Your loving mother,

Mum

45

The flash of red caught me by surprise. Blood. My period. The first one since the accident.

I’d barely noticed it not happening every month; I hadn’t worried because in the recesses of my mind, I’d known it was because of the shock and terribleness. I hadn’t, for one second, suspected I might be pregnant, but now, with an uprush of grief, I thought: I’ll never have your baby.

We shouldn’t have waited. We should have gone for it straightaway. But how were we to know?

We’d even talked about it. One morning shortly after we’d got married, I was getting dressed and Aidan was lying in bed, bare-chested, his hands behind his head. “Anna,” he said, “something weird’s happening.”

“What? Aliens landing on next door’s roof?”

“No, listen. Since I was three years old, the Boston Red Sox have been the love of my life. Now they’re not anymore. Now it’s you, obviously. I still care about them; I guess I still love them, but I’m not in love with them anymore.” All this was delivered in bed, in a somber, soul-searching, ceiling-staring kind of way. “In all that time I never wanted to have kids. Now I do. With you. I’d like a miniature version of you.”

“And I’d like a miniature version of you. But, Aidan, lest we forget, I have a mad family; a rogue insane gene could pop its head up at any time.”

“Good, good, should be fun. And we’ve got Dogly to think about. Dogly needs a kid around the place.” He sat up on his elbow and announced, “I’m serious.”

“About Dogly?”

“No, about us having a baby. As soon as possible. What do you think?”

I thought I’d love it. “But not just yet. Soon. Soonish. Like, in a couple of years. When we’ve someplace proper to live.”

To: [email protected]

From: [email protected]

Subject: This can’t go on

Dear Anna,

I hope you are keeping well. I don’t know if it will make you feel better or worse to know that things are very bad for us here, too. There was more dog number twos parked at our gate this morning. It is like living under siege. Luckily your father didn’t stand in it this time, but the milkman did and he was extremely annoyed and our “relationship” with him is awkward enough since that time we all “cut out dairy” because of that stupid diet Helen put us on that lasted five minutes until she realized that ice cream is dairy. It was hard enough to persuade him to come back that time.

Your loving mother,

Mum

46

All week, I was on tenterhooks waiting for the Mitch bloke to call with Neris Hemming’s number, but the days passed and I heard nothing. So I made a plan: if he hadn’t rung by Sunday I’d go back to that place. That made me feel less panicky and powerless. Then I’d remember that it was the Fourth of July weekend, what if he’d gone away? And I’d feel panicky and powerless all over again.

It had been a bad week at work. I’d been ferociously narky, and although my dislocated knee was officially better, I’d become very clumsy, as though one side of my body were heavier than the other. I kept bumping into things; I’d knocked a cup of coffee into Lauryn’s desk drawer and I’d made a whiteboard topple over at a briefing session and caught Franklin in the goolies. I’d only grazed them, but he still made a terrible song and dance about it.

But these accidents were nothing compared to the Eye Eye Captain disaster: because I’d cried all over the Femme address label and made it too blurry to be read, their package had been returned to us by the couriers on Tuesday afternoon, and we’d missed the print slot. Lauryn was still thin-lipped with fury. Every morning when I got out of the elevator, I’d barely set one shoe on the carpet before she shrieked down the corridor, “Do you know how high the circulation of Femme is! Do you know how many women READ it?”

Then Franklin would join in, yelling, “Without his cojones, a man is nothing!”

On Friday evening, when I walked into my local newsagent’s to get supplies for my evening of crying, I finally realized why I’d been so narky: I was roasting. The little shop was like an oven.

“It’s so hot!” I said to the man.

I wasn’t expecting a reply because I didn’t think he spoke English, but he said, “Hot! Yes! For many days a heat wave!”

Many days? What did he mean? “What…when did this heat wave start?”

“Hah?”

“When, what day, did it start being hot?”

“Thursday.”

“Thursday?” That wasn’t so bad.

“Tuesday.”

“Tuesday?” Said in high alarm.

“Sunday.”

“It wasn’t Sunday.”

“Some other day. I don’t know the name.”

Disturbed, I slowly made my way home with my bag of sweets. This heat-wave business was not good. I’d been so locked inside myself that although I’d noticed it, I hadn’t noticed it enough.

A worry was worming at me: during the week, while I’d been going about my business, wearing the wrong clothes for very hot weather, had I been…smelly?

After my regulation-issue three hours’ sleep, I woke on Saturday morning with sweat trickling into my hair. Feck. So it was true: we were in the thick of a heat wave and it was summer. Panic seized me.

I don’t want it to be summer. Summer is too far away from when you died.

I’d thought I’d wanted enough time to pass so I could think of him without the pain killing me, but now that it was July I wanted it to be February forever.

Time was the great healer, people said. But I didn’t want to heal, because if I did I’d be abandoning him.

Flattened by the sweltering heat, I was too hot to move. The air conditioner needed to be set up, but it was a huge big yoke, the size of a telly. Last autumn, Aidan had put it away on a high shelf in the living room.

The horror washed over me. You’re not here to take it down.

Those odd little gaps where I’d forget, for a split second, that he had died were such a mistake, because then I’d have to remember all over again. The shock always hit with the same force.

When would this get easier? Would it ever get easier? I’d been thinking about other people who’d had horror visited upon them—holocaust survivors, rape victims, people who’d lost entire families. Often they go on to live what looked like normal lives. At some stage they must have stopped feeling like everything was a living nightmare.