Page 100 of It's Beginning To Look A Lot Like Christmas
He’d said her name.
I bit my quaking bottom lip before replying, everything bursting out of me all at once. ‘I miss her so fucking much, Josh.’
‘I know. Me too.’ He was practically whispering now. ‘She was, well, she was everything to all of us, wasn’t she?’
A moan of pain erupted from my throat. I muffled it as best as I could with my pillow, which was fast becoming sodden with tears.
‘She was,’ I eventually managed to whisper back.
Neither of us said anything for a while, and for once I didn’t feel the urge to scrabble around for something to fill the pause with. Being together in this shared moment was enough. Josh spoke first.
‘It was my fault, Mally, all of it. I shouldn’t have been late picking her up.’
His voice cracked, and I just about made out the sound of Saskia’s soothing hushes in the background. I could picture her next to him in their bedroom, rubbing his back, giving him the safe space he needed to release his guilt.
‘Josh, it’s okay, it’s okay,’ I said. ‘I feel just as guilty. If I hadn’t cancelled her trip to Cardiff, none of it would have happened. But it wasn’t our fault.’
It wasn’t our fault.It wasn’t Josh’s fault. It wasn’tmyfault. Before Tom had said something similar to me the other night, I’d never even put those words together in my mind, let alone spoken them aloud.
‘We were just kids ourselves,’ I continued. ‘There was no way we could’ve known things would’ve panned out so horribly. It was all a totally unpredictable, fucked-up accident.’
I knew that these were the words that Josh needed to hear right now. But, in using them, I felt as if two decades’ worth of my own guilt and shame were physically dissipating. I felt rawer than I had done in years, but with that rawness came a sense of peace, too. Of respite. And, there and then, the love I felt for my brother was fiercer than any love I’d ever felt for anyone else before. By hiding ourselves away from each other, we’d somehow got stuck at opposite ends of the spectrum of coping strategies. I had a feeling that we could make more progress by meeting in the murkier middle. Perhaps we would even go back to Scarnbrook together at some point.
Maybe not next June, or next December, but one day.
After we’d hung up – Josh having given me the number of a counsellor recommended by Saskia – I’d had a sudden and uncharacteristic energy surge, and had spent a couple of hours beginning the big job of sorting out Elle’s old bedroom ready for a future lodger and a much-needed stream of additional income, thanks to my impending redundancy.
But my energy was eventually overtaken by a sensation I couldn’t pinpoint. I returned to my own bedroom and perched on the edge of the bed, catching my reflection in the full-length mirror on the opposite wall. I tried to figure out how I was feeling. I couldn’t really pinpoint any emotion at all. I certainly wasn’t feeling any Christmas tingles.
I was aware that I was absolutely wiped out – emotionally and physically. But it wasn’t just tiredness. I felt as if my spirit had been sucked out of my body, leaving behind a me-shaped shell. But the shell was flaking away into countless fragments and drifting upwards, a bit like when Marty McFly’s hand begins to disappear inBack to the Future. I lifted my hand to check that some fluke event in an alternative timeline wasn’t in the process of erasing me, but nope. All looked normal.
I had thoughts inside my head but they were echoey and distant, as if they didn’t belong to me. ‘Me’? I didn’t even know if there was a ‘me’ any more, if there ever had been in the first place, or if there ever would be again.
I’d felt – or not felt – like this once before, when Dad had called me to tell me about Livvie. When a nameless family liaison officer from the local police force had continued the sentence he couldn’t bring himself to finish.
My mind had left its casing that Saturday afternoon, and seemed to watch from above as my soulless body crumpled to the floor of my poky en-suite room and howled like an animal.
Elle had burst in from next door to see what all the commotion was about. She’d picked me up from the floor that day. She’d carried me ever since.
At the time, it felt as if her endless distractions and permanent presence had gradually brought me back into myself. Now I wondered if Ihadever truly returned. Or whether I’d simply trailed along behind her ever since, like a helium balloon on a string. Mindlessly bobbing along, my insides full of nothing but an instinctive desire to be taken away from myself, tugging upwards, away from the gravity of grief. And, for quite some time, I’d been content – grateful, even – to do just that. After all, we’d both been so young with limited tools and experiences. And, apparently, no idea about what the other person was truly feeling and thinking underneath it all.
Over the years, my hollowness had festered, rather than filled in. It’d evolved into something that resembled a life to fool everyone around me that I’d healed. To foolmyselfthat I’d healed. Then I’d arrived in Scarnbrook. For a few days while I was there, the healing had felt real, for once. Painful as fuck, yes, but necessarily so. But even that tiny bauble of hope, presented to me by Tom Brinton of all people, had shattered. And, right now, it felt like the black hole had finally consumed me.
I rested my head on my pillow, fully clothed, blankly wondering whether, if I slept, I’d maybe wake up tomorrow and somehow feel pieced together again. After a couple of hours of non-existence, a quiet, unrecognisable voice inside me told me that I needed to do something to knock myself out.
I took a big swig of Night Nurse followed by an even bigger swig of whisky. I climbed back into bed, the covers pulled neatly up to my chin, my hands by my sides. My usual sleepy instinct to curl up into a tight foetal position with a very specific amount of duvet tucked between my knees for optimum comfort seemed to have deserted me.
Slowly but surely, the chemicals blended together in my bloodstream and the grim echoes of the day, of the week, of the last twenty years, gradually ebbed and flowed out of reach, like a dark, silent tide.
I didn’t know if minutes or hours had passed since I’d neutrally instructed my eyelids to close, but I did know that the nothingness that eventually enfolded me was sweet, blissful relief.
Chapter 28
?Small-town guy falls for big-city woman
The next thirty-six hours or so passed by in a blur of dry Coco Pops,a continuous conveyor belt of Christmas movies thanks to the dedicatedchannel on Freeview and a medically inadvisable amount of Night Nurse.By the time Christmas Eve rolled around, I felt sluggish rather thanrefreshed when the toddler upstairs began bounding about at 5.47 a.m.The void that had opened up inside me after Rory had collected Elle feltsmaller today, but it was definitely still there. I stretched andautomatically reached for my phone before stopping myself. There wasnothing within that device that would improve my day today. I needed toget up, otherwise I could well imagine myself spending another entireday in bed. At the very least I had my advent calendar to complete.
I flung back the covers to coax myself into an upright position. I finally swung my legs off the bed and allowed my feet to find their slippers and padded to the kitchen.
