Page 57 of The Housewarming

Perhaps this new crisis will send these pleasures rushing back. Perhaps, now, utterly alone, there will be a kind of numb and necessary psychopathy that will allow me to simply keep calm and carry on.

Matt always said I needed time. Time will heal. But it won’t, that’s my private opinion. And even if I did need time, I needed truth more. I still need it. There is still so much truth untold. The only difference between yesterday and today is the knowledge of a lie I hadn’t even known about. So I am no further forward, not really. Matt’s betrayal is a shock that will take me years to process; I know that. But it hasn’t been a shadow – how can it have been? I had no idea. It is a new shadow, I suppose, and now I must sit in an even darker room, on my own, listening to this restless, hanging, dissonant devil’s chord, waiting for a resolving note that no one seems able to play. No wonder it was associated with evil back in the eighteenth century, I think as I slide Kate Bush from her sleeve and decide, no, not quite. No wonder it was banned. The unresolved is an eternal drip torture.

I thought this was why Matt chose to believe that our baby girl had drowned, when in fact it was his way of processing guilt: to move on, to grieve. He has needed to end the cadence. I get that, I really do. I don’t need to see the dark web to know what goes on there, don’t even need to think about it. Matt’s way of not thinking about it has been to choose death over it. It is easier to mourn the loss of our baby, to believe that her death was an accident. He knew that I had closed the door, had kept her safe, that he had opened that door, made her unsafe. So yes, it has been easier for him to think that her last waking thought would have been as vague and fleeting and full of benign joy as the falling itself, a brief moment of excitement about meeting the ducks she so loved before impact, the end, nothing.

Fast water. Such a small mass.

I need to choose a record. I’m supposed to be soothing myself, as I’ve been advised to do. God knows, I’m going to have to learn to do it myself.

Max Richter’sFrom Sleep.

I slide it back into the stack. There is self-soothing and there is consciously choosing to make yourself fall apart.

Ditto Chopin’s Prelude in E minor.

Ditto Debussy’sPrélude à l’après-midi d’un faune.

Ditto The Carpenters.

Ditto Björk’sVespertine.

Hum.

Billie Holiday: a greatest hits collection that Matt gave me early in our relationship. I guess this will count as mine when we split our assets. Blue as low cloud but cathartic – sadness, yes, sorrow, absolutely, but with that crackling lacing of grit.

I guess we’ll have to sell the house. We can’t afford two properties.

I put the needle to the disc.

I wonder how we’ll split custody?

Billie Holiday sings. Feeding Fred, I watch the sun rise. The music doesn’t suit my mood perfectly, but it slows the running thoughts in my head. Last night feels like a puzzle I can’t work out, like there is no puzzle, like a puzzle again. I am a puzzle. I am a mess. Less of a mess than I was but a mess nonetheless. Stop it. Listen to the music, Ava. Close your eyes. Listen. Be in the moment. That mellow bluesy wash. That phrasing. When all else fails, there is music. There is the sun that rises, there is Fred, there is tea, there is the soft sofa cushion beneath me. There is me.

I should return to teaching. Sod should. No, this is a good should. Maybe just a couple of kids after school, once a week, to start. Focusing on the children might help me escape from myself. I was deputy head of a primary school before Abi came along, responsible for the school choir, for playing the piano in assemblies and for school plays. I missed it, when I was first at home with Abi. I went back part-time, planned to build back up to full-time again before… that day. Afterwards, I could not imagine ever going back – to anything. Now, I think I could start. I could build up. Whatever has happened, wherever Abi is, I am on my own now. Fred needs me.

But even as I reason it in my mind, I am aware that this is a swing of the metronome, the weight slid to the top of the pendulum, the slowest possible beat. And as this awareness grows, so the pendulum swings back.

I have lost Matt. My love. My lover. My best friend.

Tears fall easily. I leave Fred dozing and sated on his sheepskin on the floor. I don’t want to, know I shouldn’t, but I check that the front door is locked, twice, before going upstairs to get dressed. It is almost eight. I push open the spare-room door a crack. Matt is snoring, his mouth open, his chin dark with stubble. The bedroom stinks of stale alcohol, sour sweat and rank breath. The pain of what he has done returns to my chest. The trampled boundaries I cannot rebuild. I can’t forgive him. I cannot.

But still, from the bathroom, I fetch paracetamol and a glass of water, which I take back to the spare room and leave on the bedside table.

Needing to keep moving, I wash my face, pull back my hair into a ponytail. I find jeans and a T-shirt on the back of a chair and put them on, grab clean socks from the drawer.

Downstairs, I try to notice how fresh the milk is, how nutty the muesli, how unctuous the yoghurt, how wonderful the word ‘unctuous’ sounds in my head. I do notice these things, notice myself noticing, know that it’s myself outside myself, looking on, the I becoming the her. It doesn’t work. A decaf coffee, made with the machine: smell the aroma, admire the burnt-caramel-coloured crema, the patterns the milk froth makes in the espresso. Yes, yes, Ava, well done.

It doesn’t work. I can’t imagine it ever will.

I take my coffee through to the living room. On the sofa, I sit still and tip my face to the sun. Feel the sun. Close my eyes to the warmth of the sun. No social media, no distractions, no life outside the present moment. I no longer go on my iPhone. I no longer have one, only a cheap mobile for emergency calls and texts. I am used to being alone now. Like this, utterly alone. I have no friends anymore. I had cut out most of the white noise. Now I have cut out all of it.

This will be easier. This will be my choice. No woman is an island. Wanna bet?

At 9 a.m., I pack Fred into the pram. One blanket should be enough on this, the first day of September. And Mr Sloth, of course.

It was Matt’s idea to give Mr Sloth to Fred.

‘Isn’t that morbid?’ I asked at the time, appalled. Now, of course, a darker shadow falls over it. It feels manipulative. Abusive.

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