A Life Without You

by Shari Low

  At least I wouldn’t have to bug her with endless questions about how to do the basics. Back in the early years, I’d supplemented my diving earnings by working in the shop at the local beach club, so I knew my way around a stockroom and a till. I glanced around, feeling strange that this was the first time I’d been in my sister’s shop. Not for the first time, I wished I’d come back before now, just for a holiday, just to keep in touch and play a part in her life. Too late now for regrets. And besides, Dee clearly hadn’t needed any of big brother’s help. This place was laid out really well and I could see why it had been a success. My sister was obviously a pretty smart girl. Jen must be too – although she was currently hiding that under a dark cloud of gloom. Not that I could blame her. She’d lost her best mate and apparently her boyfriend had done a runner too. That was a double mighty dose of heartache right there.

  ‘Where do you want me to start? I’m at your disposal,’ I told her, trying to chip away at the frostiness.

  For the first time, her smile looked like it could almost be real.

  ‘I’m just going to change this window display,’ she replied. ‘Dee…’ A deep breath, before she went on. ‘Dee did a great job with this one for the January skiwear, but we always change it after a few weeks. It’s time to get our cruise theme going for the start of the Med sailings in March.’

  The conversation was halted by the ding of the door and I made a mental bet with myself as to how long it would be before irritation overwhelmed me and I took the battery out of the bell.

  In charged a woman in her forties, gold Gucci sunspecs despite the fact that it was zero degrees outside. In the corner, Jen briefly turned around and I saw a flicker of recognition before she went back to the window display.

  ‘Well you’re new,’ was the woman’s opening line to me.

  ‘I am,’ I agreed, smiling.

  ‘Australian?’ she asked, picking up on the hint of accent that had inevitably crept in after so many years in Oz.

  ‘Half and half,’ I replied. ‘But I just got back here a couple of weeks ago.’

  She leaned against the desk, flashed her perfect teeth. Strewth. She wasn’t going to win any prizes for subtlety.

  ‘Well, if you need some company to get reacquainted with this city, Dee has my number. Speaking of which, where is my favourite travel genius?’

  Oh. Crap. I hadn’t expected this. I’ve no idea why. Of course, there were going to be regular customers who would know Dee and want to speak to her. I should have known this was coming and had something prepared but… Oh. Fuck.

  Rabbit. Headlights.

  ‘Hi Delilah.’

  Jen had stood up and turned around, coming into the customer’s eyeline for the first time.

  ‘Oh Jen, didn’t see you there,’ she said, with a definite edge of condescension. ‘Where’s Dee?’

  ‘She’s dead.’ And with that, Jen walked across the shop, into the office and closed the door behind her.

  ‘Oh,’ Mrs. Gucci said, looking, if I’m truthful, a bit put out. ‘Well. It’ll just have to wait then, won’t it?’ She turned on her fancy heels, those shoes with the red soles, and headed out the door.

  Right then. There was complete silence for a few moments as I tried to work out what to do. The extent of my knowledge of Jen was a vague memory of her and my sis as kids, a couple of holidays and then half a dozen meetings in the weeks that I’d been home, all of them surrounded by other people, and almost invariably she kept herself to herself and barely said a word. She was like the quiet, unassuming presence in the background. Not that anyone could get a word in between my mum, Josie and Auntie Ida anyway.

  I took the fact that no more customers had entered as a sign that I should go check on Jen. When I opened the door she was sitting at one of the desks, just staring at a poster of a beach on the wall.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ she said as soon as she realised I was there. ‘I shouldn’t have said it like that. I’m not sure why I did. She used to drive Dee bloody mad. She even hit on Luke once when we had an anniversary party for the shop. But that doesn’t excuse me saying that. I’m sorry,’ she repeated.

  It was the most I’d ever heard her speak.

  ‘It’s OK. Brutal, but OK,’ I added with a shrug.

  That made her smile just a little, but the misery was still oozing out of her.

  Under normal circumstances I’d probably think she was a bit of a downer and absolutely avoid her at all costs. The last thing I ever wanted or needed was negativity. That’s why I liked the laid-back, life-enhancing, live-for-today attitudes back on the Gold Coast. Working out on the ships suited me. Two or three month stints at a time, two or three a year. I was one of a rota of divers that inspected and repaired the hulls of the drilling ships and underwater sections of stationary rigs out at sea. The downside was that I was out there for weeks or months with no contact with the rest of the world, but the plus side was that the money was great and it allowed me to spend the rest of my life just chilling and diving for fun, making my own life with no constrictions. Sometimes, I’d just take off down the coast, for a few weeks, other times I’d get on my bike and see where it took me. Dee always said we both had the free spirit gene and she was probably right, although she’d managed to get married and settle. I’d only ever come close to a committed relationship once before, and I couldn’t see it happening again. Tara had that free spirit, enjoy life thing going on too. She’d come over from New Zealand and we met at the bar of the local dive club. She was the first person I’d had the slightest urge to consider any kind of future with, but neither of us were the type for rules or conventional ties and it ended so suddenly we never had time to find out if we’d ever get there.

  No point dwelling on that now though.

  ‘Look, where can we get something to eat and drink around here? Why don’t I go get a couple of decent coffees and… when was the last time you ate?’

  ‘When your mother force-fed us lasagne yesterday,’ she replied.

  ‘OK, so I’ll go pick us up something.’

  She nodded. I had a feeling I could have said, ‘I’ve just won the lottery’ or ‘I’ll go jump off a bridge’ and she’d have reacted in exactly the same way.

  Maybe this wasn’t such a good idea after all. Perhaps getting on the first flight back to Australia would have been the smarter move. But then, what did I have to go back for? Sod all, except work and an empty flat.

  Right now, two cups of coffee and a couple of bacon rolls were about as good as it was going to get.

  Chapter 11

  Luke

  They expected me to care, but it just wasn’t happening. Sitting around the boardroom table, we’d just spent the last two hours of a Friday afternoon discussing tag line pitches for a new brand of kitchen towel. Seriously. Who gave a fuck about absorbency and core market and brand values? It was paper bloody towels! Humanity wasn’t going to stand or fall on whether one sheet or two was needed to clean up…

  ‘Don’t cry over spilt milk.’ I’d blurted it out before I’d even thought it through. Yeah, it was clichéd. Predictable. Way too twee. Shit. Dee would have rolled her eyes at my rank naffness.

  Colin Medour, the head of the agency’s FMCG division – that’s fast-moving consumer goods to anyone not familiar with marketing bollocks lingo – stopped, thought for a minute. He was mulling it over like I’d just suggested a new cure for cancer. Eventually, he nodded, his face suddenly beaming with something approximating gung-ho excitement. ‘I like that. Actually, I bloody love it. OK, Callie, Domenic, Luke, work up some ideas on it. Can you get some visuals for us by 9 a.m. Monday?’

  It was phrased as a question but we all knew there was only one answer.

  ‘Sure.’ I said, ignoring Domenic’s gritted teeth and Callie’s raised eyebrows. When I say raised… she’d been at the Botox again so it was more of a mild shudder.

  Everyone else cleared out, delighted they hadn’t been seconded to the kitchen towel action group, so they migh
t actually make it home before 8 p.m. for a change. Staying behind didn’t bother me. What else was I going to do? Go home, crack open a beer and ponder the word ‘widower’ for yet another night? Reflect on my day, and try to mentally count up how many looks of abject pity I’d received before lunchtime? Or even better, how many of my esteemed colleagues had averted their gaze so they didn’t have to look me in the eye?

  Not that it was a surprise. Marketing agencies weren’t exactly renowned for their fluffy, cuddly approach to their workmates, and BRALLAN MMA (Marketing, Media, Advertising) treated death like aging and disease – best to be avoided because then it wouldn’t be catching.

  Bunch of twonks.

  I caught myself, feeling the creeping sense of irritation coming over me again. Every day since Dee died, it had happened, some days so many times I lost count. A sense that my nerves had moved to the outside of my skin and I was being scorched by some invisible force. I didn’t get it. Dee was an irrepressible force of joy and positivity, but she had also always been the volatile one, the one in our relationship that got irked, or short-tempered or impatient. Now she’d gone I was the one left pissed off and easily annoyed. I hoped it would pass because right now the only thing that helped was to run until I felt nothing but the urge to black out or throw up. And despite the rank indignity, I still kept doing it because it was the only thing that calmed the screaming in my head down from a roar to an admittedly pathetic whimper.

  As we headed to the ‘conversation pit’ – yep, my workplace is pretentious enough to need a chilled out, dipped-floor ‘focus area’ in which to have a discussion. I suppose I should be grateful that there weren’t matching flumes and bean bags. Yet.

  I tried to bring my irritation down a few notches. Get it together. It wasn’t as if any of this was a newsflash. Many of my esteemed workmates had always been self-important, narcissistic pains in the arse. Truth be told, I’d always found it more amusing than grating. Dee did too. She’d be in hysterics when I shared their more ridiculous utterings and delusions. Now it took all my discipline not to recount their grand-scale delusions to their smug, superior faces.

  In fairness, Domenic and Callie were two of the decent ones. I wouldn’t call them mates, but unlike several of the others, they didn’t make me want to bang my head on my desk until I was unconscious. They’d been on my team for a couple of years now. Domenic had an ego the size of the ludicrously large gym bag he brought to work every day, but he was a good guy at heart and his Monday morning stories of his weekend antics were priceless. Callie had my respect because she was usually the smartest person in the room. Half the guys in the office had a thing for her but she never took them up on it.

  ‘So, thanks for that,’ Domenic muttered, sliding into the pit. ‘Tonight was sorted – gym, pub, hook up with a chick that looks like a Kardashian…’

  ‘Which one?’ Callie interjected as she sat next to him.

  ‘The one in the High Street,’ he replied.

  She rolled her eyes. ‘No, genius. Which Kardashian? If we’re getting the details of your life, I just want to make sure we’ve got it right.’

  Thank God the guy resembled Orlando Bloom on a good day, because he wasn’t going to seduce anyone with his knowledge of quantum physics.

  ‘Kendal.’

  ‘Good choice,’ Callie quipped. A sudden tightness crept across my chest as I listened to the banter. It was exactly the kind of conversation Dee would have had. Funny. Quick. One of the boys.

  The familiar tightness spread to my guts, giving me that sickening feeling that I’d only ever had a few times in my life before Dee died. The one that happens when you hear devastating news and it feels like your stomach is going to collapse. Now, it happened dozens of times a day. Every time I thought about her. Every time something reminded me of her voice, her hair, her smile, or now, her sense of humour.

  I fought the urge to climb up and run. So much for the fight or flight instinct, I had no more fight left.

  ‘Look, mate, on you go. I’ll cover for you. My fault for opening my mouth anyway,’ I heard myself saying. That happened a lot now too. Sometimes it felt like I was somewhere else, not quite inhabiting this body that was walking and talking and functioning like any other normal person. Nothing was normal anymore.

  Domenic looked at me as if he was waiting for a catch. ‘You sure?’

  ‘Much as we’ll miss your valuable input on shite tag lines for kitchen towels, we’ll scrape through without you.’

  He held his fist out for a fist bump. I stared at it for a second. ‘I’m going to pretend I can’t see that because I’m not fourteen,’ I told him.

  He was still laughing when the door banged behind him.

  Callie lifted a biro to make notes. ‘OK, where are we going with this?’ she asked, and I watched as she wrote ‘spilt milk’ across the top of a page on her A4 pad. I knew what she meant, but right now the prospect of sitting in this bloody ‘conversation pit’ any longer was making my teeth grind.

  ‘Pub next door?’

  ‘Don’t need to ask me twice,’ she replied, already curling her legs up and pushing herself up to a standing position. Like Dee, she was fit and athletic. Every morning she jogged into work and then showered in the communal changing rooms. Yep, communal. Another idea on the same scale of naffdom as the conversation pit and anything that had come out of my mouth so far today.

  ‘You sure? You’re not meeting Justin?’ Her boyfriend. An accountant who did triathlons in his spare time. I’m not sure which of those aspects was most inclined to make me think he was a knob.

  ‘Nope. Called and cancelled when you got us a crap assignment at 6 p.m. on a Friday,” she said, but thankfully she didn’t seem too pissed off about it.

  ‘Sorry about that.’

  ‘Wine will make forgiveness come quicker.’

  The pub was busy with the usual mix of Friday afterwork suits and early-out girls in stilettos they’d be carrying by the end of the night. That was me once. Out on a Friday night. Not a care in the world. Laughing and joking. It was only a couple of months ago and yet it seemed like years since I’d been that guy.

  Now I was just an emotional wreck that really needed a beer and I was grateful for the noise. God knows, anything that wasn’t the silence in my house had to be a good thing.

  We found a table in the corner, and put together a few top-line ideas that I could flesh out tomorrow with graphics and spin. It was a shit idea and we both knew it would get bombed out by Monday lunchtime, so I wasn’t going to spend too much time on it.

  We were just finishing up our drinks when Callie’s expression changed very slightly and there was another little shudder between her brows. I think she was trying to frown. Or maybe it was concern. Or irritation. Dee had always said I was pretty crap at reading moods on a woman, so trying to decipher the facial gestures of someone prone to cosmetic enhancement was like breaking the Enigma code.

  ‘So how are you doing?’

  I should have been prepared for it. I’d heard it so many times in the last month; I even had a few pre-prepared answers.

  ‘Hanging together, thanks.’ I wasn’t.

  ‘Good days and bad days.’

  Only bad.

  ‘Och, I’m OK. Just have to get on with it.’ Why? Who the fuck came up with that one? Who said we needed to get on with anything when all you wanted to do was get stupefying drunk, howl at the moon or wreck a room just to have an outlet for the excruciating pain of it all.

  Callie nodded. ‘It must be… I don’t know… I mean, it’s not… Oh Christ, I’m not very good at this. But you know, if you ever want to talk… My sister died a few years ago…’

  ‘Sorry. I didn’t know.’ I was surprised that she hadn’t mentioned it, but then, I guess we’d always kept things pretty surface level in the office.

  ‘It’s not something I publicise,’ she countered, not unkindly. ‘But I know how hard this must be for you, so if you want to talk or rant, then I’m available f
or listening.’

  ‘Thank you. I appreciate it,’ I answered truthfully.

  There was a silence for a few moments that neither of us filled.

  ‘Sorry. I’ve made you totally uncomfortable now,’ she said, lifting her glass of wine.

  ‘No, it’s just…’ I shrugged. She wasn’t wrong about the uncomfortable bit. ‘Talking about it doesn’t change anything.’

  Sure, it was true, but it hid the more pressing truth. For the last ten years, the only person I wanted to talk to when anything good, bad, happy, sad or hell, anything at all happened, was Dee. Talking to anyone else, out with Val, Jen or anyone else in the family, would feel like… I searched for the right conclusion to the thought… Wrong. Like a betrayal.

  Callie and I had had drinks after work a dozen times before, when Dee was away on one of her trips, and it had never felt awkward or weird. Not like it did now. This was what mourning did. Made you feel shit. Made you act like the skin you were in wasn’t yours. Made you forget what you would usually do in normal situations. Except…

  ‘Another drink?’ I asked. Wouldn’t blame her if she said no and, actually, it would be a bit of a relief.

  ‘Sure,’ she said. Couldn’t knock her for staying power.

  I fought my way to the bar, ordered up beer, wine, and at the last minute decided to take the lead from the hen party that had congregated in the corner where their screeches were being drowned out by the massive speakers on the wall behind them. They didn’t seem to have a care in the world. I wish I felt the same.

  ‘What’s that they’re drinking?’ I asked an unimpressed barmaid.

  ‘Irn Bru vodka shots.’

  Crazy. I’d be nuts to start on those.

  ‘I’ll have two,’ I said.

  Callie nodded thoughtfully when I carried the tray back to the table and she spotted the amber shots. ‘Ah, right. This could all get very messy,’ she said, her expression suggesting she’d enjoy that.

  I had another pang of unwelcome familiarity. That was exactly how Dee would have reacted. What was I doing here? This was no place to be when I was feeling like this. I wanted space. Or people who knew me well enough to care and to spot that I was on the edge of punching out a wall. Fuck, I hated this. I put the drinks down on the table.