In the bus shelter there was a boy of about fifteen. He had no jacket on, even in this cold weather. His nose was running. His arms were pale with cold; I know because he was wearing a tee shirt. The tee shirt had these words written on it: I’m so broke I can’t even pay attention.
The bus came. The boy with the word broke on his chest got on it. I sat down where he’d been; the plastic ridge they give you to sit on in bus shelters was still warm from him.
I looked down at the pavement, where the ash from the cigarette he’d been smoking was blowing about where his feet had been. I looked across at the line of skeletal municipal saplings over the road outside the insurance offices. Plane trees. City trees are great. They coat their own leaves with stuff that means that every time it rains any pollution that’s gathered on them just slides off. Even those spindly young trees, they’d see themselves through the winter fine.
The thing about trees is that they know what to do. When a leaf loses its color, it’s not because its time is up and it’s dying, it’s because the tree is taking back into itself the nutrients the leaf’s been holding in reserve for it, out there on the twig, and why leaves change color in autumn is because the tree is preparing for winter, it’s filling itself with its own stored health so it can withstand the season. Then, clever tree, it literally pushes the used leaf off with the growth that’s coming behind it. But because that growth has to protect itself through winter too, the tree fills the little wound in its branch or twig where the leaf was with a protective corky stuff that seals it against cold and bacteria. Otherwise every leaf lost would be an open wound on a tree and a single tree would be covered in thousands of little wounds.
Clever trees. Know-it-all trees. I was tired of trees. I looked up at the sky. It was there, like it always was, like it always would be. It was regardless. It had no eyes for anything but itself. Cut me open with a knife the color of that January sky, take a sliver of sky as sharp as a cheesewire and split me down the center from here at the top of my head, and what would be inside?
I went to the doctor and told him I needed help with mourning.
Would you say you’re near the edge? he said. Because if you are, you can have six free sessions with a counselor.
The counselor wrote down the words seeing, dead and partner.
Yes, always turning up, and not just round the house, I said, elsewhere too, all over the place.
(In actuality, you’d been turning up less and less. Actually you’d not been back since I went to Brighton three months ago. But I wasn’t going to tell her that.)
And how do you feel about that? she said. Well, I said, obviously I’m imagining it. It’s obviously part of the mourning process, no? What exactly do you see? she asked. I told her about you stealing things from the house, and how the things were getting bigger, that you were now stealing quite large things, had even taken the hoover plus its nozzle attachments (though the truth was, since October all I’d missed were a couple of plastic tubs of homemade soup out of the freezer and it was possible that you hadn’t taken these at all, that I’d merely eaten them myself and then forgotten I had when I next looked in the freezer). I told her about your habit of turning up whenever you liked, even if it was inconvenient for me (I didn’t tell her how most of the times when you’d come back all you’d done was sit in the study staring at those old unfinished talks piled on the desk, saying nothing, nothing at all, to me).
That must be very frustrating for you, she said. Tell me more about it. Oh always barging in, I said, forever interrupting me telling me all about wherever it is that the dead people go, telling me made-up words too, I mean, how fantastic is the imagination? My dead lover doesn’t just come back to life but speaks to me in a made-up language. Great-sounding words, I mean, they almost sound like they should be reaclass="underline" epomony, guide a ruckus, trav a brose, spoo yattacky, clot so scoofy, but that’s what marriage is, isn’t it? someone coming home and telling you their half-stories about their day, telling you things you don’t really understand, same as they wouldn’t understand if we were to tell them our stuff, I mean the number of times I came home and held forth about the complex relationship between roots of trees and the roots of the Amanita muscaria, the Lepiota cristata, the Boletus elegans, know what I mean?
The counselor had stopped and picked up the pen again; she was sitting forward holding it poised above a notepad.
I don’t think they’re nonsense words, she said.
No, they’re toadstools, I said.
I mean the other words, she said. The words you said first. The words you said were a nonsense language. I don’t think they are.
It’s really nice of you, I said. I know, I like to think they mean something too, I like to imagine they mean all sorts of lovely things. But, you know, my partner worked a lot with words and I think it’s like my imagination is really letting that go, allowing things not to mean after all.
Greek to me, the counselor said.
Ha ha, me too, definitely all Greek to me, I said.
No, I mean really Greek, the counselor said. And not ancient Greek. Modern Greek.
Oh, I said.
I don’t mean to bring personal information into the session room and it’s especially unusual for me to do so in an initial session, the counselor said. But it just so happens that my husband’s Greek.
Oh, I said. Right.
And that first word you said, she said. What was it again? I don’t remember, I said. (I did remember, but I was now a bit annoyed.) The word that sounded like economy, she said. Epomony, I said. Yes, she said, that word, that sounds like a word he says a lot. Are you mixing it up with the word economy, I mean thinking it sounds Greek because of the present state of the economy? I said. No, the word he says is definitely epomony, she said, actually, it’s a word he often sings. Sings? I said. In the shower, the counselor said. But I can’t speak Greek, I said. I don’t know any Greek words, or any Greek people. I’ve never even been to Greece. Tell me the words again, she said, and I’ll make a note of them and check with him.
I told her the words I could remember and she wrote things down.
Now, she said. Where were we?
But why would you know that, about them maybe being Greek, and I wouldn’t? I said.
It must be very frustrating for you, the counselor said.
I looked at this woman and I thought to myself, she hasn’t lost anything. She’s never been left unsure about a single thing. She has a husband. He sings in the shower. I must have been looking at her with bare hostility because she shifted in her chair.
You appear to be very on edge, she said. I’m actually absolutely fine actually, I said. How would you feel about trying a short relaxation technique? she said. If I have to, I said. You don’t have to do anything, she said. No, no, sure, okay, I said, I mean, relaxation’s always good, isn’t it, it’s very, uh, relaxing.
She told me to sit back and close my eyes, then starting at the tips of my toes she talked me through all the parts of my body, telling me to ask them each to relax. Then she said, imagine it’s a summer’s day.
It’s January, I said.
Imagine it’s summer, she said, and imagine a warm place, somewhere where you feel completely safe. Maybe the place is in the countryside. Look all round you at the place, stand and turn and look 360 degrees round you. Then — can you see — down the path there, there’s a gate.
Right, a gate, I said.
Now you go through the gate, and you follow the path, she said, and listen for all the sounds you hear, and how you can hear the sound of the sea in the distance. Walk towards the shore, looking and listening all round you as you go. Eventually there it is, a beach, and you’re totally safe, it’s very peaceful, it’s a wonderful place. Now. What’s the sea like?