‘Mrs Hetherington?’ one of them said and his voice, when he spoke, was timid. He had chubby cheeks and his right eyebrow had thin stripes sliced through it. They must have been done with a razor, Carol thought.
‘Yes,’ she said, bracing herself. She honestly believed they were going to mug her. There’d been a gangland murder on the estate last year and she kept expecting to see them pull a knife.
‘We wanted to pay our respects,’ said the one with the fat cheeks, the phrase sounding stilted, as though he had been told what words to use.
His friend hung back, face shrouded by a baseball cap pushed low on his forehead. ‘Sorry for your loss.’ He handed over a beautiful bunch of hyacinths, wrapped tightly in Sellotaped brown paper. In the fleshy part between his thumb and forefinger, there was a small tattooed circle: half black, half white.
‘Thank you.’ She was so surprised she forgot to ask them in.
She still feels bad about that. She knows Derek would have ushered them in, told them to join everyone in the front room and got them to tell him about their lives. He was like that. No prejudice. Treated everyone the same.
When Derek was diagnosed with prostate cancer, it was the most awful thing that had ever happened to her. They were worried about how Vanessa would take it, of course, and about Archie, about how they would cope, but mostly they were pitched into a feverish, gnawing anxiety about what was going to happen when the two of them were parted. They had grown so used to each other, you see. Never been apart for more than a week.
‘Just relax, Mrs Hetherington,’ Stacey says again, her voice soft against the rising and swelling of tinkling water and rainforest sounds, piped in from the iPod in the corner of the room. ‘You’re carrying a lot of tension.’
As if tension could be carried. As if it were a bag of shopping, Carol thinks.
Derek had died in hospital. They hadn’t wanted it to end like that and she still can’t forgive herself for it. He’d asked to be discharged so that he could come home and die in his own bed and Carol had rushed back to Lebanon Gardens to get the house ready. She’d wasted her time doing silly things: putting flowers in a vase on the chest of drawers upstairs, cleaning the windows so that he’d have an unobstructed view of the tree-tops outside, buying a special tin of Fox’s chocolate biscuits even though he was hardly eating by then.
Why had she done all that? Why hadn’t she realised that the time they had left was so precious that she couldn’t afford to waste a single second of it?
Because, by the time she got back to the hospital, Derek had died. The Irish nurse, the nice one with the curly hair and fat arms, had been the one to tell her. And although, of course, she’d been expecting it, had been told again and again that Derek’s illness was terminal, that the chances of recovery were nil, that she had to prepare herself for the worst … when it happened, she was shocked.
‘He’s gone,’ the nurse said. ‘He died half an hour ago.’
Carol’s stomach curved in on itself, punched by some invisible hand. The beige-green hospital walls seemed to slide towards her, squeezing the air out of the strip-lit corridor. She tried to walk towards Derek’s bed but, instead of the solidity of the linoleum floor that she had been expecting, her foot slipped into nothing and she felt herself spiralling into space. The nurse steadied her, sat her down and told her to take her time but she couldn’t rest. She was desperate to see Derek, to hold his hand and tell him she loved him. Tell him she was sorry for not making it in time.
She pushed the nurse away, refusing the offer of sugary tea. She walked hurriedly down the corridor, balancing one hand against the wall to keep herself from falling. She convinced herself that if she got there quickly enough there would be something of him still alive, a hovering sense of Derekness, a lingering warmth in his heart like the coal-hot embers of a night-time fire. If she got there quickly enough, surely his soul would be waiting for her, resting for a while by the hospital bed until she arrived? She would still be able to feel Derek, wouldn’t she? Her love was too strong for him just to disappear, wasn’t it?
But when she saw him, she had to put a hand over her face to stop herself from crying out. She’d never seen a dead person before, never understood what it meant.
Because the figure in the bed looked like Derek but the essence of him, all those tiny movements that she’d never noticed before – the flicker of a look as she entered a room, the almost indiscernible curl of the lip, the placid sound of his inhalations, the steadiness of his touch as he reached out to take her hand – all of them had stopped, just like that. She realised – for the first time, she properly took it in – that she would never see any of it again.
And outside, birds cheeped, sirens sounded, a wind continued to blow and the world went on as normal without realising what had been lost. The enormity of it.
She stared at him and although she should have been devastated, although the tears should have been running down her cheeks, she caught herself thinking: So this is what a dead body looks like.
It was the shock, of course. It took a while to sink in.
Derek lay on his back, his mouth gaping open to reveal a black, still hole. His eyes were closed, the lids thin and papery. His skin had acquired an unnatural, waxy sheen. Liver spots crept across his naked scalp like lichen on a rock. She wanted to take his hand and yet something stopped her. This strange, stony presence was no longer her husband.
Part of her felt relief. She had been worried about burying the body, sending it into the ground and crushing the frail bones under 6 foot of soil. But she saw now that the physicality of Derek was relatively unimportant. It was what had been cradled within that counted.
‘OK, Mrs Hetherington, if I could just ask you to turn over onto your back …’ The therapist’s voice interrupts her thoughts. She shakes the idea of Derek from her mind. It is not good for her to dwell on the past, on what can’t be changed. Vanessa has been encouraging her to pick up her hobbies again and ring round a few of her Book Club friends. Her daughter has started staring at her sideways, with a crinkle above her nose and a concerned gaze. It is as if Vanessa is looking after her, whereas it should by rights be the other way round and Carol can’t get used to it. She feels patronised and quietly furious when she knows Vanessa is only trying to help.
‘It’ll do you good, Mum,’ has become her regular refrain. It’s what Carol used to say when Vanessa was a teenager, lolling about on the settee complaining she was bored, flicking through the TV channels even though it was a blazing sunny day outside.
Whenever she remembered the 1970s, it always seemed to be hotter.
‘Why don’t you go and play in the park?’ Carol would say. ‘Do you good.’
She’s dreading Archie becoming a sullen, moody adolescent. At twelve, he’s just on the cusp of it, but so far he is still the shiny happy boy he has always been. She worries, with Derek gone, that he’ll feel the lack of a male role model in his life. Vanessa is a single mother. Carol has never met Archie’s father – has never so much as heard mention of his name.
The main thing is that he seems to have settled into his new secondary school. Vanessa showed her Archie’s first report the other day and Carol couldn’t make head nor tail of it.
‘He’s got a lot of Cs, hasn’t he? That’s not like him.’
Vanessa bit her lip. She was impatient by nature, but her mother’s slowness always seemed to set her even more on edge than usual. ‘It just means he’s performing at a competent level. They don’t give As and Bs any more.’
‘Don’t they?’
‘No, Mum. It’s all numbers now. And a 7 is really good.’