Enjoy your date? Damn.
On the last two hundred metres of my ride home, I replay the conclusion to my unusual night. The pleasant awkwardness, that slow opportunistic kiss. And my smug sounding farewell: Enjoy your date.
Why didn’t I go the whole hog and invite him to have a nice life? In the grand scheme – the scheme in which I travel the world, find myself, become independent, develop a deep all-over tan – I suppose it doesn’t matter. Even so, I can’t help but wonder how it would go if I’d met him two years from now – what the new, found, Zoe would make of Henry and his don’t-ask eyes. What she would make of that kiss?
It’s been seven months since I lost Alex and the small house still feels too big when I wheel my bike through the front door. For a while I found the silence terrifying, walking from room to room, checking behind the doors, in the wardrobes and under the bed for intruders. Sometimes waking up in the middle of the night and doing the same, clutching a broken banister rail that we never did get around to replacing.
There’s mail on the mat and I pick it up with an acquired sense of trepidation. Mostly junk, but a postcard from my parents who seem to be visiting a different European city every month at the moment. So far this year they have done Rome, Madrid and – the origin of this postcard – Zagreb. They invite me each time, but I’m yet to take them up on the offer.
There is just one envelope addressed to Alex today. I can get them stopped, fill in some forms and enclose one of my remaining photocopies of his death certificate. But perversely, I like receiving these offers of low-interest credit cards, invitations to wine clubs, or, like this one, an opportunity to insure my property against damage caused as a result of a burst water main. I add the envelope to the small pile on the shelf beside the front door, slip off my backpack and hang up my helmet. My bike stays in the house most nights – after all, it’s not like it’s in anyone’s way.
There’s a message on my phone from Rachel, asking if I made it home okay.
I send one back, reassuring her that I’m alive, but keep the rest of the details to myself.
Walking upstairs, I pause in front of the photograph taken on the day we moved in, me laughing at some comment from Alex. I touch my finger to his face . . .
Goodnight, Alex.
. . . and in the moonlight hazing down the stairs through the open bathroom door, the glass is smudged with fingerprints. I’ll clean it on Sunday. While Henry is waking up next to his date and wondering whether he made a mistake or not.
It has nothing to do with me, but as I inspect my new graduated bob in the bathroom mirror, I hope he decides that he did.
After I’ve taken off my make-up and brushed my teeth, I change into my pyjamas and climb into bed. Some mornings, but it’s becoming less frequent now, I wake up expecting to find Alex lying beside me. On those days, I roll over onto his side of the mattress, feeling the cold of the sheets where they should be warm. Some mornings I cry, and on other days I simply feel a numb absence. Sometimes when I wake to the fresh realization that he isn’t there, I experience an awful skewering guilt for not missing him more. I roll over onto his side of the bed now, open his bedside drawer and remove the iPad. I turn it on with the same sense of apprehension that I experience on finding a pile of mail inside the front door. Worse today, because she always mails him in the first week of a new month.
The iPad is set up with both of our email accounts, so it’s not like I’m actually snooping. It’s all just sitting there, available at a single touch. His inbox is filled almost exclusively with junk now, the electronic equivalent of the envelopes that drop through the letterbox – discount codes, special offers, concert dates. Occasionally, he will receive a message from an old colleague or acquaintance looking to reconnect, and I reply with a cut and paste explanation of what happened last October.
It wasn’t until February, four months after his death, that I plucked up the courage – the defiance, maybe – to trawl through his message history. There were no emails to or from a lover; no evidence of the affair I had feared. Not proving Alex’s innocence – maybe he was simply careful – but neither confirming his guilt. The only woman he wrote to with any regularity was his mother.
Within a day or two of a new month turning over, she would email her son, filling him in on a variety of domestic events, family news and local gossip. And Alex would reply in kind, long, warm, funny emails, about work, football, his lunch, a funny dream. About me. Expressing a simple affection and contentment that shines a harsh light on my own misgivings. Working forwards from last summer, I read the emails they exchanged in July, August, September and – the last time Alex wrote to his mother – October. He told her we had argued about the wallpaper, expressing his regret for acting like a ‘complete pillock’. He told his mother that he would make it up to me at Christmas. But Christmas never happened.
Ready to delete Alex’s account, I scrolled upwards through the junk correspondence of November and December. But when I came to January, my drifting eyes locked onto a single glaring dreadful email. Two short paragraphs of a mother’s farewell to her dead boy, pouring out her pain and loss and incomprehension and telling him they would be together again one day soon. There was another, unopened and forever unanswered sent in February. When I checked again in March, there was another, and again at the beginning of April. The raw heartbreak gradually giving way to a more prosaic familiarity. Today is the fifth of May, and my heart tightens as I click on the familiar greeting: Hello Son.