The Coordinates of Loss

by Amanda Prowse

  It was the second day of her new job at rewer – it made her smile now every time she walked through the door and she spied the spot from where someone had stolen Glen’s B. James had been right: she had fallen on to her mattress the night before with a welcome ache to her legs and a tiredness that helped switch off her brain. It was a rare treat to fall into such a deep sleep without the need of a tablet or the torture of watching the clock creep slowly towards dawn, pleading for the release of slumber.

  She arrived early and donned her apron. Glen came out of the storeroom adjacent to the kitchen. ‘Morning, Rachel – so you came back?’

  ‘You sound surprised.’ She smiled at him.

  ‘I guess I thought it was about fifty–fifty. My dad thought eighty–twenty, and not in your favour.’

  ‘What about your mum?’

  ‘She was one hundred per cent – reckons she can spot staying power, commitment.’

  Rachel tied her apron around her waist. There was something about putting on the uniform of the place that gave her a sense of belonging.

  ‘Well, I’m glad you did. And we got you this.’ He pulled a white envelope from his apron pocket and handed it to her in a rather theatrical pose.

  ‘Oh.’ She was a little taken aback and for a moment had to ask herself if she had forgotten her own birthday. Her brain was such a muddle nothing would have surprised her. It was however, a welcome-to-your-new-home card, with a picture of a slug crawling towards a snail shell and grinning widely. Glen, Sandra and Keith had all signed it.

  ‘Thank you. That’s really kind.’ She was touched and folded the card into the wide front pocket, removing the Tic-Tac box so she could lay it safely at the bottom.

  ‘What’s that?’ He nodded at the small square container that she handled with such care.

  ‘It’s . . .’ She looked at it, trying to think how best to describe just what this little plastic box meant to her, but realised that there were no such words. ‘It’s just something I like to carry around and keep close to me.’ She replaced the box and straightened, avoiding eye contact and hoping he didn’t probe further. ‘So, what’s first today?’ She twisted her long hair into a bun.

  ‘Tables could do with a good wipe over, and if you check the salt and pepper and clean up the ketchup bottles that’ll be a good start.’

  ‘On it.’ Rachel made her way to the kitchen, happy to still keep her secret sadness close to her chest. It was no one’s business but hers.

  After five weeks, Rachel fell into a steady routine. It amazed and petrified her how, when fully occupied, she had on occasion let Oscar slip from her mind for a moment or two, and when realisation dawned, she would flee to the bathroom and sob, repeating over and over, I am sorry, Oscar. I love you, my darling boy. I am with you, always.

  Her calls with James grew less and less frequent until once every ten days or so it was almost a surprise to see his name on her phone screen. At these times she would rub her thumb over the gold band that sat neatly on the third finger of her left hand, a reminder of vows spoken with conviction in a flower-filled chapel under a blue June sky, unable to have foreseen a situation when all that they had and all that they planned could go up in smoke quicker than she could strike a match.

  Her favourite days were when Vicky came into the café with Francisco and sometimes with Gino too. There was something wonderfully social about handing her friends cake and hot tea and chatting to them when the crowds dispersed. She liked how Glen joined in too. He and his mum had always been inclusive; grumpy Keith, however, who apparently had only given her a twenty per cent chance of holding down the job, was another matter entirely.

  It was the end of another long day. Sandra and Keith had finished up and she now mopped the wooden floor of the café as Glen totted up the day’s banking at the bar, counting coins into piles before tipping them into small, fiddly plastic bags of single denomination in a rounded number.

  ‘Would you like a coffee, Rachel?’

  ‘Oh, yes, I really would, that’d be lovely. Thank you.’ She looked forward to the restorative caffeine that would fuel her walk home via the supermarket where she would pick up a granary loaf and some fruit. She pulled out one of the bar stools and watched as Glen pressed buttons and banged the grill of the space-age-looking machine that created the best coffee in Bristol. And one she had yet to master. She and Sandra had shared a moment over how protective Glen was of the contraption.

  ‘It’s been a busy day, thank you for your hard work.’ He spoke over his shoulder.

  ‘No worries. It’s good for me.’ She made the remark off the cuff.

  ‘Good for you how?’ He grabbed the small jug of milk from the countertop fridge propped against the back wall and topped up her mug.

  ‘Thank you.’ She took the coffee into her palms and sipped it. ‘Lovely.’

  ‘I was asking how is it good for you to be so busy?’ he pushed.

  Rachel considered her answer. ‘I guess when I am really busy it stops me from dwelling on things, keeps my head occupied.’

  Glen grabbed a stool and pulled it up on the other side of the bar. The two sat facing each other with the cool countertop beneath their forearms.

  ‘You need to keep your head occupied?’

  She nodded and stared at the foamy head of her drink.

  ‘What, as a distraction?’

  ‘Uh-huh.’

  ‘So come on, Rachel, what’s your story?’

  She shrugged. ‘What’s your story?’ she fired back, figuring if she could deflect the enquiry it would at worst give her time to think of a suitable response and at best make him forget that he had asked. She had yet had to say out loud what had happened to her, why she was in Bristol, and it was something she dreaded – exposing her sadness to relative strangers.

  Glen took a deep breath. ‘Well, I was, until this time last year, engaged to be married, but a fortnight before the big day, with invites sent, dress bought and honeymoon booked, it finished.’ He chopped his hand on the counter. ‘That was it, over.’

  ‘Oh, Glen, I am so sorry. That’s not good. I bet she will regret it.’ Glen was nice-looking, funny and kind, and she tried to picture the girl who had broken his heart, wondering what bit of him his fiancée didn’t like.

  ‘Why would you assume it was her that ended it? Charming!’ He looked at her quizzically.

  ‘Oh, was it not? I don’t know why! Maybe the way you said it, with a real sense of heartbreak.’

  He gave a short snort of laughter. ‘I’m only teasing you; it was heartbreaking, and it was me who called a halt. Not that that makes any difference at all; hurting someone was, I found out, just as hard as getting hurt. My main regret is that I didn’t find the courage to say anything sooner, when I first had the inkling and before things went too far.’

  ‘When did you first have the inkling?’ She was curious.

  ‘I think the moment we started talking about marriage and I felt more cornered than overjoyed. You’re married, right?’ He nodded towards her left hand.

  She nodded. ‘I didn’t feel like that.’ She pictured driving from her parents’ house to the church in a shiny, flashy car with her hand resting inside her dad’s on the wide, leather seat with nothing but the flutter of joy in her stomach. ‘I was just excited and happy to be getting married, so I guess that was a red flag for you.’

  ‘Yes. The thing is, I don’t believe that either of us was that happy, not properly happy. Carly – her name is Carly – was preoccupied with the wedding plans and used to talk about the day a lot; each and every tiny detail, from table decorations to sugared bloody almonds in a net as favours, but never about us or what was important. I had this feeling that it was the big event that was propping us up and I sensed that once the wedding was out of the way, neither of us would be satisfied with our everyday lives. The mundane wasn’t enough for her, she was always planning the next big thing, whether we could afford it or not, and I couldn’t see me keeping up. Truth is, I didn’t wa
nt to. I pictured us standing in the aftermath of the reception and wondering what to do next, whilst juggling the ever-increasing credit-card balance, and that’s not right, is it?’ He yawned; the day’s work seemed to be catching up with him.

  ‘No, it’s not.’

  ‘I think you have to be happy in the now; that’s all we’ve got, really. That said, I chickened out for months.’ He gave a wry laugh. ‘It was hard to start the conversation about ending things while she was squealing over a bit of taffeta or on the phone to her mates about the hen weekend. You get the idea.’ He slapped his thigh.

  ‘So what was the thing that forced your hand, made you speak up?’

  Glen ran his palm over his dark beard. ‘She was getting more and more frustrated with me. She kept saying that I didn’t know the right thing to do, didn’t know instinctively how to make her happy, and the irony is that she was wrong. I did know instinctively what the right thing to do was; I was just finding it hard to pluck up the courage to do it. But that phrase rang in my head – the fact that I didn’t know how to make her happy struck the bell of awareness. So I sat her down—’

  ‘Here?’ Rachel tried to picture them.

  ‘No! Not here. I was working as a graphic designer in London. This’ – he looked around the café – ‘is my plan B.’

  ‘Shame someone stole it,’ she quipped.

  ‘Yes!’ He laughed. ‘But this is what I always wanted to do deep down and I figured that as I’d found the courage to end my relationship, I should also jack in my flourishing corporate career and come back to Bristol and open a coffee shop and kitchen, right around the corner from where I grew up!’

  ‘You really went for it.’

  ‘I did. Several friends and my parents all thought I was having some kind of breakdown. I mean, end my engagement, yes, but give up my fancy car for this? They thought I must be crazy. But they hadn’t seen my coffee machine!’

  She smiled. ‘And what do you think now, a year on?’

  ‘I think it’s harder work than I realised, but I know it was the right decision. I wake up happy. I like my days, I like every day, and I can’t remember feeling like that before. It’s what we were talking about earlier, about being happy in the now.’

  ‘I get that.’ She took a glug of her coffee.

  ‘So come on, Rachel Croft, that’s me laid bare, now it’s your turn. What’s your story?’

  She shifted in her seat and tried to think how to begin. Her words were slowly delivered, paced, allowing her to keep control of the rise of sadness in her chest. It was time for her to face her fear and say it out loud. All of it.

  ‘I am married, yes, but not living with my husband; he is abroad.’

  ‘Abroad where?’ He sat forward.

  ‘Bermuda.’

  ‘Bermuda? Who lives in Bermuda? That’s like paradise! Is it in the Caribbean? I’ve seen pictures of it but can’t picture it on a map.’

  Rachel envisioned the little fishhook-shaped island in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean, twenty-one miles in length and only one across in places, dotted with palm-fringed coves and verdant, twisty lanes that all held special places in her heart.

  ‘Lots of people think that, but it’s not in the Caribbean; it’s in the North Atlantic and it’s a group of islands – five main ones and hundreds of little ones. And it is paradise, or at least it can be.’

  ‘So you were living there too?’ he asked, wide-eyed, interested.

  ‘Yes.’ She nodded.

  ‘Near the beach?’

  ‘Yes.’ With a view of the big, deep, blue ocean . . .

  ‘And just to get this straight, you gave up living in paradise for a flat off the Gloucester Road and to come and work in my coffee shop?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Now why on earth would anyone do that?’ He chuckled.

  ‘Because I needed to be somewhere different,’ she began, reaching into her apron and running her fingers over her Tic-Tac box. ‘Something . . . something bad happened,’ she almost whispered. This was new territory, bringing up the subject that lived at the front of her mind day and night. It was terrifying.

  Glen reached over and grabbed a handful of paper napkins, pushing them across the countertop towards her, his expression one of concern. She hadn’t realised she was crying; it had become as natural and as unremarkable to her as breathing.

  ‘Thank you.’ She folded one and pushed it under her lower lashes, watching her tears form rounded, mascara-tinged blobs on the paper, before continuing. ‘We had a son, I have a son, I had a son . . .’ Rachel shook her head, hating the confusion on her tongue. ‘And we lost him.’

  ‘You lost him?’ he asked softly.

  ‘He disappeared at sea. From our boat. I woke up one morning and I couldn’t find him.’

  ‘Oh my God! He died?’ Glen asked with a visible lump to his throat, and his eyes crinkled in the understanding of sadness.

  ‘Yes.’ She took a great gulp of air. ‘He died.’

  It was a strange thing; these words, this fact that she had carried around in her gut like a boulder floated from her mouth with ease, and once it had gone, she felt lighter because of it.

  ‘How old was he, is he?’ He clearly picked up on her confusion and sensitivity.

  ‘Seven.’

  ‘Seven . . .’ He repeated the small number that made the tale that much more horrific. ‘What’s his name?’ he asked softly.

  ‘Oscar.’ She mouthed the word that used to fly from her mouth a hundred times a day.

  Oscar! We are leaving in five minutes! Oscar! Your breakfast is ready! Oscar! Come and say goodbye to Cee-Cee! Oscar! Please take your Lego off the stairs before someone trips up on it!

  And now it was a name archived in her memory, a word with no use in the present because she didn’t need to call him any more, didn’t need to speak to him any more. To say it out loud, to introduce him to Glen felt like a wonderful reminder of the little person she had grown and lost. She again saw him astride the giant turtle, tanned and with sea spray sitting around him like a halo.

  ‘Oscar.’ He nodded. ‘I can’t imagine what it must be like.’

  ‘It’s a living hell.’ She looked him in the eye, speaking without guile.

  ‘I bet.’ He held her gaze.

  ‘It’s the worst kind of torture and it doesn’t go away. My grief is relentless and exhausting and it hurts physically and mentally. I am so broken that frankly, Glen, I am amazed that I am still alive, still functioning.’ She found it surprisingly easy to be this bold with the stranger, knowing that if she were to be this blunt with her parents, James, or even Vicky, they would worry, intervene, rally around, and what she needed was exactly what she got from Glen: the acceptance of her words without judgment or suggestion.

  It was liberating.

  ‘And your husband is still in Bermuda?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘That must be tough on you both.’

  ‘It is, but we are’ – she looked up to the ceiling – ‘we are pretty broken and that’s a sadness all in itself. He’s a good man, a really good man, but we are . . .’ She took a breath. ‘We are bent out of shape.’

  She heard James’s words, whispered, choked: I love you; you know I do, but I don’t know how we go forward from here. I can’t picture it.

  ‘I am sorry for what you’ve been through, Rachel, you and your husband. It’s horrible.’

  ‘It is horrible.’ She could only agree.

  The two sat quietly, letting the enormity of her story, freely told in the heat of the moment, settle over them like dust.

  It was Glen who broke the silence, speaking in no more than a hush.

  ‘Has it lessened in any way, even a little?’ She noted the way his eyebrows lifted in hope.

  Rachel considered this. ‘It hasn’t lessened, but it has changed.’ She looked out on to the street, at all the people sauntering by on their way home or heading out for supper. She tried to think of how best to phrase it. ‘It’s not th
e raw, uncontrollable grief that it was at the beginning, and actually that whole time feels like a bit of a blur. I remember the feeling but not the detail, if that makes any sense.’

  ‘It does.’ He nodded.

  ‘And now . . . now it’s like if you’ve ever trapped a nerve in your back or when your eyesight goes. It is the same every day, painful or a struggle, but you adapt, learn to live with it. The pain I feel has become normal, part of me, part of how I live now. I am not as shocked as I was by what has happened. I accept it, but I still don’t think it’s real.’ She blew her nose. It was hard to explain.

  ‘Well, I think you are amazing to be coping in any way at all. Thank you for telling me. I know there is nothing I can say that will make it better or take away your sadness, but if ever you want to talk to someone or you need a diversion, then let me know and I will do my best to try to make you feel less sad.’

  Rachel looked at him in the half-light. ‘Thank you, Glen.’ She dabbed again at her eyes and took her empty coffee mug to the kitchen; it was time she thought about heading home.

  We are pretty broken, aren’t we, James? She spoke to him in her mind, wondering if her thoughts would float across the water.

  CEE-CEE

  ‘Good morning, James.’ She placed his coffee on the tabletop and went to the oven to retrieve the two plump croissants that had been warming there.

  ‘Morning, Cee-Cee. How’re you feeling today?’

  ‘Good.’ She knew her tone was stern but didn’t want there to be any doubt over her ability to work. She placed the croissants in front of him.

  ‘Thank you, Cee-Cee, I can get my own breakfast, but I love that you do it for me; it’s a real treat.’

  ‘I like doing it.’ She spoke the truth. ‘Oscar loved his breakfast. It was his favourite meal of the day! He would lead me a merry dance. “Bacon! Ketchup! More bread!” We used to laugh every morning.’

  ‘I would hear you two chuckling as I came down the stairs.’

  She watched him pause and swallow, knowing it was important to talk about Oscar, remembering how when she had lost Willard the way his very existence became a secret, a thing too dreadful to mention, had hurt her as much as his passing.