If I Could Say Goodbye Page 2

  ‘You’re going to have to stop saying things like that once you’re officially engaged, you know,’ I say, bringing my focus to the job in hand. ‘Nessa might not like you constantly flirting with my husband.’

  ‘Nessa has watched me flirting with your husband since we met. Where did you say the new jeweller’s is?’

  The day Nessa first saw Kerry, she had been showing off on the ice. Kerry used to be a figure skater and competed nationally until she decided it wasn’t the career she wanted. The first time they had met, Kerry and Ed had taken the kids on the ice; Nessa had thought they were a couple until, well, until Kerry met Nessa’s eye over Ed’s shoulder.

  This brings us to the point of our trip. Kerry is going to propose to Nessa and I’m here to help choose the ring. Kerry’s face holds still for a moment, her hand resting on my arm. There is an emerald ring on her thumb that catches the last of the sun before it disappears behind a cloud.

  ‘What if she says no?’

  I burst out laughing but check myself, because hidden in the confident poise, that is as much part of my sister as her blue eye colour, is a shimmer of vulnerability. I reach over and squeeze her hand.

  ‘She won’t. And then you can experience married life and I can get on your case for not having sex often enough.’

  ‘Not going to happen.’ She winks at me.

  ‘No . . . I don’t suppose it will.’

  We continue walking, Kerry’s red boots expressing our progress with firm, determined thuds.

  ‘Being married shouldn’t hold you back, Jen,’ she adds.

  ‘It doesn’t.’ I keep looking forward, even though from the corner of my eye I can feel her scrutinising my face. ‘I mean, sure I’d like to be a bit more adventurous sometimes, but I like my life, Kerry. I’m not you.’

  ‘I know that, but when was the last time you, oh I don’t know . . . went on a roller coaster?’

  ‘Last month.’

  ‘I mean a real one, Jen, not the bloody pirate ship at the safari park with Hailey.’

  ‘What’s that got to do with anything?’ I rummage in my pocket and unwrap a chewing gum, offer one to Kerry which she declines.

  ‘You used to love them!’ she exclaims as if me not going to Alton Towers is the biggest regret anyone in the history of mankind has ever had.

  ‘I still do, but me and Ed—’

  ‘You and Ed need to stop putting You and Ed on hold.’

  ‘We don’t.’ I flick my hair over my shoulder. ‘We had a quickie last week while the kids were downstairs,’ I say triumphantly and stop again to begin searching in my bag for my umbrella. ‘Have you got a brolly?’ I peer up at the swollen grey clouds which are hanging heavily above the high street.

  ‘This is what I mean! It doesn’t matter if you don’t have a brolly, Jen . . . what’s the worst thing that can happen? You’ll get wet and your mascara will run.’

  ‘I’m not wearing mascara.’

  She shrugs her shoulders and gestures to the sky as if proving her point. It starts to drizzle; the rain runs in neat little droplets off Kerry’s red coat, while it seeps into my beige mac. We continue across the zebra crossing while I pull out my phone and wake the screen to reveal Google maps. ‘I think the new jeweller’s is down one of the side roads,’ I say. Kerry’s boots continue to make their progress as I stop and check the screen. ‘Hold on, Kerry . . . I think it’s—’

  And those are the last words my sister ever hears.

  Chapter One

  Jennifer

  If a person could see me now, sitting on my fashionably grey sofa watching the latest blockbuster, they might be a little jealous. My home is tidy, perfectly finished, each room an exact replica of a page in the Next Directory. In the kitchen, the coffee machine gleams while my perfectly ironed tea-towels sit neatly in organised drawers.

  But what they wouldn’t know is that Jennifer Jones’s sister died in front of her three months ago, and Jennifer Jones has just realised that, for those three months, she hasn’t been living.

  Not really.

  I know I’m alive, but I haven’t really been living. Being alive and actually living life are two very different things. I’m not explaining myself very well; I’ll try and do better.

  When you lose someone – when your life is turned upside down and you’re left broken – grief clings to every part of your being: you can’t see properly, you can’t breathe, you can’t speak, you can’t eat, you can’t sleep . . . you’re living, but at the same time, you’re not alive.

  But the thing about realising you haven’t actually been living life properly, is that when the fog of grief begins to lift, it makes you look at the world differently. And it makes you appreciate every little detail.

  Take my husband. He is currently picking his nose. His index finger is reaching out from the freckly hand that held mine while I pushed our children out into the world, up into the nostril of the nose that I have kissed the end of, its sharp tip red and cold from the snowball fight we had in the small garden of our first home, and yet, even though he is now examining the findings of his excavation . . . my loins are on fire.

  I think I can honestly say that I have never been aroused by the sight of my husband picking his nose, but aroused I am.

  ‘Do you fancy an early night?’ I ask him. He squints in response to my question, his right cheek rising and his head tilting as he no doubt mulls over my proposition. I can almost hear his inner dialogue: Why is she after an early night? Is she just tired? Why is she licking her lips like that? And why is she unbuttoning her blouse? ‘In fact . . . why don’t we have an early night here?’ I say, my voice husky, a voice that belongs to a younger me, a thinner, less wrinkly, stretch-mark-free me.

  ‘The kids,’ he replies, swallowing hard as I take his bogey-free hand and pull it towards my hundred-wash-grey Marks & Spencer bra.

  ‘The kids are asleep,’ I reply, unzipping his flies and straddling him.

  The next morning, I stare at the calendar, at the empty boxes that March has to offer – most days a blank space with a number hovering in its corner. I’m not really thinking about the calendar though, I’m thinking about Kerry. About the way that, three months ago, the electrical synapses in her brain misfired. I’m imagining a tumble of veins intricately woven in between the grooves of my sister’s brain, I’m picturing the little arc of blue electricity as they ignited with each thought, how perfectly they were working while my sister listened to me talking about the location of a new jeweller’s. How they were sending messages to her body to make her walk, just in front of me, across the zebra crossing as the rain poured and I stopped to look at the location on my phone. How one of those little blue sparks flashed red, a smoky bronzed spark that reacted to the oncoming car, that rusty spark that made her push me out of the way of the car instead of saving herself.

  I can still taste the mint from the chewing gum I had in my mouth, hear the conversation we had, feel the drizzle that was soaking into my clothes as I walked across the road. The image of Kerry flying through the air hits me: her body flying backwards, feet and arms in front of her as though she was just trying to touch her toes, blue eyes staring straight ahead: red coat, red boots and the screech of brakes. I let that image go as I exhale; the next breath in comes with the image of her hands. I can’t remember making the decision to stop walking, I was too busy looking at Google maps, but I remember the feel of her hands and the pressure – like a punch – against my ribcage. I remember seeing them splayed against my chest. Her nails were painted silver and she was wearing a thumb ring – the one with the large fake emerald that wasn’t on her hand when she arrived at the hospital; I spent hours the night of her death trying to find it amongst the debris lying beside the road: I never did.

  I breathe out again.

  In the past three months, I have managed to carry on, a zombie walking through life but not living it. Some people are consumed by anger, when they lose a loved one; that’s where Ed focused his grief, an
ger towards the elderly driver of the car with the broken windscreen wiper, but I don’t think I had room for anger; grief stripped me of feeling anything at all. A numbing pain had settled inside my body when I watched Kerry’s coffin shining from inside a hearse. Looking back, I suppose I should have been grateful for grief’s anaesthetic during those first few months because once the anaesthetic began to wear off the pain of Kerry’s death suddenly exploded like pins and needles. Her loss consumed me for weeks. At first the pain was visceral, and I cried as it clawed at me, as it scratched and kicked: grief had its grip around my throat and had begun to squeeze. Some days when I woke, its grip was so tight that I didn’t think I could breathe, felt that it would suffocate me, that my death certificate would read ‘Cause of death: suffocated by grief’.

  As time passed, grief’s grip became a little looser, and the next day looser still; slowly but surely leaving me alive, leaving me with this gift: life. This gift is like a glass vase; its purpose is to be filled with beautiful things; it holds the sun’s rays and splits it into a million different colours, a rainbow of possibility and directions. But if you don’t hold it carefully enough, if it slides from your grasp, it will be shattered and lost: you will never be able to repair it.

  This is where you find me, a woman who is somehow still alive, whose sister left her with the gift of life; I can’t waste it.

  I chew the inside of my bottom lip as I stare blankly at the calendar. There are a few appointments dotted about: there’s a hair colour on the tenth.

  Hmmm. I had better bring that forward. My roots have needed a bit of TLC for a few months, I’ve got to stop putting things off . . . also, I suppose my life could end before that and I don’t want to have my roots showing in the chapel of rest. I pull out the notebook from my stationery drawer and begin a ‘To Do’ list.

  When Kerry died, nothing was ready. She had no life insurance, no will, we had no idea how she wanted her funeral, why would we? She was only twenty-five. She and Nessa were just starting their life together.

  Nessa stayed until the afternoon of the funeral and that was it. She didn’t even say goodbye; took her daughter out of school, and just up and left. I never got to ask her about an engagement ring that was shining on Kerry’s finger as the curtains drew around the coffin: a ring she must have chosen alone and slipped onto Kerry’s finger in the chapel of rest . . . I think of that moment of vulnerability that Kerry had shown, the worry that Nessa might say no. Clearly, she wouldn’t have.

  I click the button of my pen.

  To Do:

  Check life insurance

  Write epitaph

  Make hairdressing appointment

  Write epitaph?

  ‘Get a grip, Jen,’ Kerry says. She is sitting on the kitchen counter, taking a bite out of an apple. I’m not crazy; I know she isn’t really here. I keep replaying old memories, like this one: this is a conversation we had when I had been Googling brain cancer after I’d found a tiny bald patch left over after a spot on my scalp. ‘Get a grip, Jen,’ she’d said; she was sitting on my kitchen counter and eating an apple. My subconscious also tends to embellish these memories, replacing parts of the conversation that I can no longer recall exactly by giving Kerry lines from films that I know she hasn’t even seen.

  ‘When you die, you will be an old woman in a warm bed.’ My subconscious is not very imaginative and keeps giving Kerry misquotes from films I have watched a million times. That little beauty is from Titanic.

  Oscar appears at the kitchen door. The blue of his eyes is bluer than I have ever imagined before. You will have to bear with me for a moment as I try to find the right words. Once you realise how precious life is, the world changes. As though for your entire life, you have never really understood just how magnificent the world really is. But the magnificent world pales in comparison to the beauty of the ones you love.

  So, you see, this is why I’m having a hard time conveying to you the blue of my son’s eyes. I’m not talking about the hue or tone of the colour itself, rather the innocence held within them. A crystal blue that’s pure; a pure blue that the toxins of the world have yet to tamper with. The whites of Oscar’s eyes have only a hint of the red veins that will map their way across them as life as an adult takes hold: late nights, too much caffeine or wine or take-away food. I find myself kneeling before him, my hand stroking his cheek as I try to count the tiny veins that have already begun to break the surface: a worry about a new teacher perhaps? The day Liam Butters pinched him during assembly? Small worries that will be forgotten by adulthood, but enough to break the perfect surface. How have I missed this? He rubs them, the blues disappearing behind skin so pale and perfect – tiny veins fluttering behind blemish-free hands, hands that still hold on to Santa Claus’s promises and cup his ears as he listens out for the thump, thump of the Easter Bunny’s paws.

  ‘Why are you crying, Mummy?’ I didn’t realise I was; the heels of my hand wipe away the stray tears. ‘Do you have a ear egg?’ he asks, three determinedly separate words.

  ‘Yes, sweetie.’ I stand, wipe my hands on the legs of my jeans and take a deep breath. ‘Mummy has an earache.’

  ‘You need some medicine from Dr Fow, Fow—’

  ‘Dr Faulkner, dummy,’ Hailey corrects as she walks into the room, yawning. She pulls up a chair towards the kitchen table, pushing the frame of her purple glasses up towards the bridge of her nose as she reaches for a box of cereal.

  I have always thought my children are beautiful, but I now appreciate that ‘beautiful’ isn’t spectacular enough; it doesn’t sing when you say it. Hailey pushes her purple framed glasses and tucks her blonde hair behind her ears, ears that she has been teased about at school because they stick out a little further than The Norm, ears that I now see protrude just the right amount. If they were tucked closer in, you might not be able to see the small birthmark in the shape of an ‘h’ behind her left ear, the ‘h’ that made us choose the name Hailey rather than the Emily we had already decided on.

  Oscar clambers onto the seat next to his sister as I fill his bowl with Cheerios, adding milk and sugar before turning and beginning to make sandwiches for their lunchboxes.

  ‘Can we play Tumbling Monkeys?’ he asks through a mouthful of milk.

  ‘Mummy is busy,’ Hailey sighs. The butter knife clatters against the counter.

  Mummy is busy.

  How often have I said that? How often have I missed moments to play with my children because I’m putting the washing out or making the dinner or reading a magazine about celebrities that I will never meet? Why should I care if they have split up when I could be playing with my children, holding them, making them laugh?

  I hesitate, looking at the little Tupperware boxes waiting to be filled with nuts and seeds and dried fruit, looking at the pile of salad leaves, cucumber and ham. Is this more important than Tumbling Monkeys? I push the salad to one side, open the cupboard and reach for the chocolate spread, smearing it quickly over the bread and cutting it into uneven triangles. I wrap them in clingfilm, add crisps and an apple into their lunchboxes and turn towards them. Oscar has milk dribbling from his chin and Hailey is scooping out the raisins in her granola. Her systematic approach to eating has driven me to distraction before, but now . . . why shouldn’t she eat things in a certain order?

  I clap my hands together.

  ‘We can play a quick game before school if you get dressed as soon as you’ve finished your breakfast . . . what do you think?’

  ‘Yessss!’ He shovels in his food, milk splurging out of the corners of his mouth.

  ‘But what if we’re late for school?’ Hailey asks, anxiety creasing a path between her eyebrows.

  ‘We won’t be late . . . I promise.’

  But we are.

  I’m going to have to organise my precious time better than this.

  Chapter Two

  Ed

  I was eighteen the first time I saw Jen. It was for a minute, max. I was on the train and a bloke
was getting off with a bike. The noise of the handlebars had clattered against the doorway, bringing my attention away from the other side of the carriage where I had been studying a man’s tattoo that ran along his throat, it was either a fox or an angry cat. Once the man and bike had landed on the platform, there she was. Her mouth was slightly open – like she was about to say something – and her tongue was resting in front of the slight gap between her two front teeth: her Madonna look, she calls it. Her hair was wet from the rain pouring down and her mascara was smudged beneath her eyes. But then the doors closed and that was that . . . it was three years until I saw her again.

  During that time, she became a myth, a vision that I had built up in my head: The Perfect Woman. She became the star in ‘The Woman I’m Going to Marry’ story that I would regale over drinks in the student union bar. My mates used to get sick of hearing about the girl in the blue dress and, even though I’d never tell Jen this, I didn’t believe for one minute that I would ever actually marry her. I didn’t think I would be lucky enough.

  I came out of uni with a broken nose (a result of falling over a kerb while running down one of Nottingham’s high streets in a pair of gold Speedos), a mediocre degree in marketing and a questionable penchant for army jackets. I moved into a small flat above a bookie’s in town, let my dark blond hair grow into a tangle of curls and spent the next year trying and failing to find a job that I was good at. And then, on an unremarkable day, three remarkable things happened.

  Remarkable thing number one: I went into a florist’s.