‘But there wasn’t?’
She didn’t say anything. She didn’t need to.
6
The sky was starting to lose some of its colour by the time I left Kathy’s. I opened the car door, tossed my notepad on to the back seat and then looked at my watch. Three-thirty. I still had something to do before heading home. Something I hadn’t had the strength to do the day before.
I got in the car, fired up the engine and headed off.
On the drive over, I stopped at a florist and bought a bunch of roses and some white carnations, and then spent the next twenty minutes in traffic. When I finally got to the gates of Hayden Cemetery, the sun had almost fallen from the sky. In the car park, lights were flickering into life. The place was deserted. No other cars. No people. No sound. It wasn’t too far from Holloway Road, sandwiched between Highbury and Canonbury, but it was supernaturally quiet, as if the dead had taken the sound down with them. I turned the engine off and sat for a moment, feeling the heat escape from the car. Then I put on my coat and got out.
The entrance was big and beautiful — a huge black iron arch, intricately woven with the name Hayden — and, as I passed through, I could see leaves had been pushed to either side of the path, pressed into mounds and stained by the rust from a shovel. I had a flicker of déjà vu. There and gone again. I’d been in this same position, treading the same ground, a year and a half before. Except, that time, Derryn had been with me.
The Rest, where she was buried, was a separate area. Tall trees surrounded it on all sides and dividing walls had been built within it, with four or five headstones in each section. As I got to the grave, I saw the flowers I’d put down a month before. They were dead. Dried petals clung to the gravestone, and the stems had turned to mush. I knelt down and brushed the old flowers away. Then I placed the new ones at the foot of the grave, the thorns from the stems catching in the folds of my palm.
‘Sorry I didn’t come yesterday,’ I said quietly. The wind picked up for a moment, and carried my words away. ‘I thought about you a lot, though.’
Some leaves fell from the sky, on to the grave. When I looked up, a bird was hopping along a branch on one of the trees. The branch swayed gently, bobbing under its weight, and then — seconds later — the bird was gone, swooping downwards and ranging up left; up into the freedom beyond.
I was coming down the path and through the entrance to the car park when I saw someone walking away from my car. His clothes were dark and stained, and his shoes were untied, the laces snaking off behind him. He looked homeless. As I got closer, he flicked a look at me. His face was obscured beneath a hood, but I could see a pair of eyes glint, and realized there was surprise in them — as if he hadn’t expected to see me back so soon.
Suddenly, he broke into a run.
I speeded up, and saw that the back window on the left-hand side of my car had been smashed, the door swinging open. Glass lay next to my tyre, and my notepad, coat and a road map were on the gravel next to it.
‘Hey!’ I shouted, running now, trying to cut him off before he got to the entrance. He glanced at me again, panicking. ‘What the hell are you doing?’
The edges of his hood billowed out as he picked up speed, and I caught a glimpse of his face. Dirty and thin. A beard growing from his neck up to the top of his cheekbones. He looked like a drug addict: all bone and no fat.
‘Hey!’ I shouted again, but he was ahead of me now, fading into the darkness at the entrance to the cemetery.
I sprinted after him, out on to the main road, but by the time I got there he was about sixty yards away, pounding down the pavement on the other side of the street. He looked back once to make sure I wasn’t following, but didn’t drop his pace. And then he disappeared around the corner.
I jogged back to the cemetery and gave the car a quick once-over. It was an old BMW 3 series I’d had for years. No CD player. No satellite navigation. Nothing worth stealing.
The glove compartment was open, most of its contents thrown all over the front seats. The car’s handbook had been opened and left; a bag of sweets had been ripped apart. He must have been looking for money. And now he’d just cost me a new window.
7
I woke at three in the morning to the sound of Brian Eno’s ‘An Ending (Ascent)’ playing quietly on the stereo, the TV on mute. I sat forward and listened for a while. Derryn used to tell me my music taste was terrible, and that my entire film collection was one big guilty pleasure. She was probably right about the music. I considered ‘An Ending’ as close to socially acceptable as I was ever likely to get; a song I loved that even she thought was wonderful.
In the area I’d been brought up in, you either spent your days in the record shop, or in the cinema. I’d chosen the cinema, mostly because my parents were always late with new technology; we were pretty much the last family in town to get a CD player. We didn’t have a VCR for years either, which was why I spent most nights, growing up, watching films at an old art deco cinema called the Palladium in the next town.
Her music collection still stood in the corner of the room, packed in a cardboard box. I’d been through it about three weeks after she died, when it had struck me that the one thing music had over movies was its amazing way of pinpointing memories. ‘An Ending’ had been our late-night song, the one we’d play just before bed when Derryn was weeks away from dying. When all she wanted was for the pain to end. And then, when it finally did, it was the song that was played inside the church at her funeral.
When the song finished, I got up and walked through to the kitchen.
Out of the side window, I could see into next-door’s house. A light was on in the study, the blinds partially open. Liz, my neighbour, was leaning over a laptop, typing. She clocked my movement through the corner of her eye, looked up, squinted, and then broke into a smile. What are you doing up? she mouthed.
I rubbed my eyes. Can’t sleep.
She scrunched up her face in an aw expression.
Liz was a 42-year-old lawyer, who’d moved in a few weeks after Derryn had died. She’d married young, had a child, then got divorced a year later. Her daughter was in the second year of university at Warwick. I liked Liz. She was fun and flirty, and, while cautious of my situation, had always made her feelings clear. Some days I needed that. I didn’t want to be a widower who wore it. I didn’t want all the sorrow and the anger and the loss to stick to my skin. And the truth was, especially physically, Liz was easy to like: slender curves, shoulder-length chocolate hair, dark, mischievous eyes; and a smattering of natural colour in her cheeks.
She got up from the desk and looked at her watch, pretending to double-take when she saw the time. A couple of seconds later, she picked up a coffee cup and held it up to the window. You want one? She rubbed her stomach. It’s good.
I smiled again, rocked my head from side to side to show I was tempted and then pointed to my own watch. Got to be up early.
She rolled her eyes. Poor excuse.
I looked at her and something moved inside me. A tiny flutter of excitement. The feeling that, if I wanted something from her, the experience of being close to someone again, she would do it. In her eyes, I could see she was waiting for me to break free from what was keeping me back.
But, just as there were days when I still needed to feel wanted, there were others when I didn’t feel ready to step outside the bubble. I wanted to remain inside. Protected by the warmth and familiarity of how I felt about Derryn. Most of the time, even now, I was caught between the two. Wanting to move on, curious about letting myself go, but wary of the aftermath. Of what would happen the next morning when I woke up next to someone, and it wasn’t the person I’d loved, every day, for fourteen years.