Page 13 of The Key to My Heart

I place the music on the stand. I play.

Chapter Six

When we bought Three Sycamore, so many people made faces – winces, followed by ‘that’ll cost you a bit to sort, eh?’ and ‘but won’t you miss the city?’ and Russ and I just shrugged. It didn’t matter. The money we might have to save to fix things, the upheaval, the change of lifestyle. But about two weeks after moving in, we had a power cut on the same day we found a crumbling beam in the loft, plus, the floors and walls bursting with stuff. And not the sort of stuff you dream about finding in the attic of a cottage whose last occupant was a woman who lived to see the forties, fifties, and sixties – it was juststuff.Crap. Some of it was cute, but all of it, useless, and suddenlyourproblem. I wobbled then. I sat on the closed toilet seat holding a battery-powered candle like a twenty-first-century Dickensian and cried, drying my eyes on a damp hand towel. I missed our tiny soulless London flat. I missed the bustle and life. I missed Edie dropping in on her way back from kickboxing class. I missed opening a window and hearing a disjointed chorus of strangers’ voices and smelling the fug of exhausts and kebab meat. I even missed watching the stupid shirt-tearing fightson a Saturday night. Russ had knocked on the door and I’d let him in.

‘Bloody hell, you look like you’re conjuring spirits,’ he’d said, smiling softly at me, perched on the loo seat. ‘Look, it’s just junk, Nat. Stuff. It’s …things.Things can be removed. Things can be fixed. Beams. Electricity …’

And I told him it all felt weird. That I felt homesick. Living in the country, half my things still in boxes, a loft bursting with a stranger’s past life, candles instead of lights, and not a single Chinese takeaway on Uber Eats. It felt upside down. Like I’d woken up in another world.

‘That’s because it’s change,’ Russ had said, crouching, placing two gentle hands on my pyjamaed knees. ‘You’re a bit rubbish with change, that’s all. But change is good. Life doesn’t happen without it.’ Then he’d kissed my forehead and added, ‘Plus. I’ll never change. I mean, our world will, it’s meant to. But I won’t. We won’t. Right?’

The next day, Russ, so big on being eco-friendly, so big on waste not want not, point-blank refusing to get a skip (whereas I fantasised about one in the way I used to about hot Hollywood actors having car trouble in front of my house) started photographing everything.

‘We can use Freecycle first,’ he’d said, opening my laptop, and I remember watching his big gardener’s hands pummelling on the keyboard. ‘We just stick it on here, and then wait for the locals to start screaming,fuck yeah, we want a rusty mangle.’

‘You have a week, Russington,’ I’d said, the phone to my chest as I’d waited on hold to the electric company.

‘And if that rusty old pile of shit is still sitting there, I’m taking it to the tip myself.’

But Russ was right. People practically begged us for a lot of the items, and as Russ lugged old cabinets and metal buckets and reams of mothy, musty material into the lucky winners’ boots, I remember thinking how nice it would be to be a little more like him. I was always a bit of a cynic compared to him. Russ believed in the good in people and taking a chance, even if it meant risking your own time and feelings. I’ve always just pretended to. I share all the right quotes on Instagram, I read all the right books, but I’ve never been able to fully cross the threshold, over to it. And now? Well, I’m further from the threshold than I’ve ever been. The threshold is a spike strip. The threshold is lava. And I am firmly in the room signposted ‘it’s easier to be a secretly cynical wet weekend, actually, because then you’re mostly never disappointed’.

But tonight.

Tonight, I knew what was coming. Despite the croissants I bought to try to abate it – used them as sandbags against the flood I knew might come – and despitesmilinglike a creep to myself on the train home, the music, still in my hand, as the day slowly faded, and the croissants slowly, eaten, sadness has seeped through the walls, over the course of the afternoon and evening, like damp. Because this is our home. This was our idea, and he isn’t here. It’s his birthday and I am here alone, and he will never age another day for as long as the world keeps turning. And what happened to us? The Russ andNatalie I could see so clearly in my mind. Saga-holiday-aged. White-haired and happy, and Russ still looking over the boring horticultural magazines he’d read at night on his iPad and say, ‘You’ll leave nothing of them’ when I’d be glued to a regency romance on Netflix and absent-mindedly bite my thumbnails to stumps.

And I’m crying again.Ugh.Of course I am.

I rub my face, pull my damp, teary hands over my head. I can’t keep going on like this, for God’s sake. I’m thirty-two.Thirty-two.And my enemies are croissants and digital billboards and empty piano stools. A broken record nobody wants to listen to. That’s me. No wonder my friends are worried. I can just picture the conversations.‘I know this is a bit mean, but … don’t you think she should be over it by now? Do you think she’s actually okay?’

There’s a sudden knock at the door, and I know from the rhythm of it who it is. I told them not to come, but in this moment, I want them to go away and come inside, fill my little cottage with home and warmth and life, all at once.

I find them – Jodie, my enormously tall brother-in-law Carl and my seventeen-year-old nephew Nick – bundled up to the neck in scarves and coats on our rickety tiled path. A little glowing family unit. Like something out of a sofa advert.

‘The crisis team, reporting,’ says Carl with a salute. ‘I’m here to look at the pipe, Nick’s going to look at your router, and, well, Jodie’s going to eat. Aren’t you, Jode? She’s made something. A … what’s it called?Cannelloni.’

‘Lasagne.’ Jodie smiles and proffers a big tray covered in tin foil. ‘Good time?’

‘Never,’ I say.

Nick smirks. ‘Hey, Auntie Nat,’ he says, and he presses a cold-cheeked kiss on mine. He smells like chewing gum and wet grass. Straight from football training, I bet. He used to hate football when he was a toddler. He used to like colouring and Lego and everything that wasn’t muddy or outside. ‘Ick-mun,’ he used to call mud. I can still hear his little, panicky voice. ‘Ick-mun! Ick-mun on my trousers. Ick-mun on my huuunds.’ ‘Where’s the router?’ he says now, and I can hardly believe that husky, teenaged voice comes out of him.

‘Bedroom.’

He nods, blond hair dangling over his eyes. I took the piss out of him last week – asked why he had Nick Carter’s haircut and he’d said, quick as a flash, ‘The nineties are back. Thought you’d heard. What with that super weird Fresh Prince of Bel Air jacket of yours you keep wearing.’ ‘And what’s the problem with it?’ he asks. ‘The internet.’

‘It just keeps dropping,’ I say. ‘Right in the middle of Netflix. Freezes. Buffers. Then nothing happens and sometimes I have to turn it off and then on again, blah, blah, blah.’

‘Right. Okay to go straight up?’

‘Course. Just ignore the bloodied corpse in the corner.’

‘Pam at number one invited you to Weight Watchers again then? Had it coming.’ Nick laughs, and I feel a bloom of warmth as I watch him creak up the stairs,smiling to himself, one eye on his phone. Jodie reckons he’s ‘seeing someone’. ‘Texting ’round the bloody clock,’ she said last week at work. ‘I’m dying to know who it is.’

Carl heads straight out through the kitchen, a spanner in his hand and Jodie and I follow him through. She sets down the tray on the tiled kitchen counter and whips off the lid. ‘There’s so much cheese in this,’ she says, ‘that I feel sure the NHS would ban it. But I know you like extra cheese …’

‘Jode, you didn’t need to come.’

‘I know.’ She smiles, her cheeks, pink, taut apples from the cold. ‘But I wanted to. Plus, Nick said he’d missed you, and from a seventeen-year-old boy … that’s gold dust.’

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