After You'd Gone

by Maggie O'Farrell

  Upstairs, Lucifer is asleep on the bed in a tight ball, his tail curled over his face. Alice runs her hand over the warmth of his fur and he makes a sleepy, unintelligible sound to acknowledge her.

  She takes two deep, shuddering breaths, feeling the familiar, sickening waves of grief begin to roll over her. The first tears fall on the cat’s fur before she curls up on the bed next to him. He opens his green eyes a crack and watches as she sobs, fingers pressed into her mouth. The bed shakes. From under her pillow, Alice pulls a T-shirt of John’s, which still smells of him, and she crushes it to her face.

  An English teacher at school once said to her, ‘Alice, one thing I hope you never find out is that a broken heart hurts physically.’ Nothing she has ever experienced has prepared her for the pain of this. Most of the time her heart feels as though it’s waterlogged and her ribcage, her arms, her back, her temples, her legs all ache in a dull, persistent way: but at times like this the incredulity and the appalling irreversibility of what has happened cripple her with a pain so bad she often doesn’t speak for days.

  Later, she gets up and moves about the room, performing small tasks to look after herself: she dries her tears and throws the used tissues into the bin with a wet, sodden thud; she gets a drink of water, takes a paracetamol, lights her oil burner and straightens the duvet cover, tucking John’s T-shirt carefully back under the pillow. She runs a bath and cries a little more when she is lying in the steam. The weekends are the worst: long clods of time on her own. His death has rendered everything else unimportant, so whatever she tries to fill her time with — books, films, seeing people - seems irrelevant and trivial.

  She dries herself slowly with a thick towel. Her skin feels dry and parched, as if all the tears she’s cried in the last four months have made it arid, dried it out. In her dressing-gown she goes downstairs and makes a sandwich. She eats it standing up, still not having the strength to eat at the table alone, forcing herself to swallow the lumps of bread that taste like ash. The house is utterly silent apart from the noise of her own half-hearted chewing. She wants to die.

  Ben stood alone outside the ticket office, peering at his watch, on average, every three minutes. He didn’t look at the red digital clock on the board, not entirely trusting it — his own watch was accurate, he knew that. He wound it every day. It was the first thing he did in the morning. They’d missed two trains now and he didn’t want to miss this one, didn’t want to spend another night in this city. He wanted to be at home again, wanted to have his daughter at home with them, sleeping upstairs in her old room, away from this place. What he wanted most of all, of course, he reminded himself, was for this never to have happened.

  He saw Ann hurrying across the station and he stood straighter, extending his arm, waving. ‘Ann! Over here!’

  His lips felt cracked and he licked them. She didn’t smile as she moved towards him. He searched her face, curious despite himself about what it must be like to have to identify a body. Ann had insisted that she did it — Alice was in no fit state, she’d told him, in a brief, whispered consultation they’d had in Alice’s hallway that morning. Rachel had offered, but Ann said no, she was doing it. Rachel hadn’t argued, and neither had Ben. What was it like, he wanted to ask. Was it definitely, definitely him? There’d been no mistake? Why had it taken so long and what did it . . . what did he . . . what in God’s name did it look like?

  Ann reached his elbow and seemed to be ignoring him, looking about her, twisting round and looking over her shoulder. ‘Where’s Alice?’ she demanded. A muscle just below her eye kept twitching, making her eye jerk. Ben watched it, fascinated. ‘How was it?’ he asked, resting his hand on her arm. Was it awful, he wanted to say. I’m sorry if it was awful. She shook him off. ‘Where is Alice?’ she repeated.

  Ben shrugged. ‘She went to the newsagent’s, I think.’

  ‘For Christ’s sake,’ she exploded, ‘how could you be so stupid?’

  They found her standing in front of the newspaper stand, her hands held over her face. Hordes of people wove their way round her, some staring at her curiously. On the front page of every newspaper was a picture of the bombed building and headlines in fat, black letters: ‘Bodies found in the wreckage’, ‘The undiscovered dead of the east London bomb’.

  They each took one of her arms and guided her between them to the waiting train.

  What are you supposed to do with all the love you have for somebody if that person is no longer there? What happens to all that leftover love? Do you suppress it? Do you ignore it? Are you supposed to give it to someone else?

  I never knew it was possible to think about someone all of the time, for someone to be always doing acrobatic leaps across your thoughts. Everything else was an unwelcome distraction from what I wanted to think about.

  I knew I should have cleared out his things. Anything that had touched his body was unbearable. His computer and fax machine I gave away to his friends. Two of them shuffled into the house, large and sheepish, picking up the boxes and taking them out to the car, slamming their car boots down on top of them. I think they felt obliged to stay for a while, so they sat with me at the kitchen table, swallowing rapid gulps of scalding tea, asking me hesitant questions, avoiding the subject of John. When it was time to go, they stood up with some relief.

  On my way from the house to the tube station, I passed several charity shops and I kept steeling myself to take all his stuff in there. There was even one weekend when I opened the doors of our wardrobe resolutely, preparing to dispatch all his clothes to Oxfam on Camden High Street. But when I inhaled the scent of him that escaped from the folds and weave of the material, I knew I could never do it. I’ve never been able to think of those charity shops in the same way: how they must be full of the outflows of tragedy and loss.

  Rachel rummaged in her bag for the sun cream. ‘Alice.’ She nudged the inert form at her side. ‘Alice!’

  Alice sat up and pushed her sunglasses on to the top of her head. ‘What?’

  ‘Put some of this on or you’ll burn.’

  Rachel watched her squeeze some cream on to her palm and smear it with her other hand over her shoulders and arms. They were sitting in the long grass on Parliament Hill. It was the first day of the year that had real heat in the sun. Above them, the stunt kites of the kite fanatics, who were attracted by the cross-breezes of this hill, zoomed and criss-crossed the expanse of blue sky.

  ‘Tell me how you are,’ Rachel said.

  ‘I’m fine.’ Alice didn’t meet her eye, but fiddled with the top of the sun-cream bottle.

  Rachel snatched it out of her hand. ‘Don’t bullshit me, Raikes. Fine? How can you be fine? You look like you haven’t slept for a month and you must weigh about seven stone.’ Alice sighed and said nothing. The Bathing Pond glittered in the distance.

  ‘You know,’ continued Rachel, ‘if you want to tell me to mind my own business or you want to talk endlessly about John, or if you want to scream and shout a lot, that’s OK. Just don’t tell me you’re fine.’

  Alice smiled faintly. ‘OK. You really want to know?’

  ‘I really want to know.’

  ‘I’m dreadful.’

  ‘How dreadful?’

  ‘Just . . . dreadful . . .’ Alice banged her balled-up fist into the grass. ‘I miss him. I miss him. I miss him. He’s gone. He’s dead. I can’t believe it, I don’t want to believe it.’ She broke off. Rachel hugged her and Alice cried into her shoulder. ‘I’m sorry,’ she said, between sobs.

  ‘Don’t be ridiculous.’

  Alice pulled away and sat up straight, ‘It’s just all so . . . shit, Rach. I know it will get easier in time, but it’s just so awful . . . and exhausting and relentless and ... I just can’t face life without him ... I can’t sleep at night because he’s not there and I can’t get up in the morning because he’s not there and there just seems ... no point in doing anything — in getting dressed, in going to work, in carrying on, in being brave because . . . he’s not there
. One day he was . . . and then he wasn’t . . . and it’s all so unfair, it’s so unjust . . . And people say to me, oh, you’re young, you’ll get over it and you’ll meet someone else, but the idea of being with anyone else is just hideous . . . It’s a travesty . . . because all I want is him and I can’t have him and never will be able to . . .I’m just so tired, Rach ... I’m tired of carrying this weight around with me. I’m so used to being happy and now I’ve just got this huge, crushing weight of grief in my chest . . . and I’m so furious ... I’m fucking furious that it was him and not someone else . . . and I’m furious with him . . . for leaving me . . . and I know it’s ridiculous but I’m angry with him for not picking up a fucking paper in the fucking office like he should have done . . . and if he had, he’d be alive ... he wouldn’t have been in the newsagent’s in the first place . . . He might even be here now on this rug with us . . . and that’s just unbearable . . . that it was all so random and it could have been anyone but it was him . . .’ Alice stopped at the sound of feet swishing in the grass. She wiped her face hastily with her hands. A woman and a small child walked past: the child dangled on the end of her arm and kept twisting back to look at them. ‘Mummy, why is that lady crying?’ Her clear, high voice was carried back to them.

  The mother jerked on her small arm to pull her round and whispered something in her ear. ‘But why?’ she said again. The mother picked her up and carried her away; the fragile blonde head bobbed against her shoulder. Alice watched them, her shoulders slumped, her whole being drained and exhausted from her outburst. ‘And that’s the other thing,’ she said dully.

  ‘What?’

  ‘John wanted a baby. He kept dropping hints and then eventually came out and said it. 1 laughed and said, no way mate . . . He was disappointed, but tried not to show it . . . We talked about it again, and I said maybe in a year or so, but I was just putting it off because I didn’t really want one at all . . . and then he died . . . and do you know I want that baby so much now I just can’t stand it . . . Sometimes I think I’m grieving for that child as much as I am for him ... 1 was so stupid, so unbelievably, ridiculously, selfishly stupid . . . because if I had ... I’d have it now ... I’d have something lasting of his . . . I’d have John’s child for ever . . . and instead I don’t have the baby and I don’t have him and it’s just me rattling around in that house.’

  ‘You never told me you wanted a baby.’

  ‘Well, I didn’t. Not then. I had no urge to have one at all — quite the opposite. I kind of always thought we’d have one eventually and that . . . we had all the time in the world to think about it . . .’

  Alice fell silent and held her head in her hands. Rachel waited until the steady drip-drip of tears had abated. Just above their heads, the kites dipped and soared.

  ‘Anything else?’

  Alice blew her nose. ‘I’m so sorry.’

  ‘For what?’

  ‘For going on like that.’

  Rachel gave her a gentle slap on the leg. ‘Yeah, you’re so boring with your trivial problems. Look, don’t you even dare to suggest that you shouldn’t tell me these things. I want to do something to help, do you understand?’

  Alice nodded. ‘Thanks. You’re good to me.’

  ‘Oh, be quiet. Don’t go all maudlin on me. Where’s that wine you brought?’

  Alice gripped the bottle between her knees and eased out the cork. It came out with a loud pop. Two of the kite fanatics turned round disapprovingly.

  ‘Cheers!’ Rachel shouted rudely. They turned away hurriedly. Rachel turned back to Alice. ‘Can you imagine what it would be like to go out with someone who spent his whole weekend up here holding on to a piece of string?’

  ‘Shush,’ Alice smiled, ‘they’ll hear you. Anyway, it’s really good, kite-flying. You should try it.’

  ‘Don’t tell me you do it too. I don’t want to know.’

  ‘I have done it. John gave me a kite.’

  ‘Alice, I’m sorry, I didn’t mean . . .’

  ‘No, no, it’s OK. It was ... is, I mean - it’s still hanging by the front door for all I know . . . It’s a small red one with two strings. We used to fly it together sometimes. I loved it. I wasn’t very good, though. I tended to get too excited and lose concentration, but it’s an amazing feeling. Really exhilarating. ’

  Rachel rolled over on to her stomach and lit a cigarette. ‘Well, I’ll take your word for it.’ She looked over at Alice. ‘Hey, maybe that’s what you need.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘A bit of exhilaration. Maybe you should fly your kite

  Alice shook her head. ‘No. I don’t think so.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘I couldn’t imagine doing it without him.’

  ‘I’m sure it would be OK. It might do you good.’

  ‘There are some things you can’t do on your own, Rach. Kite-flying’s one of them. You need someone to stand there and throw it into the air, and I wouldn’t want to put you through that. I know you’d hate it.’ Alice handed her a glass of wine. ‘What are we drinking to?’

  Rachel held up her glass. ‘To John.’

  Before this, I used to try to work out how long I might live. Maybe I’d contract a terrible disease in my thirties and die. Or I could be struck down by lightning before I reached my forty-fifth birthday, or be in an air crash, or a car crash, or perish as the random victim of a madman.

  But diseases, lightning and madmen aside, I could realistically live until I was seventy or eighty. Longer, perhaps. I couldn’t believe I was going to live for all that time. I would find them incomprehensible — those fifty or so years stretching out before me that I would have to live without you. What was I going to do to fill them? It seemed cruel to me that I was so healthy, so alive, so seemingly indestructible when your life had been so easily and so randomly severed.

  I was puzzled by those women in previous centuries dying of broken hearts, taking to their beds and just fading away. That’s what I wanted: I desired nothing more than to lie down and let life ebb from me. I couldn’t believe it when, every morning, I opened my eyes and felt it surging through me like sap through a tree — that aliveness, that undeniable force of existence. The beat of my heart, the swell of my lungs, the stiffness in my muscles that was telling me, despite everything, to get up, use my legs, stretch my arms.

  And even now, after I stepped into the path of a car — a two-tonne hammer of steel, chrome and reinforced glass, travelling at a hurtling velocity — my body still clings to life, and I find myself suspended like Persephone between two states. I can’t say which one I want. Death seems difficult and elusive to me.

  Beth is having difficulty equating Alice, the person she saw only two days ago, with this inert life-sized doll in the bed. Her skin has a waxy, unreal look to it. They are told all the time in medical training, don’t get emotionally involved with a patient, think of them as a bundle of symptoms, but how does it work if the patient’s your sister?

  The whole hospital smells of sickly antiseptic and reheated food — it’s a smell she’ll need to get used to. Her parents sit side by side on the only chairs in the room. They are quibbling about where to eat tonight: her mother just cannot bear the canteen food for one more night. Ben is saying that he agrees but he doesn’t know anywhere to go in London.

  ‘Why don’t we ask someone if there’s anywhere near here we could go?’ Beth suggests.

  They break off their discussion and look at her, as if surprised that she might have had a good idea.

  ‘Yes, but who?’ Ann says.

  ‘We could ask the nurse,’ Ben says.

  ‘Which nurse?’

  ‘The tall one.’

  ‘I don’t like the tall one.’

  ‘OK. The younger one, then.’

  ‘The younger one with bleached hair? Do you think she’d know? I’m not sure she would, Ben.’

  Beth looks down at Alice, circling her wrist with her fingers. Alice’s pulse moves under her hand. She’s read that
people in comas are often conscious of things being said and done around them. What would Alice think if she heard what was going on right now? She’d shout at them to hurry up and make a decision, for heaven’s sake, it’s not that important.

  ‘Alice?’ Beth whispers. ‘Can you hear them? They’re arguing about restaurants.’

  Can Alice hear them? Her face is expressionless. She looks dead, Beth thinks, Alice looks dead. Beth has seen dead bodies, opened them up with a scalpel as if it were the handle of a zip that ran down their skin; she’s had her hands inside the bodies of dead people, she’s lifted the heart out of the body of a thirty-one-year-old man and it was heavy and she needed two hands. Alice looks dead to her, but she knows this can’t be because she herself can see the ventilator moving and the ECG drawing the wave-like contractions of her heart in a green electronic pulse. But Alice has that bloodless, ceraceous look that Beth knows now. It makes a wave of panicky desperation hit her. She finds she wants to shake this figure on the bed.

  ‘I’ve never liked Mexican food,’ her mother is saying, ‘you know that.’

  The door opens behind Beth and she turns. Her parents are silenced. A slightly shabby doctor with a pen behind his ear is standing in the doorway. ‘Hi,’ he says. ‘How are you all?"

  ‘Hello,’ Ben says, ‘we’re fine. This is my youngest daughter, Beth.’

  The doctor comes into the room very slowly, and stands beside the bed, looking into Alice’s face for a long time. Then he turns and looks at Beth. He’s in his mid-thirties, maybe younger, and has dark rings under his eyes. ‘Beth,’ he repeats, in a thoughtful way, ‘the medical student, right?’

  Beth sees that he has his hand over Alice’s in a rather intimate way, and wants to dash it away. How dare this man touch her sister? Alice would hate this man, suss him instantly as a pseud and a lech, and have nothing to do with him. Beth faces him, Alice between them, and puts on what Alice calls her Miss Jean Brodie voice: ‘That’s right. And you are . . . ?’

  The man just nods. Ben shuffles forward. ‘This is Dr Colman, Beth. He’s been looking after Alice.’