Someone Else's Shoes(35)

“You can start. And then we’ll talk together.”

“I don’t know what to say.”

A long silence.

“So what brings you here, Philip?”

“Phil. It’s Phil.”

“Okay, Phil.”

Phil stares at the floor. “My doctor. Well, he didn’t actually bring me here. But he said if I wouldn’t take the anti-depressants I needed to try talking therapy.” He scratches his head. “And my daughter. She’s . . . concerned about me. Silly, really.”

“And you were reluctant to come?”

“I’m British.” Phil attempts a smile. “We’re not big on feelings.”

“Oh, I’d disagree,” says Dr. Kovitz. “I think British people are very big on feelings. Expressing them comfortably, perhaps not so much.” He smiles.

Phil smiles back awkwardly. It seems to be expected.

“Do you want to talk me through what took you to the doctor in the first place?”

Phil feels his chest tighten, as it does reflexively whenever anyone demands he discuss the events of the past year.

“Let’s keep it simple to begin with. You said your father died. Was it unexpected?”

There are things that are almost too much to put into words. And the months leading up to Dad’s death are so huge and so dark in his mind that he is afraid that if he revisits them he will be a small planet sucked into a black hole. A vast, terrifying vacuum he will not be able to claw his way out of.

He lets out a small cough. “Well, yes and no,” he says, and shifts in his chair. “Yes, in that he was fit and healthy for a seventy-five-year-old. No, in that once we knew, we had months to see what was coming down the line.”

“Cancer?”

“Yes.”

“Were you close?”

“Uh . . . yes.”

“I’m sorry. That must have been very hard for you.”

“Oh, I’m fine. He had a good life. It’s . . . you know, my mum. They were married fifty years. She’s the one I worried about.”

“And how is she doing?”

That was the thing. Nancy was doing fine. For the first six months after Dad died he would brace himself for the evening call. She would start every conversation in a tremulous, brave voice, talking about the small things she had achieved: the emptying of a drawer, moving some things from the shed, then, inevitably, she would crumble. I just miss him so much, love. He had learned to dread those moments, his feelings of impotence and sadness, his inability to lift any of that weight. He and Sam would head over every Sunday and either take her for a pub lunch or help her prepare a roast, and chat to her as they all washed up afterward. She had seemed so diminished, as if she couldn’t survive physically without him. She had never paid a bill on her own, never had the car serviced, never eaten a meal in a public place without him by her side. She lost her interest in food, in going out. She would revisit memories like worry beads, going over and over the past months and wondering aloud if they should have done things differently, if there had been something she had missed. He had wondered occasionally whether they would need to ask her to live with them. She seemed fundamentally unsuited to being alone. It was only the fact that they had no actual bedroom to put her in that had stopped them.

And then, abruptly, everything changed. His mother had grieved, and grieved, and then one day he had turned up and her hair was blow-dried and she was wearing lipstick. “I had a big think about it and I decided Rich wouldn’t want me sitting around weeping and wailing. I think he would have got quite cross with me. Can you show me where I put oil into the car?”

And that was it. Two months ago she had started volunteering with refugees at the community center, giving baking classes every Tuesday. Phil wasn’t sure how many of them really needed to learn how to make a Victoria Sandwich, but she said it wasn’t about the food: “It’s just getting them to do something, being in a group. And everyone feels better after cake, don’t they? It’s a fact.”

She said it made her feel better, being useful. Listening to their stories, she felt grateful that she’d had such a peaceful life, so much love. She—a woman who had shunned garlic for years as “too foreign”—even started to enjoy the food they brought in for her. “It was so spicy, Phil, honestly. My face went as red as a beetroot. But it was actually rather good.”

He was glad for her, but also oddly troubled by his mother’s ability just to get on with her life. Because he couldn’t. At night he dreamed of sitting beside his father’s bed, his bony, translucent hand gripping Phil’s with surprisingly strong fingers as he struggled for breath, his eyes furious as he gazed at Phil over his oxygen mask. The way he looked as if he actually hated his son. He saw those eyes boring into his every time he closed his own.

“She’s doing well,” he says. “You know. Considering.”

“So we have that,” says Dr. Kovitz. “That’s a major life event. A lot to cope with. Is there anything else you’re navigating?”

Well, I lost my job, and with that my wife lost all respect for me, and my daughter thinks I’m a dud and I can’t see the point in getting dressed, or even washing most days. I don’t see my friends any more, because who wants to be around a miserable person?