The Man Who Didn't Call: The Love Story of the Year – with a Fantastic Twist

by Walsh, Rosie

  ‘Well, that’s great to know, Alan. Thank you. But the real problem is that I have to stop loving her and I don’t know how.’

  Alan looks thoughtful. ‘I’ve often wondered how that works. Making yourself fall out of love with someone,’ he says. ‘What do you actually do ? Why haven’t Haynes published a manual on it?’ His hayrick hair sticks crazily out from the sides of his head as he ponders the question. Alan’s never had to stop loving anyone. He and Gia have been married for nine years, together for nineteen. Before her there was only Shelley, whose heart Alan (very guiltily) broke, and a small handful of girls from school with whom he was mostly just trying to subdue his never-ending teenage erection.

  How do you just stop loving someone? The love I felt for Sarah wasn’t just a version of something that already lived in me; it was something I built from scratch, something I grew. By the time we said goodbye, it was as tangible as she was.

  How do I just kill it? Even if I let time wear it down, there would still be fragments scattered all around inside me. The unexpected earthiness of her laugh, the fan of her hair on a pillow. The sound of a sheep’s baa, the sight of Mouse in her slim fingers.

  ‘I have no idea how you stop loving someone,’ I say eventually. Alan’s watching me again. ‘I guess you just sit and wait for … I don’t know. The intensity to fade? Right now, though, I feel like a pressure cooker.’

  ‘Maybe that’s why so many poets have written about heartbreak. Helps them let off steam. Like bloodletting. Rapid discharge of overwhelming feelings.’

  ‘Right,’ I sigh. ‘Rapid discharge sounds good. Release.’

  There’s a pause, and then a snort, and then we both start laughing. ‘If you want to take yourself off home for a bit of rapid release, I won’t mind,’ Alan says.

  He gets up and goes to the bar. I look at his ankles and smile. He is of normal build, Alan, but he has ankles so slender you can get a hand round them. He gets really cross when I do that.

  The wine fridge hums. In a distant kitchen, someone is scraping plates.

  I look at my watch: 8.40 p.m. I wonder what Sarah’s having for lunch, and I can’t stand it.

  Alan returns with our pints and sits down, rubbing his hands with glee at the thought of the steaks he’s just ordered, and I want more than anything to be him at this moment. To be Alan Glover, smelling lightly of yoghurt, secure in his life, responsible only for the well-being of his lovely little girl.

  ‘Just going to the loo,’ I tell him.

  On my way back to the table, I notice that a couple has taken residence at a table in the corner. They’re dressed in black and I can tell, straight away, that something about them isn’t quite right. They aren’t talking, although the woman is holding on to the man as if they were in a strong wind.

  At the same moment I realize the woman is crying, I realize I know her. I slow down, so I can get a good look at her, and after a few seconds I recognize Hannah Harrington. Sarah’s sister. Less than two metres from me, curled into the side of a man I take to be her husband. Her face is red, disfigured with sadness, but I can see her . A shadow of Sarah. Just like she was on the beach when I left her – stunned, miserable, utterly silent.

  Hannah doesn’t spot me and I move quietly back to our table. I tell Alan about the funeral cars I saw heading to Sarah’s village earlier on. Then, because my stomach is churning, I blurt out that if Hannah’s crying, it must surely be someone Sarah’s family knows very well. ‘Sarah could have flown back for the funeral,’ I whisper, and my voice has tipped just a bit too far towards madness. ‘She could be a few miles away from here, Alan!’

  Alan looks alarmed. ‘Don’t go looking for her,’ he says eventually.

  Our steaks arrive soon after, and he ends up eating mine.

  A little later on I get up to buy a round and see that Hannah and her husband have gone. I can’t stop thinking about who might have died. For a terrible moment I even consider the possibility that it could have been Sarah herself.

  It’s irrational, of course, but as the evening passes I struggle to let it go. It fits far too comfortably with those intrusive thoughts I had when I got back from LA. That voice, asking if I’d still feel like I’d done the right thing if Sarah died.

  I get embarrassingly drunk, and at some point I thump my fist on the table at the general hopelessness of things.

  I am not the sort of man to thump a table. When Alan says he reckons he’ll come back to mine to drink whisky and watch the Olympics, I don’t argue. I’m not sure I’d leave me to my own devices if I were him, either.

  Chapter Forty-Three

  Dear You,

  Enough: I have to let go of Sarah. Not just tell myself to do it and then spend all my time thinking about her – I have to stop the thoughts as soon as they’ve begun. Because they’re not just unhelpful, they’re dangerous. Once they’re out of the starting gates, they spread faster than a virus and I find it almost impossible to control them – and when I look at Mum, I see how far they could take me.

  So this is it, Hedgehog. It’s time to exercise that power of choice I like to bang on about.

  Thank you for being my witness. As ever.

  Me x

  I reread the letter before reaching for an envelope, as if trying to hold on to Sarah for a few moments more. Early morning sun falls steeply through the window, across the forest of detritus that lives on my desk: dusty catalogues, invoices, a ruler, endless pencils and offcuts, cold cups of tea. Through these obstacles a narrow finger of light makes it through to the rectangle of purple paper on which I’ve just written. It points at the letter, seems almost to trace along the words as the trees move outside. Then a cloud passes, gobbles it up, and the letter lies once again in the thin grey of morning .

  I pull out a purple envelope, just as a creak overhead announces Alan’s awakening. A muffled voice: ‘Ed? Oi, Ed!’

  He fell asleep on the sofa while writing a text to Gia about the state of my mental health. I need to keep an eye on him , he’d written, before passing out. I finished the message and sent it to Gia, so she wouldn’t worry. He lost it in the pub , I wrote. Best that I stay over. Gia is extraordinarily tolerant when it comes to Alan and me.

  Alan snored from time to time. Team GB won bronze in the men’s synchronized diving. I sat on the sofa, trying not to think about Sarah.

  Sounds of hungover padding above my head. Alan’ll be poking around in the kitchen now, like a hungry bear, sniffing out tasty things he can stick his paw into. He’ll want a large cup of tea, at least four pieces of toast and then a lift to work. Probably some clothes, too, because his are covered in strawberry yoghurt.

  I’ll gladly provide these things, because Alan is a real friend. He knew I needed the company last night. He knew I’d be miserable about Sarah, and he also knew, somehow, that I’m not in a good place with Mum. The least I can do is make him toast.

  I turn back to my letter, sliding it into a purple envelope and writing Alex’s name on the front. Quietly, so that Alan won’t hear me, I cross over to the drawers under my workbench. I open the one marked, Chisels.

  Inside, there’s a soft sea of purple paper. A sad treasure chest; my dark secret. The drawer’s filling up again: some of the letters at the back are in danger of falling into the drawer below, where I really do keep chisels. Carefully, I slide them towards the front. It’s stupid, really, but I hate the thought of any of them getting lost. Or bent, or crushed, or hurt in any way .

  I breathe slowly, staring down at them.

  I don’t write all the time – maybe once a fortnight, less if I’m really busy – but this is still the third drawer I’ve filled in the past two decades. I scoop my hand in among them now, tender and ashamed. What’s wrong with him? I imagine people saying. Still hanging on to a dead girl? He should get help.

  It was a lady called Jeanne Burrows, a bereavement counsellor, who suggested I write to my dead sister. I couldn’t stand the thought of never being able to talk to her; it made me
dizzy with panic. Write her a letter , Jeanne had suggested. Tell her how you’re feeling, how you miss her. Say the things you you’d have said if you’d known what was coming.

  In those silent hours spent driving between the Crown Court, the psychiatric hospital and my empty childhood home, I found comfort in those letters. I had friends, of course: I even had a new girlfriend back up in Birmingham, where I’d just finished my first year as an undergraduate. Mum’s sister, Margaret, phoned daily, and Dad came down from Cumbria to help organize his daughter’s funeral. But nobody really knew what to do with me, nobody really knew what to say. My friends were well meaning but useless, and my girlfriend escaped as soon as she decently could. Dad deferred his own grief by spending most of the time on the phone to his wife.

  I wrote the first letter in my empty room at halls, the day I drove up there to clear my stuff out. Mum was being treated in a secure unit at the time. There was no way I’d be going back for my second year.

  But I slept, after writing that letter. I slept all night, and although I cried when I saw the purple envelope the next morning, I felt less … stuffed. As if I’d made a small puncture, allowed some of the pressure to escape. I wrote another letter that night, when I had unpacked back in Gloucestershire, and I never really stopped.

  I’ve booked in to see Jeanne in a couple of days. She’s still practising out of her house on Rodborough Avenue. Her voice sounds exactly the same, and she didn’t just remember me, she said she was delighted to hear from me. I said I wanted to see her because my involvement with Sarah Harrington had reopened some ‘old wounds’, but I don’t know if that’s quite it. I just feel – have felt since I got back – like everything is wrong. Like I’ve arrived back in the wrong life, the wrong bed, the wrong shoes.

  What’s really alarming is the sense that everything’s been this wrong, without my fully realizing it, for nearly twenty years.

  I turn to look at my workshop, my safe house, my retreat. The place where I’ve hammered and sawed through fury and despair. Drunk hundreds of thousands of cups of tea, sung along to the radio, pulled out a raft of splinters, had the odd drunken bonk. I don’t know what I would have done if I hadn’t had this.

  And it’s Mum I have to thank for it, really. Dad, whose fault it was that I’d become fascinated with wood in the first place, was dead against me doing this for a living. During the ten years between him running off with Victoria Shitface (this was the name Alan made up for her at the time: it’s never really lost traction) and Alex dying, Dad continued to interfere with my life and decisions as if he were still sitting at the head of our table. He went mad when I said I was considering a furniture-making foundation course instead of A levels. ‘You’ve an academic brain,’ he shouted down the phone. ‘Don’t you dare waste it! You’ll destroy your career prospects!’

  In those days Mum was still capable of engaging with conflict. ‘So what if he doesn’t want to be a bloody accountant?’ she’d said, grabbing the phone from me. Her voice shook with anger. ‘Have you ever actually looked at what he makes, Neil? Probably not, given how rarely you come down here. But let me tell you, our son has an exceptional talent. So get off his back .’

  She bought me my first No. 7 jointer, a fine old Stanley. I still use it today. And so it’s always her I’m grateful to, when I consider what I’ve got.

  ‘Bonjour ,’ Alan says, his voice a little woolly. He’s standing at the bottom of the stairs, wearing pants and one sock. ‘I need tea, and toast, and a lift, Eddie. Can you help?’

  An hour later we pull up at his house, right at the top of Stroud. I keep the engine running while he runs inside to find a suitable work outfit (he flatly rejected everything I own) and gaze down at the old cemetery falling away below me, a chessboard of loss and love. There’s nobody there, save for a cat picking its way along a row of limey gravestones.

  I smile. Typical cat. Why walk respectfully on the grass when you could walk disrespectfully on a human grave?

  A church bell starts ringing somewhere – it must be nine o’clock – and I’m reminded suddenly of that funeral procession yesterday. The hearse, polished and quiet and disconcerting in every way. The careful set of the driver’s face, the cascades of wildflowers trailing down the coffin, that heady fear that comes with any reminder of human mortality. I cross my arms across my chest, feeling suddenly queasy.

  Who died? Who was it?

  But then I remember the promise I made to my sister, a mere ninety minutes ago. No more thoughts of Sarah. Not now, not ever. And I draw a screen across that part of my mind, forcing instead a plan for the working day ahead. Number one: a bacon sandwich from the roadside cafe at Aston Down.

  ‘Meow!’ I call to the cat, but it’s busy plotting the death of some poor shrew.

  Chapter Forty-Four

  SIX WEEKS LATER

  Autumn is here. I can smell it in the air, rough and unprocessed and – I’ve always thought – oddly apologetic. As if it feels slightly embarrassed, dismantling the heady dreams of summer to make way for another cruel slog.

  Although, personally, I’ve never minded winter. There’s something exquisitely unworldly about this valley when frost spikes the ground and the trees fling long shadows across the bare earth. I love the sight of smoke twisting out of a lone chimney, the fairy-tale pinch of light in a remote window. I love how my friends brazenly invite themselves over so they can sit in front of my fire and eat the hearty stews they seem to think I cook all the time just because I live in a rural barn.

  Strangely, Mum always seems a little happier in the winter, too. I think that’s because it’s more acceptable to stay indoors once the temperatures drop. Summer is fraught with the expectation of increased socializing and outdoor activity, whereas in the winter her small existence needs little explanation or defence.

  But today it’s only September and I’m still in shorts as I march up the composty hillside of Siccaridge Wood. Shorts and a jumper I still can’t bring myself to wash and de-bobble, because the last person to wear it was Sarah .

  I walk a little bit faster. A mild burn spreads through my calf muscles as I stump on up the hill, too fast to let my feet sink into the layered mulch. I start singing Merry Clayton’s part from ‘Gimme Shelter’. The only people who can hear me singing about rape and murder being just a shot away are the birds, who probably thought I was mad already.

  My voice reaches the final section of the song, where Clayton is basically screaming, and I start laughing. Life is not feeling all that tranquil right now, but refusing to think about – well, about unhelpful things – definitely gives me a breather.

  The problem is, Jeanne Burrows is not really on board with my plan to block all thoughts of Sarah from my mind. My sessions with her make me feel so much better, so much less alone, and yet she is breaking my balls every week. I didn’t imagine you could break someone’s balls in a deeply kind, gentle, respectful way, but Jeanne seems to be doing just that.

  Today’s session, however, was unprecedented.

  Just as I reached the end of Rodborough Avenue, where Jeanne lives, I saw none other than Hannah Harrington reversing out of Jeanne’s parking spot. She was concentrating on not hitting a neighbour’s car, so she didn’t notice me, but I got a good look at her. She looked not dissimilar to the last time I saw her: tear-stained, tired, lost.

  Of course, I wondered immediately why Hannah was seeing Jeanne, and before I knew it the old fear engine had fired up again. What if it was one of Sarah’s parents who died? Sarah would be distraught. She told me in those letters how guilty she’d felt, all these years, insisting on living thousands of miles away. I decided it was my duty to help her.

  ‘I want to call Sarah Harrington,’ I announced to Jeanne on arrival. ‘Can I do that here, with you? ’

  ‘Come and sit down,’ she said calmly. Oh brilliant , I imagined her thinking. Here we go.

  Within a few minutes I had calmed down and accepted that I had no business calling Sarah Harrington, but
it did inevitably lead to a conversation about her. Jeanne asked again if I felt that blocking all thoughts of Sarah was helping me let her go.

  ‘Yes,’ I said stubbornly. Then: ‘Maybe.’ Then: ‘No.’

  We talked about the process of letting go. I told her I was fed up with being so bad at it, but that I didn’t know what else to do. ‘I just want to be happy,’ I muttered. ‘I want to be free.’

  Jeanne laughed when I complained that there was not a manual for stopping loving someone. I admitted that that was actually Alan’s joke, and then she threw me a neutral look and said, ‘While we’re talking about setting ourselves free, Eddie, I wonder how you feel about that in relation to your mother? How do you feel when you imagine freedom from your duties to her?’

  I was so shocked I had to ask her to repeat herself.

  ‘How does the idea of lessening some of that burden feel?’ Her tone was friendly. ‘That’s how you described it last week. Let me see …’ She peered at her notes. ‘A “nightmarish burden”, you said.’

  My face blew warm. I pulled at a loose thread on her sofa, unable to look her in the eye. How dare she bring that up?

  ‘Eddie, I want to remind you that there is no shame – none at all – in finding it hard. Family carers might feel great love and loyalty towards their relative, but they also experience resentment, despair, loneliness and a whole range of other emotions about which they would not want the patient to know. Sometimes they reach a point where they need to take a break. Or even completely rethink the care arrangement. ’

  I stared at the floor. Back right off! I wanted to shout. This is my mother you’re talking about! Only nothing came out of my mouth.

  ‘What are you thinking?’ Jeanne asked.

  I don’t get angry very often – I’ve had to learn not to, for Mum’s sake – but suddenly I was furious. Far too angry to appreciate what she was trying to do for me. To be grateful that she had waited weeks before bringing it up. I wanted to pick up the vase of peachy snapdragons on her mantelpiece and throw it at the wall.