How I Lose You

by Kate McNaughton

  And Adam had walked into the bedroom.

  ‘How’d’s it feel, then?’

  ‘Wonderful. It’s so firm. And so wide.’ She’d stretched out her arms and legs in all directions to illustrate her point.

  ‘Well, I’m glad to hear it was worth the trouble, because getting it in here nearly broke my back.’

  ‘Oh dear. Does it still hurt?’

  ‘Nah, I think I’m OK now.’

  And, to illustrate his point, Adam had flung himself into a nosedive. He had landed heavily next to her, and the bed had emitted a loud crack, and suddenly they had both found themselves lying at a thirty-degree angle to the floor.

  ‘Oh fuck. Fuck. Fuck.’

  ‘Oh my God, Adam, you’ve broken our bed!’

  ‘Fuck.’

  Eva had scrambled to her feet to examine the damage.

  ‘Fuck.’

  ‘Oh, actually, I think it’s just a screw came loose.’

  ‘Fuck.’

  ‘It’s OK, Ad, it looks totally fixable.’

  ‘No, I – can’t move. Back.’

  ‘Oh, you’re kidding me.’

  ‘No, seriously, I’ve done my back in.’

  She had helped him turn gingerly from his face-down position and get up on to his feet. Adam had stood, slightly bent, wincing with every movement he made, watching her as she had tried to fix the bed.

  ‘I’m not going to be able to do this on my own. I can’t lift the frame and screw the legs back on at the same time.’

  ‘Sorry.’

  ‘You really are a ninny.’

  ‘I know.’

  ‘Oh well. Let’s leave it till tomorrow. More importantly, what are we going to do about you?’

  ‘Could you fetch me an Ibuprofen? Sorry.’

  ‘Anything for you, my love.’

  And so they had spent their first night in their new home sleeping on the sofa bed, Adam flat on his back and waking intermittently with a whimper of pain. Eva remembered feeling oddly comforted by the whole situation, despite being made to share Adam’s restlessness: it was as though on this, their first night in the home they had bought together, Fate had thrown them a small test, and they had proved themselves resilient, humorous, loving, in the face of this minor conjugal setback.

  Now, the sounds from the bathroom stopped, and there Adam was in the doorway, looking at her again, gloriously naked. She grinned as he started tugging at her belt buckle.

  ‘What are you smirking at?’

  She laughed. He laughed too.

  ‘What are you laughing at, eh?’

  ‘Nothing … I just love you right now.’

  The bed lost its anchor. Adam’s overambitious earlier snort of cocaine had left him impotent, but it made the moment sweeter, turned them into partners in the crime of their own ineptitude, Adam flopping around and Eva swaying between bursts of energy and inebriated laziness. Eventually, tiredness got the better of them and, unfinished but content, they drifted off to sleep. Their last words to each other were ‘good night’.

  She couldn’t remember why she had woken up. Was it her mouth, pasty from dehydration, calling for water, or had she perhaps knocked against him in her sleep, or even without knocking against him, sensed his unnerving stillness? From this point on, her memory is strange, disjointed, a jumble of images that are unbearable in their clarity and yet refuse to fit together into a coherent whole.

  She lies on her back, still – so very still – and she holds her breath. The silence is unbearable. She has never felt such sheer panic. How can her body be so still, how can he be so still?

  Why can’t I hear him breathing?

  ‘Adam?’

  She can feel centuries of wisdom inside her now, an instinct which she shares with birds and ants and lions and reptilian creatures wading through primaeval muck, with all living beings that are and have been: the sense that, though she has not moved, though she has not yet seen, heard or touched anything, though nothing confirms it …

  And she cannot move. She cannot disrupt this peaceful stillness, this moment that might still be the two of them lying side by side, warm, comfortable, secure.

  ‘Adam?’

  Her voice catches around the word. It doesn’t sound like her own.

  Her hand reaches out to touch him. His skin is lukewarm, his flesh still giving slightly under pressure but already growing firmer, as though the life has not yet entirely drained out of it, as though maybe she can grab hold of bits of it before they all slip away.

  She thinks of how this normally feels, his body baked by their thick duvet like new bread, so hot sometimes she has to move away from it.

  And she knows, but doesn’t want to know, she can’t be sure, can she, without a doctor or something?

  ‘Adam?’

  There is a crack in her voice now, a note of hysteria, like the first spluttering drops of a geyser.

  Wake up. Turn towards me. You’ve been doing it for years. You must be able to do it now.

  My beautiful, beautiful man. Your hips so slim, I always thought they made you seem a bit fragile. But your arms are strong, especially when they hold me.

  How am I going to tell your parents?

  She remembers the motions from a first-aid course: feel for the pulse.

  I’ll have to call them. And what will I say?

  Check the mouth for obstructions. Tilt the head back.

  And dinner with Bill tomorrow. We’ll have to call them to cancel. I’ll have to call them. And what will I say?

  Pinch the nose.

  What will your parents say?

  But first you have to call an ambulance, before you do anything else you must call an ambulance, if you are on your own you must call an ambulance before you do anything else. Does she scream as she calls the ambulance? She thinks she might. They are so slow at the other end of the line, so calm, asking so many questions.

  I’ll never see your eyes again.

  Am I screaming?

  What will I do?

  Call the ambulance, then place your mouth over his, sealing it completely, and blow in, two breaths to thirty pumps of the heart, pumping firmly, with both hands pressing down on the middle of the chest.

  Who will iron my bed sheets now?

  How can you do this to me?

  With the first breath she breathes into him, he lets out a low gargling sound, and she pauses in wild hope, but is faced only with stillness, and realizes that it was simply the mechanical rattle of air passing through his voicebox.

  I’ll never feel your arms hold me again.

  How can you do this to me?

  You can’t do this to me.

  Apparently your hair and nails do not immediately stop growing. She looks at them and thinks that they are still alive, and what does this mean?

  We made a promise to each other. We got married. You can’t do this to me.

  How much does she scream? She feels as though she is screaming all the time, but she can’t be because she is breathing into him and she can hear his death rattle.

  You can’t do this. You’re my Adam, and when people joked about it, when we joked about it, Adam and Eva, I laughed, but secretly I knew it meant that we had to be together and that we’d always be together, you can’t do this to me, how can you do this to me.

  My beautiful Adam. You will stay like this, beautiful, thirty-one years old, a man in the prime of his life, while the years make me old and wizened, and what will we do then? We’ll be completely unsuited to each other.

  You can’t do this to me.

  Her memory is even more laconic after they arrive. A paramedic takes over the pumping. She sits alone in the living room. There is a policeman. A doctor shakes his head apologetically. Adam is carried down the stairs to the ambulance and she realizes that they will have put him into a bodybag and she doesn’t want to see it so she shuts her eyes, but she does it a little too late, or maybe curiosity gets the better of her, and she glimpses the black plastic encasing his unwieldy fo
rm, and that image will never leave her now.

  And then the phone calls, first to his parents, to hers, then to Carmen, to Henry, then to countless others, the endless phone calls reaching out to an infinite web of people, and those people start arriving, crowding around her, the people and the phone calls, as though she were not now completely alone in the world.

  THEY’LL NEVER TELL you this, but life isn’t what it seems. Time isn’t what it seems. When you lose the man you love, you realize these things.

  You’ll probably have been thinking that time just moves forward, that your life just moves forward, that we’re all like trains chugging along railtracks stretching straight out to the horizon, with no reverse gears, and that our lives are like the landscapes you see going past the windows, one thing after another in ordered hedgerows, events fading into memories once you have gone past them.

  When your lover dies, the train stops. And you realize that while it doesn’t have a reverse gear, it doesn’t have a forward one either. You just thought it did, because the landscape was drifting by so neatly. But now, with your lover dead, time collapses in on itself, the landscape becomes a maelstrom around you, fragments of your life, the memories, the things to come, dipping in and out of view, and you’re trying to catch hold of them but they slip out of your grasp. And you’re running around this fucking stock-still train, willing it to go backwards, because a few metres up the track your lover is still alive, but that’s not an option, and nor is going forwards, so instead there you are on this train with everything that’s ever happened to you and everything that ever will flying around the windows, stuck at this moment you’ll never get away from, the moment Adam died, the moment your love died, and you realize this is where you’ll always be, growing older but still the same, Eva lying in bed touching Adam’s near-cold flesh, while outside the sun pretends to rise on another day.

  SHE EASES HERSELF out from under the duvet, gently, slowly, inch by inch. She must be careful. She must be quiet.

  Though she is not making as much noise as London is. A constant orchestra of sirens, drunken stumblings, and the string of prostitutes along her street, one at each corner, shouting conversations at each other in between customers. They sound feisty, not discontent with their lot. What other lives there are, in this world.

  She moved into the flat a month ago, and at first both she and Adam were horrified by the cacophony that seeped through the window at night, the aural spillover from nearby Brick Lane. They have grown used to it now, though; now, she loves the feeling of being in the heart of this busy, dirty city, with its bankers and Bangladeshis and trendy young things. It feels like life. Life. She has a degree, an amazing job, she has Adam, she has a flat in the thrumming centre of London. Her life is beginning; it has begun.

  The streets are in full nocturnal swing, but still, if she is too loud, she will wake Adam up: there is a difference between the racket of the outside world and the shifts and bumps of the person you share your bed with. She decides on a swift, clean move: all of this slow progress is getting her nowhere. As discreetly as she can, she heaves herself up, pushing the duvet on to him, swings her legs out, stands. He grunts and moves his head slightly.

  Eva walks to the window and peeks out at the prostitute on the other side of the street. She looks bored. All that waiting. And then having to hand your body over to a stranger, which must be boring too, lying there waiting for the guy to finish, while you think about what you are going to buy with the money, perhaps, or other sources of concern. What your friend said to you yesterday. Needing to get that shoe reheeled. Whether start-ups are still a good investment.

  She turns back towards the inside of her room. She hasn’t got round to buying curtains yet, and the moon is almost full tonight, so that its clear blue light mingles with the street-lamp orange and pours over the bed, over Adam. Half of his chest is uncovered, the duvet rumpled around it, his arm thrown sideways in an elegant arc. His face is free of any of the worry that so easily creeps into it during the day; with this peaceful expression, his tumbling blond locks, he looks like a shepherd about to be ravished by a Greek goddess. This is why Eva got out of bed. She carefully pulls open a desk drawer and takes out her camera.

  As she looks at Adam through the viewfinder, studies the angle of his jaw against the pillow, the small shadows he casts on the bed, his place in the composition of the frame, she thinks about how much she loves him, and this moment, this one little moment in their lives, this odd night-time interlude, is when she knows she will spend her life with this man – him, and no one else. She presses the shutter and decides to take another photo with the flash on, just for safety. But the rattle of the film as she winds it on stirs Adam from his slumber, and he opens a wary eye just as she is about to take the second shot. He tries blearily to sit up, arms flailing.

  ‘Hey!’

  Eva immortalizes the moment.

  ‘Hey, that’s not fair!’

  ‘I’m sorry, you just looked so cute …’

  She crawls back under the covers next to him, into the warmth. Adam wraps himself around her and goes back to sleep. Eva feels the heat of his body seep into hers, made chilly by her expedition out of the bed, feels him breathe against her, and soon she too is drifting out of consciousness, like a child gently letting itself sink underwater.

  PAIN – THERE WAS nothing but pain. Eva wondered how it was possible for her not to have lost her mind yet, when all that surrounded her was pain, when every movement was pain, every thought. When there was nothing left but his absence. When everything that had once been joyful was now a source of searing misery.

  She hadn’t gone mad, but her head did seem to have blown a few fuses. She would catch herself behaving in some weird, erratic manner, and wonder how long she had been doing that for, already. Like now. She was standing in the middle of the kitchen, looking at the two photos of Adam in bed in her flat in Brick Lane. She had framed them together, a diptych: Adam sleeping peacefully in the gentle light, Adam comically panicked in the glare of the flash. Now she was gripping the frame so hard the blood had drained from her knuckles, and she was stooped like an old lady, peering into the images as though examining them more closely would reveal some vital, previously unnoticed detail. She wasn’t crying. She didn’t always cry. She did sometimes, of course: collapse into terrifying sobs that felt as though her body was trying to expel its own insides. But mostly, she felt a dry despair, a sort of state of constant windedness before the brutality of Fate.

  She would notice she had just been standing there, for ages, probably, and would feel an urgent need to move. Not that the movement would actually change anything about the way she felt, but it still seemed necessary, a flight instinct even though there was nowhere to run to.

  She put down the photos and looked desperately around the kitchen for something to do. Every surface was spotless – a pile of immaculate dishes sat in the drying rack: when you were in mourning, it turned out, people came and did your housekeeping for you. It made them feel helpful, presumably. Or perhaps it was a way of affirming that they were still alive: that food was cooked, dishes dirtied and made clean again, again and again, more food and digestion and excretion and dirty dishes, while for Adam the whole cycle had just stopped. Eva busied herself with putting away the clean plates.

  That took about a minute, and then there was nothing to do. She looked at the calendar on the wall: ‘Henry’s Work Party’ written on the date before he died. And then there were days that followed that, which he had never seen. And it wasn’t even August any more. She took the calendar off its hook and flicked it over to September. And there, at the end of the month, five days marked out: ‘ADAM IN BERLIN’.

  She hadn’t told anyone there – she’d have to call them. Or get her mother to call them. The thought of having to say those words again, to someone who didn’t know yet … She shuddered, and felt once more the keening surge of his absence. He was gone. He was gone, just like that, and absolutely nothing would br
ing him back.

  She had been struck by this thought for some time, choking up huge gulps of grief like furballs, when her mother came into the kitchen, her arms full of household cleaning products. She put them down hastily and rushed over to Eva, took her in her arms.

  ‘Oh mein Schatz, mein Schatz …’

  Eva felt the comforting roughness of her mother’s wool sweater against her cheek, the lightness of her embrace, the words she was repeating in her ear like a litany:

  ‘Es ist schrecklich, es ist schrecklich, es ist schrecklich …’

  Eventually her body dried itself out, or got tired of the spasms, or tricked itself into thinking she was still a child that could be comforted by its mother, and the tears stopped. As she pulled away, Eva felt a desperate need for Adam. She needed Adam.

  ‘I – I have to …’

  ‘Eva – you are OK?’

  ‘Yes, I – I just need to …’

  She bolted down the corridor and into their bedroom, quickly closing the door behind her. Drew in a huge sniff of air. It still smelled of him. It still smelled of him.

  Yes – their bedroom still carried his scent: in the bed, in his clothes, in the air they had breathed together. She knew that it couldn’t last long: already now, it had faded so much. That smell she had so loved – she would lose that too. She thought of the molecules, microscopic bits of him, drifting around her, gently dissipating until they would all be scattered around the globe, or until they had turned into something else, some new matter that could no longer in any way be traced back to Adam. These moments when he still lingered in the room, when she could still pick up one of his T-shirts and inhale him, these were precious. But every time she opened that door and let fresh air in, every time she herself was in here, filling the space with bits of her own body, with her own smell, she was accelerating his disappearance.

  Eva lay down on their bed, buried her nose in Adam’s pillow, breathed in the place where his head had rested; he was still there, pungent, musty, strong. And in the midst of all this overwhelming pain, for a brief moment, she drew something resembling a small, sad comfort from this fact.