Year three and JS is still keeping fit, whilst I am blobbing at home watching the Holy Quadruple of Soaps: Corrie, EastEnders, Emmerdale and Brookside. It’s not that I don’t want to keep fit, I just don’t want to leave our flat to do it.
But then I see an advert for a NordicTrack Ski Machine, a contraption that promises to not only tone and trim my bod, its silent glide mechanism means I can watch telly and keep fit. It’s made for small spaces too: the foxy chick in the advert demonstrates that with just one finger it will fold up to store neatly against a wall or under the bed. My husband is sceptical and refuses to pay. I am enthusiastic and happy to. It’s the perfect solution! Whilst he is schlepping to the gym in all weathers, I will be at home, gliding along, toning my abs whilst keeping abreast of Ken and Deirdre’s shenanigans.
I hated it.
It wasn’t silent, and instead of folding up with one finger, I had to beat and kick it into submission. Invariably I left it up, resulting in one or other of us tripping over it so it still got a kicking.
My dear friend and colleague, Karen, mentioned that her boyfriend (later husband) wanted a ski machine, but couldn’t afford one. I begged her to take it away. I didn’t want money; I just wanted it gone. In exchange, they gave us a bottle of champagne: 1989 Bollinger, an extraordinarily generous gesture given the state of their finances at the time.
Years passed and the champagne remained unopened. JS would sometimes slide it from the wine rack and I’d shake my head. ‘Let’s wait,’ I’d say. ‘For a special occasion.’
Then, tragically, Karen died within days of being admitted to hospital with excruciating back pains and uncontrollable vomiting following a miscarriage. It was undiagnosed cancer, a malignant melanoma that had spread like wildfire from a mole on her shoulder through her body to her brain. She was 33 and had worked with JS and me since she was 19. We were devastated.
Karen’s champagne became even more symbolic. For me, no occasion was ever special enough to pop its cork.
And then JS died.
After my husband’s death, I wept buckets over that unopened bottle of Bolly. JS was the type of man who would have opened it because it was Friday or sunny or because Arsenal had won. Why couldn’t I have seen that just being alive and with JS was the only reason I ever needed to open it? I had been waiting for some big flashy occasion to come along, when in fact life with him was the big occasion. And now we would never be able to drink Karen’s champagne together; that opportunity had been lost forever.
A couple of weeks ago saw a significant family birthday. I decided to take the champagne. It seemed right that it would be opened amongst people he loved and loved him. I also hoped it would chase the Regret Monster away.
Wrapped in a tea towel and with great ceremony, the bottle was opened, the contents poured.
Instead of straw-coloured fizz, it looked dark and cloudy, like urine from someone with a kidney infection. It smelt rank and tasted foul. We poured it down the sink.
Karen would laugh and say we should have opened it just because we could.
JS would be annoyed that it was a waste of what was once an excellent bottle of champagne.
But they are both gone. I hope that they are together, somewhere, looking out for each other.
I’m the one left weeping over the empty bottle as the Regret Monster digs its claws in ever deeper.
BEREAVEMENT BLING
After Mark’s suicide, I had to go and identify his body. I made sure I was in an outfit that Mark had always said was his favourite. The funeral was a woodland burial (neither of us are of religious) and was just going to be twelve of us around the grave drinking champagne and telling stories, no officials to oversee things, just Mark’s trusted circle. In preparation of the funeral, I went out with a friend and I bought the loveliest dress: floor length and bright colours and a teal cardigan to go with it. It was important that it wasn’t black and that Mark would have approved – it was his mission to get me out of black. We do these things to cope and get through. Who cares what they are and who cares what other people say. ~ Emma S
In May 2007, I was in a beauty salon in east Kent having a pedicure. It’s the type of salon where people drop in not just for a Brazilian, but a gossip. That Saturday, instead of the usual small-town tittle-tattle, there was only one subject on everyone’s lips: the disappearance of little Madeleine McCann from the villa in which she was sleeping, whilst on holiday in Portugal with her family.
The unanimous verdict of the women around me was that Kate McCann was undoubtedly involved in the disappearance of her daughter.
The evidence of Mrs McCann’s guilt was overwhelming and based on two counts: firstly, she had gone out running whilst her daughter was still missing, and secondly, she had changed her earrings.
What sort of a woman could find the energy to keep fit not knowing whether her daughter was dead or alive? How could she even think about putting on jewellery or brushing her hair at a time like that?
None of them had lost a child, but if they had, they knew for a fact that they would be in bed under sedation, not careering around the Algarve in running shorts. They certainly wouldn’t be bothered about their appearance.
Guilty! Guilty! Guilty!
I was reminded of this recently because I bought Kate McCann’s book, Madeleine; I had read an extract of the book in a newspaper where the McCanns talked about how valuable they found trauma counselling, and I wanted to read more about their experience. Kate McCann doesn’t write about her earrings, but she does talk about going running as a way of coping. But even if she had changed her jewellery, what did that prove?
In my experience, absolutely nothing.
The Monday after my husband’s Sunday morning accident, I went back to the hospital to register his death. The day before I had been wearing a bikini, flip flops and carrying a beach bag. I couldn’t help my outfit, but it all felt so wrong, so undignified. JS was an elegantly understated man who looked good in casual clothes, but was really more at home in the formality of a jacket and tie. Dead or alive, he deserved dressing up for. I put on a short, flippy dress that I had brought to wear to dinner, all the jewellery I had with me, some blusher; a slick of Bobbi Brown ‘Buff’ lipgloss and my pretty patent-leather ballet pumps.
With shaky legs and accompanied by the undertaker, I walked along those hot sticky corridors of the administration wing in the Queen Elizabeth Hospital in Bridgetown, towards the woman sitting at the desk who needed my signature confirming my husband had died. My world had ended. My life felt over. My heart was shattered. But to anyone looking at me, blinged-up and made-up, I probably looked as if I was ready for a good time.
Those women judging Kate McCann’s innocence or guilt on how she behaved and what she wore hadn’t got a clue. I suspected that the days when Mrs McCann was so physically sick and drained she couldn’t even get in the shower or change her clothes were yet to come, as they were yet to come for me.
CHAKRAS AND CARROT
CAKE: COUNSELLING
PART THREE
I went to one Mindfulness-based therapist who told me if I would only breathe and be present in the moment, I would realise that death was alright. Oh, how hard it was not to put my hand on his arm and tell him his lovely wife would not ever come home again, that she was at this very moment dead, and then ask him how serene his moment felt.