The Love of My Life(6)

‘Can you promise me one thing?’ I ask. He’s standing in front of the fridge, appraising its contents with apparent curiosity, even though we both know what he’s there for. My husband wouldn’t survive a week vegan.

‘Anything.’

‘Oh Leo, just eat the bloody ham.’

He frowns, and opens the vegetable drawer. ‘What do you want me to promise?’ he asks, obstinately leafing through wilting herbs.

‘That if there is bad news, you won’t pre-write my obituary.’

He straightens and snatches the ham off the top shelf. ‘Of course I won’t.’ He rolls a slice into a baggy cigar and crams it into his mouth.

‘You might feel like you have to. I don’t know – professionally, personally; both. But I don’t want anyone writing about my death while I’m still alive. Least of all you.’

‘It hadn’t even crossed my mind.’

I watch him for a while. ‘Are you sure?’

‘Yes!’ He looks quite upset.

‘Sorry, darling.’ I sit down, suddenly. ‘Sorry. I just can’t stand the thought of you imagining me already gone. I . . . I can’t cope with that.’

Leo shuts the fridge. ‘I get it,’ he says. He kneels down in front of me. ‘I get it.’

John Keats watches us uncertainly. Leo strokes my hair. He knows not to say anything.

I find myself wondering, as I have done so many times in the last few years, what the moment of death feels like. How much we know; whether there’s any sense of letting go. I don’t believe in tunnels or white lights, but I do think there’s a moment when we just know we’re done, when we stop trying.

And that’s the thing: I don’t want to stop trying. I don’t want to be done.

After a while, Leo gets up and puts on the quiet music we leave on all night for John. The dog pads off to bed, reassured, and Leo goes over to say goodnight. ‘Don’t even think about waking before six,’ he tells John, giving him his night biscuits.

Then he straightens up and looks at me. ‘Would it help to dance?’ he asks.

Leo and I barely knew each other the first time we went dancing. It was just meant to be a drink in a pub. But a drink turned into several, which turned into late spaghetti and meatballs in a tiny Italian near Leo’s old flat in Stepney Green, which turned into rum in a bar full of dental students who’d just finished exams. We all became friends and the students took us to a club in Whitechapel where everyone was dancing as if the end of the world was nigh.

‘Is this OK?’ he shouted in my ear. Leo. Thirty-five years old, beautiful and so funny, in his quiet, deadly way. ‘We can go somewhere less mental if you want . . . ?’

‘No chance!’ I yelled. ‘I’m happy!’

And I was. Everything was so easy with Leo. He was so easy. Watchful, perhaps hurt in the past, but straightforward in a way that made me regret all the high-energy men I’d dated in the last few years, with their need for attention, for admiration, their noise. Leo didn’t seem to need anything from me, other than me. I held his hand tightly. It was cool and steady, even in that overheated underground space.

Then he said, ‘Right, let’s dance.’

‘I’m pretty good,’ he warned me, which I took to mean ‘I’m terrible.’ But, oh God, could he dance. A man with rhythm is one of the sexiest things on earth, I’ve always thought, and Leo, in his slim jeans and T-shirt, his glasses and his uncertain haircut, was pure fantasy. He just slipped through the air, through the hot bodies around us, as if waterborne. I watched him, awed, until he took hold of my waist, in a matter-of-fact manner, and moved me around the sticky dance floor as if I too were the sort of dancer people stopped everything to watch.

‘As far as I’m concerned, you’re going to get the all-clear,’ he says now, as we dance slowly, quietly, in our darkened kitchen. His voice is tired but defiant. ‘There is no other possible outcome.’

Before we go to bed, I check on Ruby. She’s bundled up in a corner of her bed, face down, arm hooked around Duck. I breathe in the smell of my sleeping girl.

We all but gave up on conceiving. Three years of hopes raised and dashed, endless appointments with real doctors, witch doctors and everyone in between. We’d had every test known to man, but nobody could give me a concrete reason for my inability to get pregnant. The only thing they seemed to agree on, in the end, was that I was very unlikely to conceive naturally, if at all.

Eventually, we took out a loan and payed for an eyewateringly expensive ‘miracle IVF’ that Leo’s sister-in-law had had. It worked. Another part of my body might have been growing a low-grade cancer, but in my womb, a child was forming.

A second chance, I think now, reaching out a hand to check for the gentle rise and fall of my daughter’s ribs. Please, Dr Moru, give me a second chance tomorrow, so I can love my husband and daughter in the way I promised.

I will let him go, if I get the all-clear. No matter how hard, I will let him go.





Chapter Three


LEO


When Emma finally sleeps, I go back out to the shed. I pick up the notebook and hold it between two fingers, as if it’s a contaminant.

Her instinct was spot on: I have been writing her obituary. Sitting, scribbling on the tube, strangers trying to read over my shoulder. Writing late at night, when Emma’s gone to bed and it’s just me and John Keats and a black opening of fear.