‘Have you tried anything – the breathing space kit?’
I froze, tried to swallow. ‘Sophie, it’s too late. Darling, I’m sorry.’ I walked over to her. She threw her arms around me and squeezed tight, sobbing into my neck. She wasn’t often physically demonstrative. Not with me. With Neil – yes. ‘Oh, Dad,’ she wailed. After a minute or two she pulled away.
‘It’s all right,’ I told her, ‘if you want to sit with him or hold his hand or anything.’
She looked at her father again, then shook her head. She went out of the room. I’d misjudged it, perhaps. She was fifteen and we were constantly second-guessing her reactions. Sophie was always so practical and sensible that it was easy to forget how young she really was. Unlike Adam.
I followed her down. I hated to leave Neil on his own. Sophie was on her phone. She ended the call as I came into the kitchen.
‘You didn’t tell Grandma.’ It sounded like an accusation.
‘Not yet. I thought you and Adam – you’ve told her?’
She nodded. She was being so grown-up. I realized that this was how she would deal with it now. She’d throw herself into the arrangements and help me with the tasks that needed doing and find a way to be useful.
‘Thank you,’ I said.
The doorbell rang. There was an ambulance outside, a man on the step. He checked that he’d come to the right place and signalled for his mate to join him.
‘He’s upstairs,’ I told them. ‘He’s been very ill.’ I led the way and the two men followed. One crossed over to Neil’s side and felt for his pulse. The other distracted me, asking questions: he’d been ill, what with, which hospital was he being seen by, how had he been earlier that day.
‘He is dead,’ his colleague confirmed. I nodded. The door went again. I heard voices. Then Sophie calling me. The ambulance man examining Neil gestured that I could go.
Downstairs there was a young policeman. Sophie had seated him at the kitchen table. He stood up as I entered the room. He was one of those men whose jaw is wider than his forehead, giving him the look of a comic-book hero. He introduced himself as PC Stenner, and explained he was following up on reports of a sudden death.
I sat down opposite him. Sophie was making tea.
‘My husband Neil. He has motor neurone disease. I went to check on him this afternoon, about three o’clock. Anyway, he wasn’t breathing.’
‘Big shock,’ he offered.
‘Just a question of time, really. It’s a terminal illness.’
‘He’s not in hospital?’
‘There’s no treatment.’
His eyes fell for a moment. ‘I see. Well, the coroner will be informed, just a matter of routine. Any sudden death. But, like you say, if it was expected…’ He wrote a few lines in his notebook, then stood and spoke to Sophie. ‘I won’t be needing that cuppa, ta.’
Her hands stilled and she flexed her fingers, a little signal of frustration. ‘You can do one for me, love,’ I put in.
The policeman left, and then the ambulance men came downstairs and explained that they would be fetching a stretcher to remove Neil’s body. I tried Adam’s number again but it was still on voicemail. Typical. If he got back in time for the funeral it would be a bloody miracle.
Sophie passed me my tea and I took it upstairs to the bedroom. The smell caught me afresh; I’d probably have to chuck the mattress. We’d never thought about that. The way a body empties on death.
The sun was glancing off Neil’s hair, turning the grey at his temples into silver and bringing out the shine in the rest, still dark brown. His skin tanned in spite of death’s pallor. He’d loved the sun. Had inherited his father Michael’s skin colouring, not his mother’s. Michael had Spanish ancestry while Veronica was Irish, complexion pale as milk and prone to burn. They were both small, Veronica was petite really, and Neil had towered over them. They joked he was their cuckoo child.
His parents arrived as the ambulance men were manoeuvring the stretcher down our stairs. Veronica was weeping noisily even as she came up the path. Sophie ran out to meet them and Veronica pulled her close. Michael moved on into the house, looking older and smaller, curly grey hair, a thick moustache. ‘Deborah.’ I moved into his arms.
He caught sight of the stretcher, let me go and moved to support his wife. Veronica groaned as the men brought Neil down. As they stepped on to the hall floor and straightened, she gave a wail and moved forward. ‘My boy,’ she cried. A fifty-year-old man. Ridiculous, perhaps, but I recognized the passion in her cry, the depth of her grief. If this had been my boy, my Adam… I started to cry, too. She loved Neil. I loved him. And now he was gone. Veronica clasped Neil’s hand between her own and kissed it.
‘Where are you taking him?’ I asked the ambulance men. ‘Only my son…’
‘He’ll be at the mortuary. Once you’ve sorted out the funeral arrangements, you can arrange a viewing at the funeral home.’
Michael eased Veronica away and I bent forward and kissed Neil’s cheek. I couldn’t speak. I stepped back to let them pass and stood in the front doorway while they carried him down to the ambulance and slid him inside. I watched until they had driven out of view.
When we were at university open relationships were all the rage, and Neil and I were nothing if not fashionable. Neil had one-night stands with a stream of women when I was away or staying in to study. I had a few short-lived affairs. Most of the time we’d sleep together, either at his house or at the bed-sit I’d moved into in my second year.
One night I’d been visiting my mother and got back sooner than expected. The trip had rattled me. She and I had so little to say to each other that, for me at any rate, the visits were an excruciating mix of tension and boredom. We relied on banalities, talked about the weather, the increase in fuel prices, domestic mishaps and the ups and downs of acquaintances we cared little about. I went out of a sense of duty; I never could tell whether she got any pleasure from our encounters.
There was a disco on at the student’s union that evening, and although I’d missed most of it, it would be more fun than sitting in getting stewed on my own. While I changed, putting on a vintage silk dress and dramatic makeup, I drank a couple of brandy-and-lemonades and smoked a joint.
Things were in full swing when I arrived, the air humid and smoky, the lights rippling over the crowd. Neil was in a corner, a pretty redheaded girl sitting on his lap. My guts clenched in reaction. I shot him a blazing smile and turned away. I wanted to rip her off him. I wanted him to dump her on the floor and come over to me. I wanted to kill them both. Not acceptable reactions. For the next hour I flirted with a group of lads at the bar before going off with the prettiest. It felt meaningless.
When I rolled up at my place the following afternoon, shivering in my thin dress, Neil was sitting on the doorstep. My heart burned when I saw him. He kissed me and followed me in.
I had a shower while he made bacon-and-egg butties. He was quiet as we ate and the tension was plain in the set of his jaw and the cast of his eyes. I put music on, rolled a joint. We lay on the bed smoking. He put the roach in the ashtray. I straddled him, let my robe fall open, traced his clavicle with my fingers. He stayed my hand and my skin chilled. He was leaving me. That was why he’d come round, why he was so wound up.
‘Move in with me,’ he said.
‘What?’
‘Or I’ll move in here. I don’t want anyone else.’ He edged himself up onto his elbows, shook his hair back from his face. ‘I don’t want to share you.’ His eyes were hot.
‘Very bourgeois.’
‘Deborah,’ he warned me, his grip on my wrist tightening.
‘Okay.’
He closed his eyes, a gesture of relief. Then looked at me again. Lay back down. I began to unbuckle his belt.
Living together. Monogamy. I wondered how long it would last.