After the End(65)

“Yes.”

An apartment, I think. Something totally different, some modern glass loft. A city, perhaps. Still close enough for Pip’s parents to visit.

“A new start,” I say.

“Yes.” A tear builds slowly on her lower lashes. As I watch, it tips over the edge and trickles down her cheek.

“A new house.”

There’s a pause. And then: “Two new houses.”

I’m slow to understand. Two houses? Why do we need—

“It’s over, Max.”





twenty-eight





Pip


   2013


Max has been back home for three months. Two months, three weeks, five days, to be precise. After the funeral he checked out of his hotel and put his bags in the hall, and stood for a moment, as though he didn’t know what to say, what to do. How to be.

“Coffee?” I said. Because everything we should really have been saying was too hard.

“Sure.”

And that was it. Max was back home, like nothing had happened, like everything was exactly the same as it was a month ago, before Dylan died.

“We don’t have to do this now.” Max scans my face for doubt. We’re standing on the landing, my hand resting on the handle to Dylan’s room. “We don’t have to do it at all.”

“Leave it, you mean? Like some sort of shrine?” There are times when I wake up and it’s already Wednesday; others when I look at the clock and can’t believe that only a few minutes have passed.

“People do.”

Do they? Does clearing Dylan’s room mean I love him less?

“No, we should do it now.” But still I don’t move, the resolve in my voice not reaching my fingertips.

Max nods. “OK.” Then he puts his hand over mine and we open the door together.

It’s possible to look without seeing. To act without feeling. You just have to close your heart for a while. I kneel on the floor and start sorting Dylan’s clothes into piles, picking up jumpers and refolding them without letting myself think about what I’m doing. “The Red Cross will take all these,” I say briskly. “Or I can pass them to Alison for the twins—they’re small for their age but she could put them aside till they fit.”

“I don’t want anyone wearing his things.” The words are curt, Max’s tone harsh. He’s holding a xylophone, and as he puts it in the toy box the notes make a dull clink. “The toys, yes. Not his clothes.”

“We can’t throw them away.” I picture Alison’s twins—identical, but so different already—in Dylan’s T-shirts, the bright diggers and dinosaurs he loved. “I think she’d like something of Dylan’s.”

“No.” Max goes to the window. Summer arrived without my noticing it, and the garden is overgrown and neglected. Grass grows around Dylan’s football goal, loved so much for so few weeks. Perhaps we should grow vegetables instead. Create raised beds. Pave over it all. Anything that means I won’t look out of the window and hear my two-and-a-half-year-old boy shouting Go! I watch Max’s back, stiff and uncomfortable, as he looks out at the garden. I realise with a jolt that I don’t know what he’s thinking, and—worse—that I don’t want to ask. Instead I continue sorting clothes, methodically separating what can be worn again from what has seen better days.

“I’ll take them to another town,” Max says, still with his back to me. “Or to a charity that’ll send them overseas. But if I saw another child wearing Dylan’s clothes—”

“They make a million identical shirts—”

“—I couldn’t handle it.”

I spread out the T-shirt I’m holding. It’s white with red stripes, an appliqué shark leaping out of blue stitched waves. I mentally take myself to Alison’s house, imagine Isaac running to the door in red and white and shark. It feels right. It feels comforting to imagine this scrap of cotton so full of life again.

“OK,” I say, because this is how it is now. If Max doesn’t want another child wearing Dylan’s clothes, the clothes won’t be worn. Giving Max his way is small compensation for everything he feels he has lost.

We work in silence, stacking books into boxes for Oxfam, folding sleepsuits and bedding for the NCT sale. Max finds an Allen key to undo the bolts that hold the cot together, and I hold the sections steady while he takes it apart, just as I held them steady three years ago, my bump so big I had to stand sideways.

I’m undone by a sock.

A single tiny white sock, separated from its mate and dropped between the back of the cot and the wall. The sole is grubby, the fabric still pushed into the shape of a foot, and when I pick it up I half expect it to feel warm to the touch, as though Dylan has just this moment pulled it off. I hold it to my face and breathe in the scent of my boy—a physical assault on my senses that makes me lean against the wall to keep myself from falling.

“Oh, sweetie.” Max moves to put his arms around me, but I shake my head.

“I’m OK.” If I cry now—even for a moment—I am lost. I have learned this the hard way. Crying is not as simple as shedding a tear, then finding a tissue and getting on with my day. Crying is an hour or more, crouched in a corner with my breath coming in hard painful lumps and my nose turning every word into a string of vowels. Crying is that first day lost, and the second lost too, to puffy eyes and a leaden, dragging sensation like waking from Valium-fuelled sleep. Crying is no longer something to be taken lightly.