chose not to give the guilt any oxygen. That he didn’t call a cab and leave me on my own like a coward.
‘I’ll get you a blanket,’ I said, throwing a cushion at him.
We ate breakfast together the next morning, the final wisps of whatever had happened in the night lingering (an overlong good-morning kiss), before dispersing gradually over coffee (a touching of hands) and toast (a complicit, apologetic smile). We were embarrassed enough to satisfy decency, and both understood – I think – that this one time was forgivable and understandable and possibly even natural, but that it would never happen again.
‘Zozo?’
‘Sorry?’
‘Your go, sweetheart.’
My parents are both smiling at me, attempting to project amusement instead of concern.
‘Sorry, miles away. Blame the hot chocolate.’
I don’t really know what that means, but my parents laugh and I make a show of examining my tiles.
E-E-E-I-G-L-V
From the minute I picked my last few tiles from the bag, I knew I could hang GRIEVE off the end of WRONG. But triple letter score on the V or not, I can’t bring myself to do it. LIVE is slightly more bearable, but it’ll only net me seven points, so is hardly worth the discomfort.
‘R-E-L-I-E-V-E,’ I say, ‘triple on the I, twelve points.’