‘Oh, I’d say that it’s …’ he looks around again.
I open the wooden cupboard beside the dishwasher and find the washing machine.
‘There it is,’ he says. ‘You know your way around here better than I do. Truth be told, it’s Joy that does everything in here,’ he admits guiltily as if I couldn’t have guessed. ‘Always said I’d be lost without her.’ It feels like something he’s always said, and now it has real meaning. Life without Joy, as he knows her, is nearing. It’s real.
‘How is she doing?’ I ask. ‘She seems very positive.’
‘Joy is always upbeat, to others anyway, but it’s got harder for her. She went through a period where nothing changed, she didn’t worsen. We thought that was it, but then it advanced – and it’s when it advances that the body declines.’
‘I’m sorry,’ I say softly. ‘For you both.’
He purses his lips and nods. ‘But I do know where the milk is,’ he says, perking up and pulling open a door.
A broom falls out.
We both start laughing.
‘You’d best be off to your appointment,’ he says again. ‘I know how they can be. Waiting list after waiting list, life is one big waiting room.’
‘It’s OK.’ I pick the broom up from the floor, the desire to run gone. I sigh to myself. ‘It can wait.’
When I return to the group with the replenished tea, Bert has faded. Whatever burst of energy his medication gave him for the hour has worn off, leaving him exhausted. As if anticipating this, his carer has arrived to collect him.
‘Why don’t we talk about this in detail the next time we meet,’ Bert taps his nose in a secretive but terribly obvious manner, and jerks his head towards the sound of his carer speaking with Joe in the hallway. His chin wobbles as he moves. ‘And not in my house, because Rita will be suspicious.’
‘Here,’ Joy says. ‘We can all meet here again.’
‘That’s unfair on you, Joy,’ Paul says.
‘I can take over from where Angela left off. I wouldn’t have it any other way,’ she says firmly, and it’s clear, at least to me, that it suits Joy in more ways than one to remain in her home.
‘Good for me,’ Bert says. ‘How about two days from now, same time? If we meet tomorrow, Rita will be jealous of Joy.’ He chuckles and winks. ‘Will you come back to us, Holly?’
Everyone looks at me again.
I should not get involved in this club. I do not want to get involved in this club. It can’t be healthy.
But everyone is looking at me, hopeful and expectant. Ginika’s baby Jewel lets out a sound, as if she’s joining in, trying to convince me along with the group. She makes happy bubbling sounds. She is six months old, she could be a one-year-old when her mother dies.
I look around at them all, this motley crew. Bert is struggling to breathe, Joy is barely holding herself together. I’ve been here before, I know how short six months can be, how quickly everything can change, how health can deteriorate in two weeks, how twenty-four hours can change it all.
I read an article on how the clocks stand still to keep our time in sync with the universe. It’s called the leap second: a one-second adjustment applied to the coordinated universal time because the Earth’s rotation speed changes irregularly. A positive leap second is inserted between second 23:59:59 and second 00:00:00 of the following date, offering an extra second in our lives. News articles and magazine features have posed the question, what can happen in a second? What can we achieve with this extra time?
In one second, almost two and a half million emails are sent, the universe expands fifteen kilometres and thirty stars explode, a honey bee can flap its wings two hundred times, the fastest snail travels 1.3 centimetres, objects can fall sixteen feet, and ‘Will you marry me?’ can change a life.
Four babies are born. Two people die.
One second can be the difference between life and death.
Their expectant faces peer up at me, waiting, hoping.
‘Let’s give her time to think about it,’ Joy says softly, but her disappointment is obvious. They all back off.
8
Rage has returned and it rushes through me. I am angry, I am seething. I want to scream. I need to shout it off, cry it off, exorcise it before I cycle home. My bicycle could surely not take the extra weight, couldn’t cope with the ever-shifting emotional imbalance. I cycle out of sight of Joy’s home, dismount, lazily discard the bike on the ground, and hunker down, leaning against a painted white popcorn wall that digs into my back. The PS, I Love You Club are not Gerry but they do represent him, his journey, his struggles, his intent. I always felt in my heart that the point of Gerry’s letters was to guide me, and yet the motivation for these people is fear of being forgotten. It breaks my heart and makes me furious. Because, Gerry, my love, how could you ever feel that I’d forget you, that I could forget you?
Perhaps the root of my rage is that I lied to Ciara about not still feeling his presence. I could never forget him, but Gerry is blurring. Though he lives on in the stories we share and in my memory, it is becoming harder to summon the vivid living, moving, fluid, animated Gerry to mind. I don’t want to forget him, but the more I move on and the more new experiences I have, the more the old memories get pushed aside. Selling the house, moving in with Gabriel … Life won’t let me stay still and remember. No. I made a decision that I wouldn’t allow myself to stay still and remember. Waiting … waiting for what, a reunion in death that I don’t even know will happen?
‘Hi.’ I hear a voice beside me and I jump to my feet, startled.
‘Ginika, hi, you gave me a fright.’
She examines my bike, where I’m standing, the way I’m standing. Perhaps she recognises a hiding place when she sees one. ‘You’re not coming back, are you?’
‘I said that I’d think about it,’ I reply weakly. I’m pissed off, I’m agitated. I don’t know what the hell I want.
‘Nah. You’re not. It’s OK. It’s all a bit weird anyway, isn’t it? Us lot? Still, it gives us something to do. Something to focus on, thinking about our letters.’
I exhale slowly. I can’t be angry at Ginika. ‘Do you have an idea of what you want to do?’
‘Yeah,’ she adjusts her grip on Jewel’s thigh as the baby sits on her hip. ‘But it’s not, like, smart the way the others’ ideas are.’
‘It doesn’t have to be smart, just yours. What’s your idea?’
She’s embarrassed and avoids eye contact. ‘It’s a letter, that’s all. One letter. From me to Jewel.’
‘That’s lovely. It’s perfect.’
She seems to prepare herself to say something and I brace myself. She’s firm, strong, shoots from the hip, a hip loaded with a baby she made.
‘You weren’t right in there, what you said, about everyone remembering us when we’re gone. She won’t remember me.’ She holds her baby tighter. ‘She won’t remember anything about me. Not my smell or nothing of the things you said. She’s not going to look at anything and think of me. Whether it’s good or bad. Ever.’
She’s right. I hadn’t considered that.
‘That’s why I have to tell her everything. Everything from the start, all the things about me that she knows now but won’t remember, and all the things about her as a baby, because there’ll be no one to tell her. Because if I don’t write it all down about her, then she’ll never know. All she’ll have of me is one letter for the rest of her life, and that letter has to be from me. About me and her. Everything about us that only we know and that she won’t remember.’
‘That’s a beautiful idea, Ginika, it’s perfect. I’m sure Jewel will treasure it.’ These are feathery kinds of words in response to the weight of her reality but I have to say something.
‘I can’t write it.’
‘Of course you can.’
‘No, I mean. I can’t write. I can barely read. I can’t do it.’
‘Oh.’
‘I left school. I didn’t, couldn’t keep up�
�� She looks around, embarrassed. ‘I can’t even read that sign up there.’
I look up at the road sign. I’m about to tell her that it says No Through Road but I realise it doesn’t matter.
‘Can’t read my baby bedtime stories. Can’t read the instructions on my medication. Can’t read the hospital paperwork. Can’t read directions. Can’t read buses. I know you’re so smart and all, you probably don’t understand.’
‘I’m really not smart Ginika,’ I say, with a bitter laugh. If I had been smart I wouldn’t have gone to Joy’s house today, I wouldn’t be in this position now. If I was smart, if I could think clearly through the mush and the fog, then I would know exactly what to do next, instead of standing here, feeling completely emotionally incapacitated, this supposedly experienced adult facing a teenager, unable to aid or guide. I’m reaching out and grasping for golden nuggets of advice and inspiration, but my hands flail uselessly in the emptiness. Too wrapped up trying to clean the shit off my own wings instead of helping a younger woman to fly.
‘I don’t ask for help,’ Ginika says. ‘I’ve always been able to do everything myself. Don’t need no one else.’ She shifts Jewel’s weight to her left hip. ‘But I need help writing the letter,’ she says it as though she’s pushing it out through her teeth, it’s that hard for her to say.
‘Why don’t you ask somebody in the club to write the letter for you?’ I suggest, trying to weasel myself out of the equation. ‘I’m sure Joy would be wonderful. You can tell her exactly what you want to say and she can write it down, exactly as you want. You can trust her.’
‘No. I want to write it myself. I want to learn how to write this letter for her. Then she’ll know that I done something good for her, because of her. And I don’t want to ask any of them. They mean well, but they haven’t a clue. I’m asking you to help me.’
I look at her, feeling stunned, frozen, by the magnitude of this request. ‘You want me to teach you how to write?’ I ask slowly.
‘Can you?’ she looks at me, her large brown eyes deep and pleading.
I feel that I should say yes; I know that I shouldn’t.
‘Can I …’ I begin nervously, then shut down my emotions, the desire to protect myself is too great. ‘I’d like to take some time to think about it.’
Ginika’s shoulders drop instantly, her demeanour slackens. She has swallowed her pride and asked for help and, selfish coward that I am, I can’t bring myself to say yes.
I know it’s prosaic, I know it’s tedious to say this after so much time has passed, when everything is OK, when I am more than a woman in grief, but sometimes something sets me off and everything gets tilted. I lose him all over again and all I am is a woman in grief.
The smashing of his favourite Star Wars mug. Discarding our bedsheets. When his clothes lost his smell. The broken coffee machine, the sun we’d rotated every day like two desperate planets. Small losses but huge. We all have something that unexpectedly derails us when we are motoring smoothly, blissfully, ardently. This encounter with the club is mine. And it hurts.
My instinct is to move inward, recoil, curl in a ball like a hedgehog, but never hide or run. Problems are excellent hunters with their flaring nostrils and sharp teeth; their special sensory organs ensure there is no place they can’t find you. They like nothing more than to be in control, on top, predator to you the prey. Hiding from them gives them power, even feeds their strength. A face-to-face meeting is what is required, but on your own terms, in your own territory. I go to the place where I process and acknowledge what is happening. I ask for help; I ask it of myself. I know the only person who can ultimately cure me is me. It’s in our nature. My troubled mind calls out to my roots to dig deep and steady myself.
I cycle away from Ginika, my heart pounding, my legs feeling shaky, but I don’t go home. As if I’m a homing pigeon, an inner compass takes over and I find myself at the graveyard staring at a Columbarium Wall. I read the familiar words of one of Gerry’s favourite phrases, and wonder just how and when the past started chasing me, when I started running, and the moment it caught me. I wonder how on earth all that I worked so hard to build up has so suddenly come crashing down.
Damn you, Gerry. You came back.
9
I watch the ‘For Sale’ sign being hammered into the soil in the front garden.
‘I’m glad we finally got to do this,’ the estate agent breaks into my thoughts.
I’d made the decision to sell the house in January, and it’s now April. I’d cancelled our appointment a few times, a representation of the yin-yang pendulum swinging in my newly altered state of mind, though I told Gabriel it was because the estate agent kept cancelling. I had to arm-wrestle his phone to the floor when he threatened to give her a piece of his mind. My reluctance has not been because I’ve changed my mind, but because I seem to have lost the ability to focus my mind on ordinary tasks. Though as I watch the ‘For Sale’ sign’s violent disturbance of the peaceful daffodil beds, I acknowledge this task is not ordinary.
‘I’m sorry, Helen, my schedule kept changing.’
‘I understand. We all lead busy lives. The good news is I have a list of very interested people – it’s the ideal starter home. So I’ll be in touch with you very soon to organise viewings.’
A starter home. I look out the window at the sign. I’ll miss the garden, not miss doing the physical work which I delegated to my landscaper brother Richard anyway, but I’ll miss the view and the escape. He created a haven for me, one that I could disappear to when I craved it. He will miss this garden and I will miss the connection we have because of this garden; it binds us together. Gabriel’s house has a courtyard in the back, with a beautiful lone mature pink cherry blossom tree. I sit and gaze at it from his conservatory, captivated by it when in bloom and willing it on in winter. I wonder if I should grow new plants, how Gabriel will feel about a pot of sunflowers, in keeping with my annual tradition since Gerry sent me the seeds in one of his ten letters. If this is my starter home, does that mean Gabriel’s house is the main event? Or is there a third course with him or another person that I have to look forward to?
Helen is staring at me. ‘Can I ask a question? It’s about the podcast. It was wonderful, incredibly moving, I had no idea what you’d been through.’
I’m put out, not ready for the sudden veering into my personal life and thoughts in the middle of a regular life moment.
‘My sister’s husband died. Heart attack, out of the blue. Only fifty-four.’
Twenty-four more years than Gerry had. I used to do that; a calculation of how many more years people had with their loved ones than I managed. It’s cold but it used to help feed the bitterness that occasionally came to life and chomped at every hopeful thing around it. Apparently the gift has returned to me.
‘I’m sorry to hear that.’
‘Thanks. I was wondering … did you meet somebody else?’
I’m taken aback.
‘In your husband’s final letter, he gave you consent, his permission to meet somebody else. That seems so … unusual. I can’t imagine my brother-in-law doing that. I can’t imagine her with anyone else anyway. Xavier and Janine. Just rolls off the tongue, you know.’
Not quite, but that’s the point, isn’t it. People who don’t fit together suddenly do and then you can’t imagine anyone else fitting at all. Circumstance and happenstance collide to synchronise two people who until then repelled each other, so they find themselves pulled into a net electric field. Love; as natural as shifting tectonic plates with seismic results.
‘No.’
She seems uncomfortable at having asked, starts to backtrack. ‘I suppose there’s only one real true love. You’re lucky you had him at all,’ she blurts. ‘At least, that’s what my sister says. OK, so I’ll get this in motion, and I’ll call you as soon as I have viewings arranged.’
It may seem like a lie, that I’m a Judas to my Gabriel, but I didn’t mean to tell her that I haven’t found love again.
It was her paraphrasing of Gerry’s final letter that I took issue with. I did not receive nor did I need Gerry’s consent or permission to fall in love again; that human right to choose who I love and when I love has always lain with me. What Gerry did was provide a blessing, and it was this blessing that boomed the loudest in the scared, excited Greek chorus of my mind when I began dating again. His blessing fed a desire that already lived within me. Humans possess insatiable longings for wealth, status, and power, but are hungry, most of all, for love.
‘Which room did it happen in?’ she asks.
‘His death?’ I ask, in surprise.
‘No!’ she says, aghast. ‘Where were they written, or discovered, or read? I thought that might help with the tour of the house. It’s always nice to have a little story. The room where the wonderful PS, I Love You letters were written,’ she says, grinning, her salesperson head on full blast.
‘It was the dining room,’ I say, making it up. I don’t know where Gerry wrote the letters, I’ll never know, and I read them in every room, all the time, over and over again. ‘The same room he died in. You can tell them that too.’
His breath, hot, against my face. His sunken cheeks, his pale skin. His body is dying, his soul is still here.
‘See you on the other side,’ he whispers. ‘Sixty years. Be there or be square.’
He’s still trying to be funny, the only way he can cope. My fingers on his lips, my lips on his. Inhale his breath, inhale his words. Words mean he’s alive.
Not yet, not yet. Don’t go yet.
‘I’ll see you everywhere.’ My reply.
We never speak again.
10
I study Denise for a hint of what to expect. She seems calm, but impossible to read, and that’s always how Denise announces these things. I recall her face when she announced her engagement, her apartment, her promotion, coveted shoes bagged in a sale: any announcement of good news has been preceded by this solemn expression, to trick us into thinking she’s going to deliver bad news.
Postscript Page 6
