Page 72 of Famous Last Words

She begins to go around with a bin liner, ridding herself of the last of Luke. She knows it’s mad, but she doesn’t care. Fuck it, she thinks, finding the things she has been too afraid to throw out. She starts on his side of the bedroom, where his possessions largely lie preserved. She takes the book he was reading and ceremoniously adds it to the bin bag. Partially to prove something to Libby, partially to herself. His old T-shirt he slept in. A box of cufflinks. Take the lot of it.

Say she does proceed with getting him declared dead. Say she does sell. She’ll need to move on then. Luke wouldn’t even know her new address to find her. No matter that he could find her through work. No matter that they’d reunite, somehow. This simple fact matters to Cam.

She feels like she’s motor-powered, can’t stop. She sweeps through the kitchen, slinging into the bag a pint glass he stole from a pub, his dressing gown, a framed photo of the two of them. She checks his office cabinets, their television unit, the kitchen drawer that’s full of batteries and elastic bands and lightbulbs. Anything to do with him. Anything at all. It’s gone. And, with those objects, Cam is trying to rid herself of herself, too. Sad, introverted her. Be gone, Cam, and get a life.

And that’s where she finds it, at the back of his bedside table, the place that has remained the mostLuke. tucked between it and the wall. A scrap of paper she’s not seen before. And on it, undoubtedly, her husband’s handwriting.

H. Grace – 0203 1393934.

Cam hesitates. She can’t help but trace a finger over the numbers, inscribed by Luke over seven years ago. He was here. He was real, she thinks, touching their blue imprints. So much of their relationship was writing. Representing him, reading him, texting him. And now here is all that remains: a relic.

Cam stands at the fork in the road. Moving on will be hard, she tells herself. Fraught with challenges and decisions. It has to be intentional: time has not cured this problem in seven years. Behaviour will. This is the first challenge, and she must rise above it, throw this note away.

But she can’t do it. The compulsion rears up, and she can’t resist it.

She googles Grace and the number, but no results come up for it. Without much to lose, she withholds her number and her pride, then dials, standing at the patio doors, looking out into the dark garden.

‘Hello,’ a male voice answers immediately, despite the late hour, despite how much time has passed since her husband must have written it down. Cam paces away from the windows, seeing moving shadows, and speaks. ‘I wondered—Sorry, I found your number in my husband’s things, and …’

He waits, saying nothing, which unnerves Cam. ‘And I … I wondered, sorry, because of some circumstances around my husband, I wondered – would you mind telling me …’ She lets her voice trail off in the silence. ‘The circumstances in which he was in touch with you?’

He pauses. Cam can hear his breathing. ‘I wouldn’t be at liberty to discuss that,’ he says. ‘Sorry.’

‘Why?’ she asks. ‘Sorry – you’re Mr Grace …?’

‘Harry.’ Something begins to percolate in Cam’s brain. Harry … Harry.

‘Why can’t you discuss it?’

‘Business,’ he answers.

‘Business?’ she echoes.

A dial tone. Cam pulls the phone away from her ear, shocked, calls back, but he doesn’t answer. Three rings then voicemail: a dismissal.

There are never any answers. None. She’s a fool.

She stands there, her back to the patio doors, still clueless.

God. She is a joke. What does it matter?

She vowed to move on ten minutes ago, and now what is she doing? Calling dodgy businessmen who may or may not have known her husband, the criminal. She’s sullied herself, once more. Been to metaphorical Shadwell in search of answers. If Luke were here, they’d immediately adopt this as a moniker. Going to Shadwell: when you have a failure of willpower.

The rest of the night heralds the beginning of a downward descent for Cam. Into the history of all of her devices, searching for clues. Googling his number.

And then the rest.

Within seconds, under the sheets, she is existing only in data, and in memories: her old emails to him; their ancient texts. She is no longer searching. She’s merely immersing. Everything is preserved in the Cloud – at her end, at least – for her to visit whenever she needs to: a private museum of them.

She scrolls through their iMessages, the last things he said to her, that chicken salad he asked for, and back and back and back through the days preceding the siege. The things the iPhones remember: every thought, every moment of married life, it sometimes feels like.

Crickets chirp outside and what used to be a noisy,traffic-filled road is quieter these days, electric vehicles creeping by like silent cats.

Luke: What do you think of these trainers: cool or Sad Dad act?

Cam: Sad Dad act.

Luke: No?!

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