‘Well. That’s really great.’
‘Yes, I’m very happy. I mean, you know, my job at the moment is perfectly fine, but I was starting to worry I’d never be able to buy a house at this rate …’
‘Henry! We’re not even thirty, for Christ’s sake.’
‘Still, you know, you want to be thinking about these things. Englishman’s castle and all that. So anyway, I was going to have a little drinks party to celebrate, next Friday, if you guys are around.’
‘Adam’s in Berlin then, aren’t you?’
‘I’m afraid I am.’
‘I’ll come along, though. Though I won’t be able to stay too late, I’m catching an early flight the next day.’
‘Oh, really? Where are you off to?’
‘Iraq, actually.’
‘Jesus! Seriously?’
‘Yes.’
‘I can’t believe you just drop that into the conversation like you’re off for a weekend in Mallorca or something.’
‘Oh my God, I would definitely tell you if I was going to Mallorca – that would be a far more traumatic experience.’
‘Seriously, though, Eve, you’re actually going to Iraq?’
‘Guys, I am a journalist, you know, it’s kind of part of the job description …’
‘Aren’t you worried?’
‘From what I’ve heard, you’re not really allowed to do very much, to be honest, the military is very careful about what they allow you to see. So don’t worry, I’ll probably be stuck in my hotel room most of the time.’
‘Adam, aren’t you worried about this?’
‘Well, I mean, yeah, of course, but Eva’s right, it is her job …’
‘Hm. Well, be careful though.’
‘I’ll send you guys a postcard. So, anyway, Friday night then, Henry. I will make sure I get my packing done early, and I will be there.’
‘OK, well, good. Carmen, you around?’
‘I am indeed. But Henry, what was the other announcement you had to make?’
‘Ah. Yes. Well, it’s not entirely unrelated to these house-buying considerations, actually.’
‘What – you’ve found a house already?’
‘No, no, no! Georgie and I are engaged.’
If any of Adam, Eva or Carmen had been taking a sip from their drinks at this point, they would have spluttered them right back up. Luckily, Henry seems to interpret their reaction as mere surprise.
‘Wow!’
‘Wow.’
‘Well.’
‘Wow.’
‘Well. Congratulations again, Henry!’
‘Yes, congratulations.’
‘Yeah, congrats.’
‘Well. That was quick, Hennes! How long is it you guys have been going out?’
‘I proposed on our nine-month anniversary. Georgie’s the kind of girl who wants a ring on her finger, you know …’
‘Yes, I can imagine.’
‘Wow.’
‘Well. Amazing.’
‘So how did you propose?’
‘Oh, nothing very original, I’m afraid – took the train up to Chichester on the Thursday, under cover of a work trip, to ask for her father’s permission, took her over to Paris on the Friday, and fine wine and dined her in that restaurant halfway up the Eiffel Tower on the Saturday – I’d prepped them to bring us some champagne and oysters as soon as we arrived, dropped down on one knee, and there you have it.’
‘I didn’t know anyone still asked for the father’s permission.’
‘Well, I like to do things the proper way, you know.’
‘Georgie must have been thrilled.’
‘Well, at least she said yes, thankfully for me.’
‘Well. I think we should have a toast.’
Adam raises his half-empty pint; Carmen follows suit, her features set into a poker face; Eva lifts up the remains of her G&T, which she has almost entirely downed in the last two minutes; they clink against Henry’s sturdy Guinness.
‘Cheers.’
‘To love, my friends!’
‘To love indeed.’
‘To love!’
‘To love …’
SOMETIMES YOU SEE something funny, and you know that Adam would have found it funny too, so you start to tell him about it in your mind, but then the laughter changes in your throat, it sort of gurgles out and into choking instead, and then crying, and you feel like you have become this sort of terrible machine, something resembling a meat grinder or pasta maker, where whatever you put into it comes out in tears.
Laughter has become impossible, or rather not impossible, because actually you do laugh, but laughter has become the prelude to weeping, a burst of emotion that can only lead you back to grief, which is where all your emotions take you now, joy, frustration, anger, fear, elation, anxiety, delight at spotting a bird hopping on your windowsill before it rises up into the sky, awe at the sight of snow weighing down the slender branch of an elm tree, relief when the Tube train starts moving again, rage at the inflexibility of a computer system that seems to not want to let you cancel your joint bank account, they are all, it turns out, mere preludes to grief, grief is the highest trump card, you know now, when all other possible feelings have been exhausted, it is grief that will remain.
THE PHONE RANG.
‘Hello?’
‘Eva.’
‘Oh. Hi.’
‘How are you doing?’
‘Well. You know.’
‘…’
‘Sorry.’
‘Don’t be silly. Of course it’s hard. I know it’s still hard.’
‘…’
‘I know it is, Eva.’
‘…’
‘Eva?’
‘…’
‘…’
‘Yes …’
‘Maybe this isn’t a good time.’
‘No, it’s fine. How are things?’
‘Oh, you know. Ticking over. More or less. I’m not entirely convinced we’ll still be here in a year’s time, but for now most of the leaks in the boat seem to have been stopped.’
‘Uh-huh.’
‘We miss you, though.’
‘Why, is there a me-shaped leak?’
‘Oh come on, that wasn’t what I meant – I mean – obviously – not that you’re not indispensable – well, I suppose there is a you-shaped leak but, you know, we can find other ways to plug it. Bit of a square-peg-in-a-round-hole situation, obviously, but that can be dealt with. We want you to take your time – all the time you need.’
‘Bill, what are you trying to say? I can’t work out whether you’re being passive-aggressive or just rambling.’
‘I know, neither can I most of the time. That’s what decades of married life do to a man.’
‘…’
‘Sorry.’
‘Don’t apologize, you’re still allowed to crack a joke. But listen … I don’t think I’m ready to go back to work yet. I’m sorry. I know it seems like it’s been a while, but …’
She wanted to scream that she wasn’t ill. She didn’t just have some condition that you recovered from, moving on, rebuilding your life, as though it were just a Lego set and not a miasma of relentless pain. People didn’t seem to understand that, while for them there may be days and weeks and months going by, time wasn’t working like that for her any more. She was trying to swim upstream. Because there was the point in time where Adam died, and before that there was the time when he was still alive, and maybe if she kicked her feet hard enough she could make it back there, against the current. Even if she was only treading water for now, in a large pool that was just the time after his death, not this or that many days or weeks or months after, it made no difference, and why couldn’t people understand that?
‘Look, Eva, I wouldn’t blame you if you never went back to work. It’s just I’ve got the bloody Board on my back and you know what shareholders are like – they’re less capable of human sympathy than Stalin circa 1937.’
‘Why do they care abo
ut me, though? It’s not like I can turn the internet off, or do whatever else it would take to save their paper.’
‘No. But you are a marketable name, and in this time of crisis that is something they can cling on to. Which, my dear, leads me to the crux of the matter: you cannot write at the moment, which I personally find entirely understandable. But the Board is in a flap and wants your name back in our opinion pages. So … I have suggested we reprint some of your old articles. A sort of Eva Bard retrospective. Highlights from our sharpest commentator on international relations in the Age of Terror. Or something like that. What do you think of that bloody stroke of genius, eh?’
‘Bill, I’ve only been a journalist for about five years.’
‘Eight, I think you’ll find. I checked.’
‘Whatever. Well. Anyway. If you think it’ll keep the Board happy, I don’t mind you reprinting my old articles. Go ahead.’
‘Well, I was wondering if you would mind giving me a bit of a hand with selecting them?’
‘Bill. The longest I can focus on anything these days is about three minutes. I don’t think you quite understand what state my mind is in at the moment. Think of me as someone with very severe brain damage.’
‘…’
‘Bill? Are you still there?’
‘It will come back, you know, Eva. You’ll start being able to think again. Or, I mean – to think about other things.’
‘But I don’t even want to think about other things – I just – it just doesn’t interest me any more …’
‘…’
‘It’s weird, you know. I was thinking – ha! OK, so maybe I am doing a bit of thinking now and again – But anyway, I was thinking, it’s so weird, there’s been this huge financial crisis going on, I mean potentially the actual death knell of capitalism, and I just really don’t give a shit. I can’t get myself to take the slightest interest in it.
‘You will, Eva. Eventually. And it won’t be a bad thing – it won’t mean you’re forgetting Adam, or not doing him justice in some way.’
‘Won’t it, though? I think that would be exactly what it would mean.’
‘…’
‘You know, I was already having doubts about my job before he died. The evening before. I wanted to talk to him about it. I tried to, in fact, but we were in a cab and he gets carsick if he can’t concentrate on the road.’
‘…’
‘Got carsick. Used to get carsick.’
‘…’
‘I was feeling – I don’t know. Tired of it all. Like what use is it really, what we do?’
‘Eva, how can you say that? We tell people what’s going on in the world. We make it a little less ignorant, with every article we publish.’
‘Do we, though? Don’t we just tell the stories people want to hear? What about all the ones we don’t tell?’
‘Surely that’s no argument not to tell the stories we do tell?’
‘…’
‘…’
‘I wanted to talk to him about it, but he was too carsick and then I couldn’t be bothered to try and explain once we’d got home. I thought I’d just wait till tomorrow.’
‘…’
‘…’
‘I’m sorry, Eva.’
‘…’
‘Adam was very proud of your work, you know. He didn’t think you were wasting your time.’
‘…’
‘Eva?’
‘Yes. Yes, I know.’
‘…’
‘Yes.’
‘And I’m very proud of your work, too. I’m rather proud of myself, in fact, for having spotted you.’
‘Now you’re just trying to flatter me …’
‘No, really, Eva. I remember being so bowled over by that material you brought back from 9/11 …’
‘Well – it wasn’t exactly hard to come back from 9/11 with good material …’
‘But you jumped in there, Eva – you went straight to the action. It was journalistic instinct at its purest – and the detail with which you managed to register what was happening, despite being in so much danger yourself … It’s a rare talent. I remember thinking, goodness, we have a natural-born frontline reporter here, and all you’d been assigned to before that seemed to have been reporting on local magistrates’ courts and various pointless press conferences …’
‘Yes, I was grateful to you for pulling me out of the hellhole of general reporting.’
‘I asked Adam about it once, you know. About what it had been like for him, you wanting to rush to the Twin Towers like that.’
‘And – what did he say?’
‘That he was terrified – rightly so, obviously. But that he could see it was something you needed to do – that something was driving you to go there. A need to bear witness, he said.’
‘Hm. He’s probably right about that. Was – was right.’
‘…’
‘You know, that’s another thing about him being gone. When I think about that day – I mean, it was one of the most horrific – one of those experiences that you’ll always carry with you. That no one else will really ever be able to imagine, to understand, if they weren’t there. But we were there, together. We could understand what it had been like, really been like. But now he’s gone, I have no one I can share that with any more.’
‘…’
‘We disagreed about some of it too, you know. Some of what happened. It used to infuriate me. But now I miss even that – that sense that my memory of the day could be questioned, could be up for debate – that it was fluid in some way. Now it’s fixed – I’m left with only my version, the story I’ve told myself about it.’
‘…’
‘…’
‘I’m sorry, Eva – so sorry. I don’t know what else to say.’
‘I know. It’s fine.’
‘…’
‘…’
‘But try. Do it for me. Take a quick look at those old articles of yours, pick a few out. See if you can fire up your deadly synapses again.’
‘…’
‘Come on. It won’t take you that long, and it’ll do you good. You’ll see.’
Eva wondered why everybody was so fucking keen on things that did her good these days. Have some of this nice pot roast, it’ll do you good. Let’s go for a walk, it’ll do you good. Have a good cry, that’ll do you good. Why don’t we go and watch a comedy show? It might do you good, you know. It was as though there was an unofficial period during which everybody was agreed that they had to indulge her grief, and they had now moved on to the buck-up-girl-sort-yourself-out-chin-up-and-all-that phase. There was nothing she cared about less in the world than a fatuous pile of her old articles. Adam was never coming back, and five months, five years, five decades from now, that was never going to change.
‘All right.’
‘That’s the spirit! I’ll have a shufti through them too and we can compare notes. Maybe have a coffee in a couple of weeks’ time?’
‘Uh-huh.’
‘…’
‘…’
‘We all miss you, you know, Eva. Board or not.’
‘…’
‘…’
‘Uh-huh.’
‘Anyway, I’d better leave you to it. Take good care of yourself, Eva.’
She hung up, noticing as she did so that this was rather out of character. She used to be someone who could never say goodbye: always the last to leave a party because she couldn’t bear to work her way through a crowded room bidding farewell, always repeating niceties on the telephone until the line went dead at the other end. Now, it seemed, she was one of those people who cut others off mid-sentence. Interesting. She was frequently noticing, these days, small shifts in her behaviour which she assumed dated back to Adam’s death. She had few feelings about this beyond a mild sense of curiosity and, occasionally, a distant concern that his death might be turning her into a different person. What if she were no longer recognizable to a hypothetical Adam returned from the grav
e? Would she still be able to do his memory justice if she was forgetting who she had been when he was alive?
Eva stared at her spent phone for a while, then at the kitchen around her. She heard the clatter of post through the letterbox, and went to take a look. There were two envelopes on the doormat: a bank statement, addressed only to her, where once it would have carried both their names. And a theatre brochure, addressed only to Adam. Eva burst into tears.
Some time later – minutes, hours, she wasn’t sure – she was rummaging around their filing cabinet, trying to find the folder in which to place the bank statement. Another new character trait: she had never, in the past, been the kind of person to immediately file anything. That was Adam’s field of expertise. Perhaps he was, ghoul-like, taking over her body. You’re welcome, Adam. I’ll gladly live for us both. It is, in fact, the only reason I continue to live.
Adam’s superior administrative skills had also meant that he had taken charge, over the years, of setting aside Eva’s press cuttings. Oh, what the hell, she thought. I might as well take a look. She set aside the piece she had written about the Congo, her first Iraq trip, her indictment of the international humanitarian aid system. Tony Blair, of course. 9/11, of course. She stumbled on an article she had forgotten, about a kid in East London who had started a community initiative to foster contacts between recently arrived immigrants and their wary native neighbours. The terrorist interview. Each article brought back memories, not of the places and people it was about, but of the stage in her and Adam’s relationship when she had written it. She remembered the steamy hotel in Kinshasa from which she would try hopelessly to get a Skype connection to talk to him; how angry he’d been with her for going on that trip. She remembered the excitement and outrage they had both felt about the aid piece, which they had essentially written together after Adam’s disillusioning elective in Sudan: he had been shocked by the disorganization and arrogance of the people working for the small NGO he had flown out with, and Eva’s further research had revealed an opaque, self-serving system of dubious benefit to the poor people it was supposed to be rescuing. It reminded Eva of one of her later articles, about the rise of Al-Qaeda-inspired terrorism in Kenya as a result of the Sudanese conflict. It would be interesting to put these two stories side by side, perhaps under the title ‘The myriad ways in which East Africa continues to be fucked over, from colonialism to the present day’.
How I Lose You Page 11