But first he’d go for a drink. Not here, but somewhere farther north. A pub up towards Mile End or Bow. A quiet, midday boozer, dark with close walls. Or perhaps one of the old all-day strip joints, its windows boarded over and its drinkers, from company director to delivery driver, levelled by the clink of their coins in the pint glass. Or maybe he’d just buy a bottle of Teacher’s and take it to a bench by the canal. Somewhere he wouldn’t have to look at the faces of others. Somewhere where nobody knew him; where he could forget, for an hour or so, who he was and who he’d been.
―
The flat to which a courier drove Josh’s boxes later that day was in a Victorian terraced house on the east side of the Heath, set back two streets from its edge. An attic conversion of a bedroom, living room, bathroom, and kitchen with Velux skylights in its sloping roof through which Josh smoked at night, looking over the chimneys and eaves of his neighbours. It was the kind of flat one of his more affluent juniors might have rented, fresh from university. A first-timer’s flat. Neat, minimal. A starting place. But for Josh, on moving in, it had felt like an end. A contraction of his hopes and everything for which he’d ever worked and loved to three cramped rooms with predictable furnishings and an air of bland expense.
He’d chosen it simply because it was available, and for its proximity to South Hill Drive. This was the only stipulation he’d given the letting agent. Nowhere more than ten minutes from his home. From Rachel and Sam. He’d agreed to leave the house, but that didn’t have to mean leaving their lives. He understood why he had to go. It was becoming unbearable. The way Samantha looked at him each morning, her face thickened with blame. Having to see those stairs every day, to walk down them and see, in his mind’s eye, Lucy caught in their turn like driftwood between rocks. That’s why he’d stayed away so much, why he’d drunk so much. He wanted to be nowhere other than home, where he could keep Rachel and Samantha close. But when he was there, he couldn’t stand it. Every brick, every chair, every picture, was a part of the canvas of Lucy’s death, and his contribution to it. And not just her death, but her short life, too. These were the rooms in which he had first held her, her newborn eyes still welled with the womb’s darkness. Where he’d watched her infant sleep, hovering his open hand above her stomach to feel it rise and touch his palm with a breath. Where he had witnessed her growing delight in her childhood discovery of being alive. Loaded with these past visions, and more terrible recent ones, too, Josh’s home, once his refuge, had become inhospitable, a wilderness of guilt, grief, and regret. So when Samantha had said she wanted him to leave, that she wanted time apart, he’d offered barely any resistance. It was, beyond the sadness of the action, of carrying those two suitcases out the door, a release. And, he’d thought, as he’d unpacked those cases in his new attic rooms, the only way, in the end, they might stay together.
But if Josh’s moving out gave Samantha the space she needed, it did nothing by way of helping him find his own. He felt trapped between what he had done and what he hadn’t, between what he’d said and what he hadn’t said. A corrosive cocktail of self-loathing and grief continued to eat at him from within. And within was the only place it could be. There was nowhere else for it to go. No one else to whom he could explain or confess. He had left the house. He had not been there. And why? For his secret conquering of Tony’s assured world. For the thrill of it. And just because he could. Because in letting him do so Maddy had intoxicated him, not with beauty or allure, but with the simple reveal of her ordinary self behind that impossible façade. But none of that mattered now. All that did was that Josh had left Lucy alone. The only other person who knew was Maddy herself, and she’d already gone, distancing herself as fast as she could the moment she heard what had happened.
She and Tony, like others, had sent them a card with a note expressing their sympathies, offering to help. A week later Tony had taken him for a drink. They still had their place in Vermont, he’d told Josh. It was empty right now, so if he and Sam wanted to get away for a while? But Maddy Josh hadn’t seen since Lucy’s death. For all of August she and Tony had been away, in Italy on the Amalfi Coast. At the end of the month Tony had come back to work, but Maddy, he’d said, had flown straight to America. To see her sister, spend time with her nephews and nieces. Tony seemed strained when he’d told Josh this, and Josh wondered if he wasn’t the only man from whom Maddy was distancing herself. She was a survivor, and always would be. It was what they’d first seen in each other. The ability to move through, to emerge the other side. But now he hadn’t. Now he was left, and she was gone.
Josh didn’t care. Maddy’s absence, like Samantha’s request for him to leave, was also a relief. It removed a low-grade anxiety that had haunted him below his grief ever since it had happened. What if, through Maddy, or through Tony via her, or through some confiding friend he didn’t even know about, Samantha were to learn he hadn’t been in the house? What then? No, he never wanted to see Maddy again. Not now that her scent, her touch, her submissiveness which had so surprised him, excited him, were all no more than markers of his guilt, reminders of those seconds in which his daughter had fallen through the air without her father there to catch her.
In the weeks after he moved out, as Samantha held her grief close within their house on South Hill Drive, so Josh cradled his guilt in those high rooms on the east side of the Heath. He ate badly: late-night pastas in the nearby Italian, take-out curries and pizzas, ready meals from the corner shop, all accompanied by drink. Wine, whisky, vodka. His work suffered, but he knew they were all going to suffer soon enough. He’d seen what was coming, like a rain cloud over a hill. At another time he might have tried to run for cover, to get out while he could. But as it was he was too apathetic to make the attempt, or to care. And in a way it felt apposite — the foreclosures sweeping the Midwest, the collapse of the markets — it all seemed in rhythm with the descent of his own domestic life. There were those who believed it would correct itself, who revered the system like a religion. Somehow, these people thought, it would all be allowed. But if this was a religion, then it was a creed that demanded sacrifice. And not just of individuals and families, the small people in small towns the young men of Wall Street and the City would never meet. They’d spent too much for it to end just there, imagined too much, wanted too much, and gambled too much. The money gods would need a greater sacrifice than that, a public sacrifice. The banks, they’d been told, were too big to fail. But not a single bank, not a lone bank, the collapse of which might just satisfy that ravenous system and trigger the rescue of others.
The first time Josh and Samantha met after he’d moved out she told him she’d started seeing a bereavement counsellor. She asked him to do the same. So he’d registered, but then missed the appointments. He was gaining weight, his secret heavy within him. He was often angry, always tired. Some mornings he didn’t get out of bed but remained curled under the duvet, wishing himself a child again. The only commitments he ever kept were those to Rachel. Whether collecting her from school or taking her out on the weekends, he was always sure to be on time for her and sober. He was always, as much as he could be, the father she’d known before.
Samantha told him she’d explained everything to her: why her father was living in another house, why they weren’t together at this time. But whenever Josh sat opposite her, at a café in Hampstead or riding the Tube into town, her hurt expression, the slow bruise of her being, told him Rachel understood nothing. And why should she? She was just eight years old. The world, which had always seemed so benevolent, had been proved malign. He wanted to tell her different, to reassure her there was so much to come that would give her pleasure, that she would love the world again one day. But it was an effort beyond his spirits, and so they’d end their time together in silence instead, the two of them in a park, a museum, a restaurant, joined and apart in the still presence of Lucy’s going.