The Dead Wife's Handbook

by Hannah Beckerman

  Angry that of all the people in the world who had to die that day, one of them had to be me.

  I just want to be with him. And with Ellie. And the knowledge that I can’t is the lone atom of truth that makes me wish right now that dying really had been the end of everything.

  Chapter 12

  I hear the living world before I can see it. There’s cheering, shouting and chanting, a rabble of male voices that are at turns excitable and angry. As real life comes into view, I’m disorientated for a second, hovering high over a large stadium I don’t think I recognize, before my vision instinctively zooms in on the person I’m here to see.

  Max is standing in the terraces with his threadbare QPR scarf around his shoulders. I look next to him, expecting to see Connor, his regular football sidekick, but instead of Connor there’s Eve, conspicuously radiant amidst the testosterone-fuelled crowd.

  ‘Only five minutes to go. All we’ve got to do is hold our defence and the game’s ours. You don’t mind, really, do you? I know it’s not the most romantic of fifth dates but I thought it might be fun and I wanted you to see why I always get so excited before a match.’

  Fifth date? And he’s taken her to see QPR? Only once in ten years was I afforded the privilege of accompanying Max to see his beloved football team play live, and then only because Connor was ill and the dozen friends he’d phoned to replace him had been unable to make it at such short notice, so it had made sense for me to go rather than ‘waste the ticket’ as he’d so gallantly put it. Football has always been sacred as far as Max is concerned; sacred amongst men, a masculine exclusion zone to which women are never admitted. It was Max’s only adherence to male stereotypes and I’d always counted myself lucky that of all the ways in which relationships can become polarized, one afternoon a week of agreed separation really wasn’t anything to complain about.

  But that was before Eve was invited to a football match on their fifth date. They can’t have been seeing each other for more than a few weeks and yet already she’s managed to inveigle the space that Max kept separate from me for a decade. It’s hard not to feel affronted. Not only is this woman beginning to live my life, the one I’d be leading if I hadn’t died, already she seems to be negotiating her way through it with greater success than I ever did.

  The final whistle blows and Max hugs Eve with the adrenaline of sporting victory. It’s a visual assault, seeing their bodies embrace, his arms around her, their torsos touching with a familiarity and a freedom that for so long has been the preserve of him and me.

  As they file, slowly, out of the packed stadium, they’re holding hands and laughing together, indisputably relaxed in one another’s company. The first date had been promising, admittedly, but there’s clearly been some progress since. Not for the first time, I curse the unpredictability and irregularity of my access. If it serves any purpose whatsoever, surely it should at least do me the courtesy of keeping me fully apprised of my husband’s romantic liaisons. That should be the very least of a dead wife’s prerogatives, shouldn’t it?

  Max and Eve reach the tube station and stand together, hesitantly, outside. They stop talking, stop laughing and an inexplicable awkwardness emerges between them but how or why or from where I’ve no idea. There’s something going on here that I don’t quite understand, some unspoken collusion between them from which I’m excluded, and it pains me to be outside of their intimacy, both physically and emotionally.

  ‘So, what are your plans for the rest of the evening? Is Ellie waiting at your mum and dad’s for you?’

  ‘No, she’s actually staying at theirs tonight. Mum’s got some kind of baking extravaganza set up for the pair of them. They’ll have a whale of a time.’

  There’s a pause in the conversation that feels suspiciously loaded. I think I know what’s coming but if I’m right I’m pretty sure I don’t want to hear it.

  ‘So, given I’m child-free for the night, I could always come back to yours. Unless you’ve got other plans, of course.’

  Eve hesitates for just a beat longer than Max can bear.

  ‘I’m sorry. Forget I said that. We don’t have to. How about we just grab a quick bite to eat and then I’ll head home.’

  ‘No, no. It’s not that I don’t want to. It’s just …’

  Eve intakes a lungful of air as if steeling herself to continue.

  ‘It’s just that it’s been quite a while since I … since I had someone to … you know … stay over.’

  There’s just a hint of surprise in Max’s eyes and I couldn’t agree more. It’s hard to believe that Eve doesn’t have a string of suitors knocking down her door.

  ‘It’s fine. Please let’s just forget it. I’m sorry. Do you think we can rewind this conversation a couple of minutes and start again? I’m not very practised at all of this.’

  ‘Please don’t apologize. It’s not your fault, really. It’s mine.’

  Eve offers Max a conciliatory smile which lapses into another charged silence.

  ‘Right, where do you fancy heading for supper? Greek or Italian or curry? Your wish is my command, madam.’

  Max is desperately trying to inject some jocularity into the conversation but the awkwardness is palpable even to me.

  ‘No, why don’t you come back to mine. We can stop off at the supermarket on the way and I’ll cook us supper.’

  Max looks confused as though he instinctively wants to say one thing but chivalry is going to force him to say another.

  ‘No really, Eve, it’s fine. Let’s eat out.’

  ‘Honestly, Max, I want you to come back with me. Genuinely. I was just thrown for a second there. I suppose I didn’t expect to be in this position just yet.’

  ‘God, if it’s too soon, we can wait. Seriously. There’s no rush. You’re probably right. Please let’s just forget I ever mentioned it.’

  Eve laughs and her laughter brings with it a decisive break in the tension.

  ‘Please let’s not forget it. It’s just been a while and even though I knew this was coming somehow you still caught me off guard. But I want you to. Really.’

  ‘Really?’

  ‘Yes, really. I promise.’

  Eve leans in and kisses Max tenderly on the lips and it’s the kiss of a multitude of possibilities, each one reeling through my imagination in unnecessarily graphic detail, each scenario more distressing to envisage than the last.

  ‘If it makes you feel any better, it’s been a while for me too. I haven’t been with anyone … with anyone like that since … since Rachel. I guess we’ll just have to stumble through this clumsily together.’

  Max laughs now too and I can hear the catharsis in his voice and I don’t think any sound has ever made me feel so far away from him.

  ‘Well, if there are awards for cringeworthy conversations, I think we can both share top prize for this one. I think we’d probably give some of our students a run for their money in the embarrassment department, don’t you?’

  Eve smiles and Max takes hold of her hand and looks directly, calmly, confidently into her eyes.

  ‘Let’s start this evening again shall we? So, Eve, how do you fancy us going back to yours for a quiet evening in?’

  ‘Well, since you ask so nicely, that sounds like a wonderful idea. I may even have a spare toothbrush for you if you’re really lucky.’

  They grin at one another, conspiratorially and intensely, oblivious to the throngs of football fans circling them to enter the underground.

  I take a deep breath to try and steady myself against the emotional tidal wave I can feel approaching. He’s actually going to do it. He’s going to sleep with another woman. He’s going to get naked with her and caress her breasts and marvel at her tight, flat tummy, devoid of the evidence of childbearing, and he’ll wonder whether he can remember when he last saw a tummy as beautiful and blemish-free and smooth as that. He’s going to kiss her bare neck and stroke her exposed thigh and taste her skin and the taste will be like nothing else he’s ever enco
untered before. He’s going to run his fingers down her naked back and cup her perfect, rounded buttocks in his hands and look into her eyes as they make love and it’s going to be a revelation, like he’s making love for the very first time, because there’s been a part of him for so many months, for over a year, that’s believed he’d never make love to anyone again. He’s going to spend the entire night entwined with her, sleep by her side, listen to her breathing and watch her dreaming and in the morning he’s going to wake up next to her and realize that today is the first day of the rest of his life. His life without me.

  I’m overwhelmed by panic. I can’t watch this. I can’t go with them. I don’t want to see how the evening pans out. I know what’s going to happen without the torture of having to watch it with my own eyes. Surely that’s more than any wife can be expected to witness, dead or alive?

  Max and Eve start walking towards the underground entrance, hand in hand, almost skipping with mutual excitement into the tube together as they head towards Eve’s house for their very first night together. I feel sick, hysterical almost, like I can’t breathe and I have to escape but where to and how I just don’t know. I squeeze my eyes tightly shut, so tight it hurts. Maybe, I think, maybe if I focus on thoughts about Max and me, maybe they’ll disappear.

  I keep my eyes firmly closed and try to replace the graphic fantasies of what lies ahead with images of what lay before, with memories of Max and me instead, of us curled up in bed on Sunday mornings in the days before Ellie was born, naked, surrounded by Sunday papers and a swiftly cooling cafetière of coffee, our own favourite time for making love, both of us immersed in the weekend without the pressure of time or tiredness or work to invade that most private of spaces. I think about Max standing behind me when I was cooking in the kitchen, sweeping my hair on to one side of my neck while gently kissing the other. I think of us lying together in the bath, our much-relished pre-bed ritual, discussing the day’s events while washing them off one another, cleansing ourselves of everything outside our own, exclusive cocoon. And I think about the time we made mid-afternoon love on the sofa of that New York hotel room, the full-height, twenty-third-storey windows overlooking the Manhattan skyline welcoming the early-summer sunshine into the room and warming our already-overheated bodies, and both of us knowing afterwards that something special had taken place, something exceptional, something we wouldn’t comprehend until three weeks later when I took the test and we learnt for the first time that a brand new life would be completing our family.

  When I open my eyes, finally, there’s nothing but whiteness. I don’t know how but I’ve managed to will myself away from the scene that I know would otherwise have haunted me for as many days as this afterworld exists. I’m grateful, more grateful than I ever thought possible, to be back on my own in the nothingness.

  But pernicious images of the evening’s possible events continue to spool through my mind like a speeded-up Super 8 film. My stomach churns with envy, eating away at me from the inside out like a cancer metastasizing in record time.

  I imagine Eve’s naked body and Max’s certain appreciation of it and then I look down at my own body – a body no one else but me can see any more, with a face that even I haven’t seen for over a year, so who knows what kind of state it’s in – and I’m pierced by the sharpest stab of inadequacy. Did Max spend our entire marriage wondering if he might have done better for himself, whether he might have stood before a registrar declaring vows to someone who looked like Eve rather than me? Will he begin to question that now? Will he lie in bed with Eve and wonder why on earth he wasted a decade in my naked company?

  For the first time since I met Max eleven years ago, I find myself questioning whether I was ever good enough for him. And whether Eve’s perfection is about to relegate me to the Inadequate First Wives’ Club.

  All I can think about is Eve. Eve making love to Max, Eve stealing the heart of my husband, Eve and Max embarking on the exciting journey of a new relationship, with no idea where that road might lead them except that it seems, right now, to be heading in a direction they both want to go.

  Chapter 13

  Max is walking jauntily down the path of his parents’ front garden with what looks suspiciously like a morning-after-the-night-before spring in his step. I can tell it a mile – or even a thousand miles – off. Post-coital Max couldn’t be more transparent if he ripped off his shirt, began beating his chest and howled a time-honoured chant of sexual conquest into the jungle.

  My mind surrenders to an army of schizophrenic thoughts. Rationally I know that I’m dead, that Max is a widower, that he’s free to pursue other relationships. Rationally I don’t want him to be unhappy, in mourning and lonely forever. But those rational feelings aren’t sufficiently robust to repel an onslaught of irrational impulses: that Max has betrayed me, that he’s moved on too quickly, that he’s desecrated the memory of our marriage with this act of emotional and physical treachery. And stoking the flames of envy’s fury are those repetitive, invidious images of what I presume took place last night.

  As Max lets himself into the house, Joan calls out to him from the kitchen.

  ‘Come in here, quickly, will you love?’

  Max saunters through, not quickly at all, his thoughts clearly a long way from his mother’s kitchen.

  ‘Close the door. I need to talk to you about something before Ellie comes downstairs.’

  The tone of her voice and the frown above her eyes indicate concern. A small flutter of anxiety begins working its way tentatively from my stomach up to my throat.

  ‘Sit down, Max. You know it makes me nervous when you loiter around me.’

  Max does as he’s told, still grinning, seemingly oblivious to Joan’s preoccupation.

  ‘It’s about Ellie. We had a bit of an accident last night.’

  Oh god. Please say she’s okay. Please.

  ‘What kind of accident? What happened? Is she okay?’

  ‘She’s fine. Not that kind of accident. She wet the bed. Stayed in it all night, poor little mite. Said this morning that she hadn’t wanted to wake us up.’

  My poor angel. My poor little girl. I can’t bear the thought of her lying all night in a wet bed without me to comfort her, to change her sheets, to settle her back to sleep.

  She used to wet the bed occasionally when she was a toddler. She’d come into our room in the middle of the night and gently – oh so gently – prod my arm until finally I stirred and she’d whisper, ‘Mummy, I’m wet again,’ as though what had happened was entirely out of her control, which I suppose, in a way, it was. I’d get up and we’d go to her room, collecting clean sheets from the airing cupboard on the way, and she’d stand silently, clutching her brown bear, watching me discard the soiled bedding and replace it with freshly ironed linen. I’d tuck her back in, often snuggling in beside her until she managed to fall back to sleep, constantly reiterating that it didn’t matter, that it wasn’t something to worry about, that all little people wet the bed sometimes. I didn’t want it to be something she became too self-conscious about.

  She started wetting the bed again in the months after I died but she hasn’t, as far as I know, been troubled by it for a long time now. If she’s started again, Joan’s right to be worried.

  ‘God, Mum, you nearly gave me a heart attack. Is that all? I thought there’d been a real accident. Honestly, I can’t believe you can be so melodramatic sometimes.’

  ‘I don’t think I am being melodramatic, Max. Ellie hasn’t wet the bed for nearly a year and then all of a sudden she did it again last night. Forgive me, but I think there’s a question to be asked as to why now.’

  I agree with Joan. Of course it’s suspicious. Why isn’t Max taking this more seriously?

  ‘Well, clearly you have the answer to that question, Mum, so instead of us playing guessing games, why don’t you just tell me what it is?’

  Joan frowns at Max. I don’t blame her. He’s being rude and abrupt and it’s not like him. And she, un
like me, isn’t privy to the knowledge that she’s inadvertently burst his post-coital bubble. He’s behaving like a teenager after his first all-nighter, sullen and resentful that he’s being pulled back to reality against his will. It’s really not very becoming.

  ‘It’s obvious, isn’t it? It’s you going out all the time. You’ve been out more in the past few weeks than in the last eighteen months put together. It’s unsettling her, Max. I think you’re just going to have to give all this socializing a rest for a while.’

  The mood in Max’s eyes – which has already metamorphosed from pleasure to petulance – now undergoes a further transformation. Now he’s plain angry.

  ‘You’re really having a go at me for going out too much, Mum? Isn’t that just a tiny bit hypocritical since it was you who was hassling me to – what was it? – get out and about in the first place. You can’t have it both ways.’

  I think it’s highly probable – however unsavoury the thought – that Max didn’t get enough sleep last night. He so rarely behaves like this and when he does it’s invariably the result of a severe hangover or chronic sleep-deprivation. This morning it could well be both. I try to stop my mind from running out of this conversation and into fantasies about what kept Max awake all night. Those kinds of thoughts aren’t going to do anyone any good, least of all me.

  ‘I never suggested you should be gallivanting around town every weekend till goodness knows what time and with goodness knows who. A couple of months ago you didn’t even want to leave the house and now it looks like you haven’t been home all night.’

  ‘Mum, I’m a big boy now. I don’t need your permission for a late pass.’

  ‘Don’t be silly. You know that’s not what I’m saying. I’m just surprised – very surprised, if you want to know – that you don’t seem to be taking last night’s incident seriously.’

  So am I. I’m surprised too. And I’m beginning to feel a bit annoyed as well. I’m trying really hard to put my feelings about last night aside, for them not to infect my thoughts about this morning’s revelations, and what I’m left with is frustration that Max is so wrapped up in his new relationship with Eve that Ellie seems to have slipped down, overnight, from the top of his priority list where she belongs.