Page 82 of Days You Were Mine

‘You know how much I love you?’

‘Same, same.’

‘Could you eat something? There’s enough time.’

He nods. ‘Something small.’

‘Soup?’

He smiles for the first time in twenty-four hours.

‘Soup would be perfect,’ he says.

Did anyone ever prepare a tin of soup with such care? As if I can deliver all my love and hope and reassurance into this small bowl of vivid orange, the toast crisp and hot and buttered from corner to corner. While I wait for the soup to heat, I make myself a cup of tea and remember that I haven’t eaten anything since a slice of toast at eight o’clock this morning. I chide myself for not taking better care of the baby. I think that with Jake away I will go to the greengrocer and pack in all the healthy ingredients I can get my hands on, a last-minute nutrient boost for our almost-born babe.

It’s a quarter to three by the time I make it back to the bedroom, enough time for him to eat the soup, which I have taken care not to over-boil. I push at the door with my foot, but it doesn’t budge; there’s something jamming it from the other side. I put the tray down on the floor, a difficult move at nine months pregnant.

‘Jake?’ I call, pushing harder at the door so that it inches forward, but there is still something pushed against it, something heavy and hard to shift. Everything in my body – bones, blood, skin, heart, lungs, stomach – turns to ice. I shove against the door with my full weight and then I see on the other side of it his feet, still in the holey socks, three toes exposed, and I know, oh I know, what I am going to find. He is leaning away from the door, face tilted up grotesquely, neck looped to the doorknob by a slip knot in his cream feathered scarf.

I’m sobbing as I try to release the noose with hands that shake.

‘You’re alive,’ I say, talking to myself, talking to him, talking to anyone who might be able to make this true.

And his skin is still warm, that’s the thing, but his bodyslumps forwards across my lap the minute he is released from the scarf, and his eyes are staring into nothing. I sit down on the floor, cradling him in my lap, my lover, my love, my darling.

Now

Luke

Luke,

I used to tell you stories about your father while you slept, whispering them into the darkness so your dreams would be filled with colour and light and love.

Of course you couldn’t understand, but I wanted to somehow pass on to you the strength and passion of this most amazing human being as if by osmosis.

I loved him, and not just because I’d fallen in love with him so passionately and intensely as a girl of nineteen. My first love. My only love.

He was the person who inspired me and understood me, my mentor and my saviour.

You look just like him. So much so that when I first saw you in that restaurant, it was like him being brought back to life. It still is sometimes. The re-emergence of you, such a happy event, one I have longed for, has also brought me to the brink of despair. I’m not always sure I’ll be able to bear it, this constant reminder of what I lost.

And so I must tell you the truth about your father, write the words that I can never speak. The horrible, ugly truth and my part in it. I will spare nothing.

Your father was Jacob Earl, the lead singer of a rock bandcalled Disciples, set for great things. Their second album had just come out and after he died it went to number one in the charts.

Jake had severe depression, which stemmed from a troubled childhood and pursued him as a young adult. He had good patches when he was happy and creative, and it was during one of those times that we met. He really believed he’d kicked the depression once and for all and so he threw away the medication that was meant to keep him stable, and I allowed him to do it. I didn’t understand.

I want you to know how excited your father was about my pregnancy; an accident, it’s true, but we both wanted to keep you. He said it was the best thing that had ever happened to him. And it would have been, I know that.

Jake fell into a deep depression while he was on a European tour; by the time he came back he could hardly speak. The day he was due to go into a psychiatric hospital he hanged himself from the bedroom door while I was in the kitchen.

That he died on my watch is something I shall never forgive myself for. Please just know this. He loved unborn you with all his heart. He was the best man imaginable and you are just like him.

Alice

The letter from Alice heralds my breakdown. Letter, photographs and an old newspaper cutting of the two of them at a gallery opening, caption:Jacob Earl, singer of Disciples, and artist girlfriend Alice Garland at Robin Armstrong Gallery in Mayfair.

In the photograph you can clearly see the swell of Alice’s pregnant stomach, but the thing that derails me is the way these lovers are looking at each other, inflamed by love, at the height of their beauty, on the precipice of success, a snapshot ofgreatness. I hold Alice’s letter in my hands and I weep for the man I never met and the life that was taken away from her, and for things I cannot name. The crying lasts all day and I can’t explain it to Hannah, who fusses over me, trying to understand the mix of hopelessness and sorrow that has swept over me; how could she when I cannot comprehend it myself?

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