Friends came to visit. So did Fiona, every day. Sometimes with her husband, occasionally with her children. Neither of these seemed to know how to deal with a grandma who was now no longer always smiling as she bustled around a kitchen filled with steam; and Mark — who Sheila privately thought was okay, though no John — stood around looking as if he could hear unanswered emails mounting up on his phone.
After the second week their visits tailed off, but Fiona kept popping in. She was a good daughter. She had a little of both parents in her, of course, and was unconsciously compensating for her father’s absence.
Sheila didn’t miss her husband’s efficiency, however. She missed him.
She missed the man.
After ten days Fiona brought up the idea of going to Brighton. ‘You always liked it there, Mum,’ she said. ‘I’ll come with you. I could do with a break and it’ll do you good to get out of this house. We could have tea at The Grand.’
She must have seen how horrified the idea made her mother. ‘I know it’ll be weird, without Dad,’ she added, quickly. ‘But you have to start making new memories. He wouldn’t have wanted you to just stop living.’
But Sheila didn’t want new memories. The idea of them made her furiously sad. What possible use could they be, if she couldn’t share them with John? What would she do with such memories? What would they be for?
Fiona dropped the subject, but three days later mentioned it again, in passing, careful to move the conversation on quickly afterwards. Her mother knew she was being ‘managed’ now, that the tactic was to drip-feed her until the idea became lodged, and came to seem reasonable, less of a denial of how the world had once stood. John had tried something similar with Sheila a few times, back in the early days. She had firmly put him right over it. He’d never tried it again. Fiona had yet to learn, evidently, that people aren’t as dim as you think they are, and that taking over her father’s role wasn’t as simple as downloading a backup of him from the ‘cloud’.
After Fiona had left, Sheila went and sat in her chair in the living room.
She had never realized how loudly the clock ticked.
The next morning a man called from the mobile phone company. He had an Indian accent but said his name was Bob. He had great news about their phone contract.
‘My husband deals with all that,’ Sheila said, before she had time to realize what she was saying.
Bob cheerfully asked if he could talk to her husband, then. Sheila said that would not be possible, and put the phone down.
When Fiona popped in later she could tell something was wrong, but her mother wouldn’t tell her what it was. She stayed a little longer than usual, as if hoping that would wear her mother down. It did not. Sheila felt sad, yes: today she felt wretched. That did not mean she had reverted to being a child. Dimly she sensed it was important that her daughter understand this, too, and before it was too late - that the road to role reversal between the generations was far more of a one-way street than it ever had been between the sexes.
Just before she went, Fiona mentioned that she’d heard a new bistro had opened down on the sea front in Brighton. Locally-sourced food, all organic.
‘Hmm,’ her mother said. She had not felt hungry for several days.
That night there didn’t seemed to be anything on television. Sheila had adopted a temporary policy of not watching the shows she and John used to enjoy together. Not for ever, just for now. Settling down in front of University Challenge or that cook they liked, Rick Stein, was simply not a tolerable prospect.
Unfortunately all of the other television seemed to have been made with someone different to Sheila in mind. She watched almost a whole episode of what was evidently supposed to be a comedy without feeling moved to smile. This wasn't because she was grieving. It was because it wasn’t funny. When something wasn’t funny and you were watching it with someone, you could enjoy not finding it funny together. By yourself, it simply wasn't funny.
Although everyone in the audience seemed to be laughing.
For a moment Sheila felt very afraid, wondering if the show was funny after all but she was unable to see it. She’d always known what funny was. She and John used to make each other laugh all the time. Even in bed. But what if that hadn’t been her?
She used to say things that would make John laugh, but what if it was his laughter that made them funny, rather than what she said? What if — without realizing it — she’d left all of that to him, too?
Half an hour later she found herself upstairs, outside the little office. The door was open and the filing cabinet was visible. It was a murky green color, with beige drawers. John bought it from a catalogue and for years afterwards they got a laugh out of an occasional update arriving at their door, addressed to “The Office Furniture Buyer”. John would open up the kitchen waste bin, bend down and call “More post for you, Cyril...” and drop the catalogue in.
Their mobile phone contract would be in the cabinet somewhere. Sheila knew she didn’t have to look for it. She understood that any news “Bob” might have had for her would have been nothing more than a covert means of getting her to upgrade, or committing herself to a longer contract with the same provider. A history of leaving things to someone else didn’t make her a complete dimwit.
It seemed important, however. It felt symbolic of something. It was a useful test case, too. If Bob or one of his familiars called back, she could hear him out — armed with the relevant documentation — and simply say “No, thank you,” if she so chose. There was nothing to lose.
She walked into the office and up to the cabinet. She put her hand on it. The metal felt cool to the touch. It was strange. Despite the fact that John would have had far more contact with other objects in the room — the desk, the chair, his biros on the little pot — the cabinet felt like the essence of the space.
She opened the top drawer. It was easier than she’d thought it would be. Not just that she was able to reach out and do it, but also because it slid out faster and more smoothly than she'd anticipated.
Ka-thunk, it went. It was a capable sound.
The smell of old papers wafted out. Each drop file had a neat plastic tag at the top, arranged so as to progress from left to right, all visible at once. Each one held a tiny rectangle of paper in John’s extremely legible capitals, saying things like CAR, KITCHEN, and MEDICAL. Big nouns, concrete and abstract. The building blocks, tangible or otherwise, of a life lived.
Sheila ran her hand over the top of the files, causing some to open a little. Many pieces of paper lay within. Letters, receipts, contracts. Even though a lot of them presumably related to things she was still using, she had never seen anything that looked so dead. Deader even than John. He at least still lived — to some degree — in her mind. These things... they were just dead.
She closed the drawer, not having been able to spot a tag that related to mobile phones, and feeling neither inclined nor strong enough to work through the contents of all the drop files one by one.
She opened the second drawer. This didn’t come so easily. Perhaps the mechanism had rusted, or a piece of paper inside had become caught. She pulled harder, and it eventually withdrew.
It wasn’t just a mechanical problem, however. She was crying now. Crying hard enough that all of the energy in her body seemed focused on yanking muscles tightly in the wrong directions, stretching the tendons in her throat. There was little power left for anything else.
She dragged her sleeve across her eyes and forced herself to read the tags in this drawer.
GAS & ELECTRICITY. BROADBAND. TAX. She couldn’t imagine why she would ever, ever want to open drop files labeled thus. There were more, but still not the one she was looking for.
She pushed the drawer. It suddenly slammed shut, far more easily than it had opened. The noise scared and unnerved her.
She reached down and took hold of the handle on the lowest drawer. She pulled, but nothing happened. She tugged, with all her might, but it would not ope
n.
It wasn’t locked - it gave a little - but there was evidently something jammed in it, stopping the drawer from sliding out more than about half an inch. A few more half-hearted yanks at it achieved nothing. She stopped.
She’d tried. Evidently the drawer was broken.
She left the room and went back downstairs. Later she went to bed and lay there, sleepless, for several hours. What if he’d been wrong?
What if everything she needed wasn’t in there?
What then?
Fiona’s visit next day was a fly-by, mid-morning, on her way to some meeting or other. She seemed distracted at first, as if these daily visits to her mother — never part of their routine before John’s death — were beginning to feel a little like... not a chore, exactly, but an errand secondary to the main order of business.
Sheila caught herself thinking this and felt depressed and sad. Not at the thought, but at herself for entertaining it. That wasn’t how Fiona would be feeling, and Sheila knew it. Fiona was busy. Her life went on, as all lives must. The dead die in order to remind us how non-dead are the lives of those who remain; we have children to provide us with role models to remind us the way we think now is not the only way to think. Fiona was not “distracted”, merely a woman leading her own life, one that currently involved the death of her father and dealing with a grieving mother, but which also still held commitments to the living and to the future.
Sheila understood this. But still, when Fiona dropped a mention of how The Grand in Brighton was doing out-of-season deals, it was all she could do to turn away, and remain silent, rather than saying something she would have regretted.
Mid-afternoon, Bob rang again. Actually he said his name was Kevin this time but he appeared to be fundamentally the same person. He also wanted to talk to her about her mobile phone contract. Sheila did not say that John dealt with those things. She told him instead that she was unable to find their phone contract. The man assured her that this was not a problem, not in the slightest, and that the great offers he wished to make available to her were not dependent upon it.
Sheila listened for a few moments but then gently put the phone down. Of course it mattered whether she could find the contract. Otherwise why would they have such things?
She spent the rest of the afternoon in her chair in the sitting room, in silence. She was waiting for something. What, she didn’t know.
Later, she stood in front of the window onto the garden, watching twilight darken and fade. When it was properly dark, she went upstairs.
This time she looked through the top cabinet properly, searching each drop file. Although she found many, many pieces of paper — John had obviously maintained a policy of retaining absolutely everything, even for appliances she knew for a fact had gone to the great dump in the sky many years previously — there was nothing in there about their mobile phones.
She closed the drawer. She realized it was now after nine in the evening. She realized also that she hadn’t eaten anything for dinner. Or lunch. She couldn’t remember the last time she’d drunk anything, either.
Had she made tea again after Fiona left, late morning? She wasn’t sure. She didn’t think so.
She felt dry, and tired, but knew that she had to do this, and do it tonight.
The second drawer was as hard to pull out as it had been the night before. She still couldn’t work out why, and tonight at least she wasn’t crying. It simply didn’t slide properly. She searched through all of the files, going straight to BROADBAND to begin with, as it had occurred to her that whoever was supplying them/her with that service might be in the market to sell mobile phones too, and John might have taken advantage of some special deal or other (he had always read direct mail diligently, rather than throwing it away, in case they were offering something worth having. Sheila had never understood how he was able to tell if something was worth having or not).
Their Internet supplier apparently did not also provide their mobile phones. Neither did anyone else in any of the second drawer’s drop files. By the time she was only halfway through it Sheila’s back was aching. She pulled John’s old chair over from the desk, but it didn’t help much. For the last few files she was leaning her elbows on the sides of the drawer. Her stomach had stopped growling some while ago, as if it had lost faith. Her mouth was arid. When she blinked she could hear the lids scrape across her eyeballs, or it seemed like she could. She felt a little light-headed as she sat upright. It didn’t matter. She could have a snack afterward if she felt like it. The clock on the desk said it was now well after eleven, in fact coming up for midnight. The house was silent and cold around her.
That made no difference. She was finishing this tonight. She had to find the thing, and if everything she needed was in here, then here was where it had to be.
She closed the second drawer.
Ten minutes later she was crying. She didn’t know whether the tears were of grief or frustration or both and it didn’t matter. What mattered was that she couldn’t open the bottom drawer. As with the night before, it would slide out about a centimeter but then come no further. She’d gone down on hands and knees in front of it, holding the handle with both hands, and pulled with all her might. She’d got one of the pens from the desk and poked it through the gap at the top, running it right along the edge in the hope of dislodging anything that might be obstructing it within. She done that one way, then the other, then back - faster and faster, until a combination of despair and fury broke the pen into three pieces.
She’d broken a pen that John had used to write things and sign things, but achieved nothing else.
She tugged at the handle some more. She hit the drawer with her fists. Her tears were constant now, and she felt dizzy and her head was aching. The room seemed to sway as she pushed herself back up to her feet.
‘You said it would be in here,’ she shouted, catching herself unawares. She’d had no idea she was going to say anything, much less shout it. ‘YOU SAID THIS HAD EVERYTHING I NEED.’
She kicked the drawer, hard, and then again, heedless of the pain in her toes. She relished it, in fact, bitterly triumphant at being able to make herself feel something, at breaking out of the endless grey fog. She felt even dizzier now but didn’t care — she believed she’d finally understood what people feel in the moment before they end it all, a kind of frantic glee, a rich dedication to self-harm and self-destruction and to the realization that none of it mattered and you could just keep escalating the pain until it exploded into silence.
She pulled her foot back, screaming incoherently, and kicked the drawer with all her force.
There was a soft thunk.
Sheila froze. The sound hadn't been loud, but it cut through the haze all the same.
Something had happened inside the drawer. Something had been dislodged or freed.
She lurched back toward the cabinet and leaned down, panting. She grasped the handle. She pulled. It slid open smoothly.
John was inside. He was bent and folded and turned over on himself, like a blanket stuffed into a too-small drawer. He had been so very thin at the end. His head seemed to lie on top of the rest of him, top toward the front, face pointing upwards. His eyes were open.
They swiveled to look at her. ‘Hello, dear,’ he said.
Sheila fell to her knees, reaching for him. She tried to pull him out but he was too tightly jammed into the drawer. There was no way of ever getting him out.
She gave up trying, and though her eyes were so tear-blurred she could barely see, she saw him start to smile in the same old way as she leaned over to bring her lips down toward his mouth.
She woke the following morning in her bed. When she remembered what had happened she got up, wrapped her robe around her, and went through to the office. The bottom drawer was shut. She knelt down in front of it and pulled, gently, not expecting it to open.
But it did. It was empty inside but for ten hanging files. Each had a plastic tag at the top, but no label.
She flicked slowly through them.
In the last she found a single index card. She took it out and found something written in John’s handwriting. Not as she remembered it from their first letters to each other, or on so many birthday and Christmas cards, but as it had become in the final months, in the last days. Weaker, but defiantly neat, and still characteristically his.
‘For your filing,’ the note said. ‘Put everything you need in here. Love, J.’
Fiona arrived at mid-day, this time bearing lunch from Marks & Spensers. She looked tired. Sheila helped her unwrap the sandwiches in silence, and then the two of them stood side by side for a few moments, looking out at the street outside.
‘I don’t want to go to The Grand for tea, not this time,’ Sheila said. ‘Let’s try the Metropole instead.’
Fiona turned to her and smiled, properly, for the first time since her father died.
Bob rang again, in the afternoon. This time he was called Justin. He still had a great new offer to discuss.
Sheila told him to bugger off.
The Darkening Tree
So meet me there
Under the Darkening Tree
I'll tell you everything I know.
Bring plenty of wine
And promise this time
That you'll never have to go.
The nights are long
But the days are much longer
Because no-one else can see me —
Everything You Need Page 28