The Last Day

by Claire Dyer

  However, lying there waiting for her coffee she lets her mind drift back to those old days and her heart starts knocking in panic. Suddenly she feels unwashed and sticky, she feels dirty. She grabs hold of the duvet cover and clenches it in her fists as though it’s a lifeline. As the saying goes, you never truly know what you’ve got until it’s gone, or if not gone, then at risk of going.

  Her thoughts are interrupted by Vita delivering her drink.

  ‘Here you go,’ she says, coming into the room this time and putting the mug down next to the other cup by the bed. Honey notices Vita doesn’t look at her, or the bed.

  In Vita’s other hand is a bouquet of flowers: large white lilies and tiny coronets of gypsophila.

  ‘Trixie brought these round for you,’ Vita says. ‘There’s a card.’ She puts the flowers at the bottom of the bed.

  ‘Oh,’ Honey replies, rearranging the pillows around her head like a consumptive Victorian heroine; this isn’t her at all, she thinks. She’s better, much better, than this and yet she says, ‘Thank you. Gosh, that’s kind of her too.’

  ‘Boyd must have told her you’d had a bad reaction to the wine, or something.’

  ‘It is odd,’ I say. ‘I only had two glasses.’

  ‘Mmmm.’

  Honey can tell Vita doesn’t necessarily believe her but then Vita’s gone. She doesn’t say goodbye, or see you later, she just goes, leaving the coffee on the bedside table, and the flowers at Honey’s feet.

  The card says, ‘Hope you feel better soon. Thanks for a lovely evening, Trixie.’

  Honey will put them in some water later but for now she looks at them, at the waxy petals of the lilies and the blooms of baby’s breath and feels a strange kind of unease.

  By the time she gets up and has had her bath, Vita has gone out. She makes some soup and sips it watching some inane programme on TV. She checks her horoscope. It says, ‘You will receive an unexpected gift today.’ She checks the time, it’s almost four. Boyd should be home soon.

  Vita

  I didn’t expect this. When Boyd and Honey moved in, I expected my life to remain unchanged. I would work, go out to exhibitions and galleries, have sex with Colin now and again; I would eat the same food, drink sparingly, do my garden as always and then they would leave. But now it seems my life is concentrating itself once again on this house and the people in it. Boyd’s presence is comforting and comfortable. Honey is quirky and full of a contradictory kind of poise; some days she’s relaxed and happy, others she’s wired and watchful. I find I am interested in and confused by both these people and the vigour and uncertainty they’ve brought with them.

  I feel responsible for them in some strange way, that I am the adult and they the children. Like I had when Honey had been in my studio, I feel the loneliness of being the one in the middle not able to tell Boyd what I know, not able to help protect Honey. And, I keep telling myself, I shouldn’t want to do either. It is not my place to. I am a free agent; nothing should be able to touch me, not now.

  I feel cramped by their presence in the house, the scattering of their belongings, and I feel liberated by it. I have no fucking idea what I’m doing and, when Honey is in bed with her inexplicable hangover and Boyd is out at work, I am unsettled, as if something is out of alignment.

  I’ve just taken the flowers Trixie brought round up to Honey and texted Colin, ‘You around later?’

  He replies straight away, ‘Yes. Do you fancy doing something this evening?’

  ‘Maybe.’

  ‘OK, I’ll text you in a bit.’

  My exchanges with Colin are not loaded with ambiguity or open to misinterpretation and this pleases me. I hope we will go out tonight. I’ve seen an advert in the window of the local bookshop saying that the author of a book about Ancient Rome I’ve recently read is giving a talk. Maybe we can go to that, or maybe not.

  However, there is a gap, an absence I can’t put my finger on. The weather’s still good and so I decide to go for a walk. I can’t face the studio today; not the portrait of Honey nor the picture of the stupid little Pekingese I’m doing for a friend of the woman who owns the Cockapoo.

  And so I leave the house and make my way to the end of Albert Terrace; I’ll do a circular route, ending up back in the park, like I’ve done before. I remember why I used to walk it too. After the time I’d spent with my face to the wall, there’d been the walking. I’d walked and walked, in the mornings, afternoons, at night. I’d left without telling Boyd where I was going or when I’d be back, I’d left him behind in so many ways. And yet he’d always be there waiting for me when I got in and he’d help me take off my coat and then touch me briefly on the shoulder as I turned and moved away from him. I hadn’t let myself be consoled and I hadn’t consoled him either.

  By the time I reach the park, school is out and there are knots of kids around the swings, their mothers sitting at a distance in the unexpected autumn sun. I can hear the children’s shouts but see them only as blurs of school uniform against green grass. I refuse to watch them, I can’t bear to. It’s like this every time I come here; I know I shouldn’t, but somehow I can’t keep away.

  And then one hurtles into me, coming at me from an angle. He’s obviously not looking where he’s going.

  ‘Oof,’ I say, as he crashes into my legs and topples over onto the ground, his body still plump with childhood, his skin pale, one sock down, the other up.

  He starts to cry.

  ‘Hey,’ I say, bending down to pick him up. ‘It’s OK. No damage done. Look, there’s no blood.’

  The boy gazes up at me and then down, firstly at his knees, then at the soft palms of his hands. I’m right, there’s no blood and I wonder if secretly he’s disappointed by this. The tears are hovering on his eyelashes. He looks bewilderingly beautiful.

  ‘Off you go,’ I say. ‘Best go and find your mum, eh?’

  He nods, his lips trembling. He wants to be brave, I want to hug him to me. He’s around six years old, I’m in my forties and yet neither of us really knows how to behave. He runs off and I wait until I see him safely reconciled with his mother.

  When I get home, Boyd is back. He’s left his briefcase and jacket on the sofa at the back of the kitchen. I fill the kettle noisily, crashing it against the sink and slamming it down on the counter, expecting him to appear and ask after my day like he used to do.

  ‘Stop it,’ I tell myself as I wait for the kettle to boil. ‘Why the fuck would he?’

  I check my phone, there’s no message from Colin as yet and this surprises me. I’d thought he may have been in touch by now.

  I hesitate, uncharacteristically uncertain. The incident in the park has unsettled me further.

  ‘Fuck,’ I say out loud. ‘Fuck, fuck, fuck,’ and, leaving the kettle to switch itself off, I stomp upstairs to my room.

  Boyd and Honey are talking but, as I reach the top of the stairs, there’s something about Boyd’s voice which makes me pause. I don’t want to listen but can’t help it.

  ‘Were you?’ Honey is asking.

  I hear the creak of the bed as Boyd sits on it, can imagine his face, the lift of his eyebrow, his full lips.

  ‘Well?’ Honey asks again. ‘I can’t remember exactly, but I think you were crying. You were sitting in the same kind of place as you are now, your head in your hands. And you were crying. Weren’t you?’

  ‘Do you …’ Boyd says quietly, ‘think you may have been dreaming. You were a bit tipsy!’

  ‘I was more than tipsy and I have no idea how it happened. I’ve even wondered whether there was something wrong with my drink!’ She laughs as she says this, an easy, light laugh and then, serious again, she says, ‘But if you were upset, you can tell me. You know that, don’t you? Did I do or say anything to upset you?’

  I rest a hand against the wall and wait. I should move on, go into my room, change my clothes ready for when Colin gets in touch. Yes, I think. These are the practical, sensible things I should do and yet I wait, convinced
in some strange way that what will happen next will have something to do with me.

  ‘No,’ Boyd replies. ‘It’s nothing you’ve done.’

  ‘What is it, then? Is there a problem at work, something you haven’t told me? Oh, shit, you’re not ill, are you?’

  My mind’s-eye moves from the figure of my husband, as he sits on the bed, to Honey. I imagine Honey is standing by the window, the evening sun starting to fall in stripes across the carpet. Honey’s head is tipped to one side in that bird-like way of hers. The flowers Trixie brought will be somewhere in the room, too.

  ‘No. But there is something you should know. Something I should have told you ages ago.’ Boyd’s voice is low and quiet.

  ‘You’re scaring me now.’

  ‘Don’t be scared.’

  I hold my breath. I know what’s coming. So he hasn’t told her then. I think back to the morning when he said what he said and I knocked my tea off the arm of the sofa. Had he been trying to say something about this then, that he hadn’t told Honey and that I mustn’t either. Shit, I think, how can this house survive seeing it’s full to bursting with the three of us, our belongings, and so many unsaid things? Sometimes, in the middle of the night, I can feel it all pressing in on me; it’s as though the house is going to explode.

  But now Boyd is saying, ‘It’s just that sometimes being in this room gets to me.’

  ‘This room? Why?’

  ‘You once asked why Vita and I split up. Do you remember?’

  ‘Yes,’ Honey says in an almost-whisper that I have to strain to hear.

  There is an agonising silence and then Boyd says, ‘We had a child. A son. This was his room.’

  As he says this, I expect the roof to collapse and the wall against which I am leaning to crumble. I expect a huge wind to rise and raindrops the size of fists to fall on my head. But this doesn’t happen. Instead there is yet more silence, heavy and portentous. Whatever Honey says next will, I believe, shape the rest of our lives.

  ‘My God, Boyd. You should have told me. Why didn’t you tell me this?’

  ‘I tried once, early on. That night you went running. Do you remember?

  She pauses, then says, ‘I remember.’

  Stop it! The words are screaming inside my head. Stop talking about yourselves. Remember my boy, how it felt to hold him, the shade of blue his eyes were, a shade for which there is no word.

  And then he tells her, or as much of it as he can. He can’t know of my pain, the vacuum, the sheer magnitude of my loss, my rage, my never-ending search for someone to blame, for someone to fill the void. Loss: such a small word, such a massive, massive thing.

  ‘His name was – is – William. We thought we’d end up calling him Will, but somehow he stayed as William. He looked like a Will, though. He had the most amazing blue eyes, Vita’s eyes.’

  ‘What happened?’ Honey’s voice is soft and loving and I hate her for it. How dare she feel pity, feel anything at all? What right has she?

  ‘Sudden infant death. He died in his sleep when he was three months old.’

  And again it’s as though someone has come along and torn my heart from my chest. I can see the scatterings of broken ribs, the trails of blood, can hear the howls of my pain and of Boyd’s as he holds our son’s body: all that promise gone, a whole life gone, my life gone in one short moment.

  I’d always believed that Boyd had not really understood the savagery of hoping every month that this would be the one when the dot, or the line or the words would tell me I was pregnant. I mean, how could he? It wasn’t his body.

  We’d left it late and I blamed myself for this. I can’t remember now why it seemed so important that we did but eventually, everywhere around us, people were having kids. Trixie had had hers, the artists with whom I’d studied sent photos of round-faced, chubby-armed babies in their Christmas cards and I would pummel the flat of my stomach with my fists and ask myself why I hadn’t.

  Boyd had promised me a horde of children, five at least. We’d buy them bunk beds, extend into the loft, we might even move house. We’d talked about caravan holidays, burying them in sand up to their necks at the beach, us reading stories to them, the smell of cheese on toast for supper, doing homework by the fire. All this.

  By the time we started trying I would have settled for just one. One precious child I could be a good parent to, a better parent than mine had been to me. And Boyd? I’d wanted Boyd to have a son. I’d wanted to peg their jeans (his vast, our son’s tiny) on the line, to watch them kick a ball to one another in the park. I’d wanted Boyd to teach our son to drive. All this.

  Then, eventually, I fell pregnant. I liked to imagine I knew when it had happened, that there’d been something special about the way we’d made love that particular night.

  Boyd was flummoxed, as I’d imagined he’d be.

  ‘I know it’s what we wanted,’ he said, ‘but now it’s here, is it OK to be scared?’

  ‘Of course,’ I’d replied. ‘I’m terrified too.’

  And I was. As I watched the stretching of my skin I was at times ecstatic, at others crippled by fear. And when the baby began to kick, it was hard to explain to Boyd what it was like; it was music and movement and flawless. I’d felt that my baby and I were dancing together, that I was already holding him in my arms, swaying, tracing figures of eight on the carpet and drawing in the sweet smell of his head, his tiny fist wrapped around my finger.

  My spine slackened, my hips spread, my tummy button protruded, my breasts became full and round and hard. I was fuelled by a primal instinct and a huge ball of unnameable, unmanageable love. I’d waited so long for this.

  We decorated the nursery pale yellow, bought a cot, a mobile of farmyard animals to hang over it, tiny white sleepsuits, packs of minute socks, a crib to put by our bed so I could reach over and gaze at him in the night. We got a baby monitor, muslin cloths, nappies. The house took on the appearance of a Mothercare store.

  And then came the birth. I remember telling Trixie every last detail of the drive to the hospital, the waiting, the cannula in my wrist, Boyd pacing the room, the nurse with the cool, small hands, the rush of the last moments and then how William had arrived: bloody, marvellous, triumphant.

  And I nursed him.

  That raw pull of his mouth on my nipple, the delicious pain searing across my shoulder blades as he fed.

  The solid mass of him, sturdy yet fragile against my bare skin.

  And Trixie was there, with casseroles and clean laundry and she let me weep when I wanted to and shuffled Boyd out of the room, sending him on errands when he was being helpless and in the way.

  And I watched Boyd with our son, his head cradled in Boyd’s huge hands. I watched the tricky process of Boyd placing William on the changing mat, the intricate application of creams, the way Boyd would lower his lips and place a kiss on his son’s belly.

  And I imagined a future for me and my son. From the moment my eyes met his, I saw it stretching out in front of us: football, driving, girls, doors slamming, limbs lengthening, his first shave, his first job, how he’d call me ‘Mum’, his voice deep, a man’s voice. I saw him become a father and hand me his child and I would see my son’s face reflected back at me. All this.

  And then there was the morning when I woke suddenly, breathless, afraid of the inexplicable silence from the baby monitor by the bed. Normally, I would hear a faint whistle or snuffle as William slept, the rustle of bedding, even a bird singing outside the window of his room. But that morning: nothing.

  ‘Boyd?’ I hissed. ‘Boyd, there’s something wrong.’

  I threw back the bedcovers, my breasts full and leaking. William hadn’t woken for his early morning feed as he normally did and I’d slept through; I hadn’t been watchful. My heart was hammering.

  ‘What?’ Boyd answered, still sleepy.

  ‘It’s William. There’s something wrong with William.’

  And he was out of bed and at the door in one bound. His hair, I noticed, s
till tufted by sleep.

  I remember how we knocked against one another as we turned into William’s room and how, without being able to say how, I knew that my baby was dead.

  And Boyd was holding William, placing him on the floor and massaging his heart, was lowering his lips to my son’s mouth in a different sort of kiss. Then he lifted his face to look at me, grief already etched on it in what looked like black marker pen. ‘Call an ambulance,’ he said in the sliver of silence between my howls. ‘Go. Do it now.’

  And everyone was gentle with us: the paramedics, the hospital staff, our GP, the midwives, the counsellors, Trixie, the couple who lived in Colin’s house before Colin. Everyone.

  But however kind these people were, what no one could do was bring my baby back.

  And now Boyd is saying, ‘And nothing was the same again. How do you recover from something like that? That’s why I’ve always said it’s amazing we’re still friends. There was so much damage, untold damage after he died. It’s just that occasionally I can still feel him, here in this room. I’m sorry. I shouldn’t I know. This is about you and me. I’ve done my mourning, or anyway I think I have. Last night was an aberration, nothing more.’

  I can’t bear to listen. After all, there is nothing Boyd can say that I don’t already know, haven’t already felt a million times. And I feel his betrayal again and again. Can he really have finished grieving? How dare he even consider it? How can his tears last night have been an aberration? Either he is lying or he’s a cold and unfeeling bastard. I can’t believe he is. The mornings we’d done the crossword together recently had been special and I’d thought I still knew him, but maybe we’re both still acting; maybe we haven’t actually forgiven one another yet.

  And, as I creep into my room and silently close the door, I can imagine Honey walking over to where Boyd is sitting and wrapping her slender arms around his shoulders and breathing in his familiar, musky smell. I imagine Honey kissing Boyd, pulling on his lips with her teeth and Boyd’s cock, his wonderful, vast cock, which I’ve held in my hands and in my mouth, stirring, and him reaching up and pulling Honey down to him and in that moment I hate Honey, I hate Boyd and I hate the grief that never seems to let me go.