After the End(66)
“Sure?”
“Yep.” I put the sock in my pocket. “But let’s stop. For a bit.”
A bit is a week, and then two, and then four. I spend a few days with my parents in the autumn, and when I return Max takes my hands and tells me he’s cleared Dylan’s room.
“I put the cot in the loft,” he says.
We’d always talked about a big family. Both of us are only children. Both of us longed for siblings growing up, and yearned for them even more as adults, with ageing parents and grown-up worries too intimate for friends. Then Dylan fell ill, and now . . . now it feels wrong. It isn’t like buying a car to replace the one scrapped. Empty arms feel empty forever, even when they’re full again.
“Just in case,” Max says, and his eyes slide away from mine. He shows me the books he’s kept, and the one-eared elephant Dylan flattened into a pillow. Then he leads me upstairs and I find myself pulling back slightly because I don’t know if I can bear to see the room empty.
Only it isn’t empty.
The blind has been replaced by voile curtains that pool on the floor, the walls repainted in a soft grey.
“Did you do this?”
Max nods.
“But you hate decorating!”
“It felt different,” he said. “Cathartic, almost.” Against one wall, family photos sit on a writing desk with pigeonholes already filled with notelets and envelopes. The mug bearing Dylan’s one-year-old handprint holds a clutch of pens. In the opposite corner is an armchair, angled to face the window. Beside it, a reading lamp is switched on, a pile of paperbacks waiting to be read. My yarn bag is on the floor, filled with the knitted squares I haven’t touched since we left the hospital.
“I thought it could be yours,” Max says, as I turn slowly round, taking in all the changes. “Somewhere to knit, or read, or just to—”
“Just to be,” I finish. “To think.” And I resolve that I will not cry in this room, that it will not become a place of sadness, another quiet room. I snake my arms around Max’s neck, and feel him breathe out in relief that he did the right thing. “Thank you. It’s perfect.”
* * *
I don’t knit in my room. But I do read. I read in a way I haven’t read since I was pregnant, when I’d swallow a book in one sitting. When Max is away I spend my evenings here, looking up to realise it’s pitch-black outside and I’m stiff from not moving.
“How many this week?” Max asks, when he comes home. He puts his washing in the machine, but leaves his case in the hall. “Washington, DC, on Monday,” he says.
“Six.” I open a bottle of wine. “I’m working my way through P. D. James.”
We eat on our laps in front of the television, half-watching a soap neither of us has bothered to turn off. The camera cuts to a child in hospital, a tangle of wires across a cellular blanket. I reach for the remote, but Max gets there first, pressing a button—any button—and we finish our meal to the backdrop of a documentary about sheep farming.
“Meet Me in Mississippi?” I say, when we’ve finished eating, and I’m scrolling through channels. “It’s got Bill Strachan in it. Great reviews.”
Max grimaces. “Saw it on the plane. Sorry. I don’t mind seeing it again, though—it’s very good.”
We settle on a comedy that stops being funny twenty minutes in, and when I look at Max he’s fallen asleep, his head tipped back and his mouth slightly open. I slip out from his arm and he doesn’t stir. Upstairs my book is waiting, the page marked with my library card, and I wrap myself in a blanket and read until I fall asleep myself.
* * *
There was no Christmas—I can’t imagine there ever will be again. I wished I could sleep right through it. I took small comfort from thinking there must be others like me—other childless mothers—lying in bed with their eyes squeezed shut, thinking, Let it be over; others who do their shopping at midnight in near-empty 24/7 supermarkets, free from excited children tugging at their mothers’ skirts and saying When will he come, when will Santa be here?
I stayed up, though, to see the date tip from 2013 to 2014, and I felt the beginnings of optimism at the start of a new year. I joined an online book club, spending even more time in my reading room, and tearing myself reluctantly away from my fictional worlds for mundane chores, and to put tea on the table.
I’m doing housework when my mobile rings. It’s a rare occurrence nowadays, and by the time I run downstairs, the ringing has stopped and Alison—Isaac & Toby shows on my call log. Most of the women I met when Dylan was a baby appear in my phone suffixed by their children. As I ring Alison back I wonder if my name flashes up as Pip—Dylan, and whether the sight of it gives her a jolt.
“Hey, you!”
“Sorry I missed your call. I was cleaning the bathroom.”
“I thought you had a woman?”
“We did. But it seemed silly keeping her on when I’m here all day, and it gives me something to do.” There’s a beat, just long enough for me to recognise how pathetic I sound.
“How are you doing?” I hear tapping at the other end of the phone, and I know that Alison is calling from the travel agency where she works. I picture her cradling her mobile between shoulder and ear as she completes someone’s booking.