grief – Page 2 – SANDERLINGS

It was seven years on the 30th January. The eve of Brexit. The anniversary of your death. I can’t believe it’s been seven years. If someone had asked, I’d have shuffled and counted and eventually settled on four or five. It’s still so raw.

There’s a bus stop in the West End outside a shop that used to be a chemist. The bus stop doesn’t have a shelter. I went to that chemist for your drugs when it was open out of hours. I can’t wait at that bus stop without thinking of you. The plain white boxes of medication piled up on your dresser. The arrival of your hospital bed. The smoky coal fire in the room that became yours. The soft winter sunlight that waltzed over your sheets.

There’s a cycle path that runs along the Water of Leith. It winds past Tesco through a stippled bower of trees and on to the Scotland Street tunnel. Sometimes there’s a community art project in the tunnel. Or young folk nodding heads to music in the rain. I went to Tesco for you. Stood stricken searching for small things with big tastes or tempting smells. Prawns in a gingery sauce. A blistering avocado. A bag of peppery rocket. The flowers would stick up out of my pannier, pint-sized soldiers with soft floppy hats. One night the heads severed. A trail of creamy petals shimmered the tunnel in woe. I can’t ride that path without thinking of you.

There’s a beach outside my flat. A great blond stretch of sand, held together by parallel lines. Beside it there’s a bar with not much of a view. It was a lunchtime in a season with cold days. We were eating soup. Pushing hard butter out of golden wrappers. Spreading firm yellow squares onto white bread rolls. You told me then. The words so simple out of your mouth I couldn’t believe they were true. I can’t enter that bar without thinking of you.

There’s a desk in my room. It, too, is pale. Pale oak. It has shelves and drawers and a round hole for cables. On the top shelf I have a light, a jar of pens, and a row of thick reference books and thin jotters. Sometimes the books and jotters topple. The light, held solid by its smooth lead base, never moves. You collected that desk. You put it together while I made us coffee and read the instructions and faffed around and pretended to help. You were well then. I can’t sit at that desk without thinking of you.

There’s a text on my phone. The last text from you.

I fill silence. I can’t help myself. It’s a family thing. We take a hush and we trash it. We’re right in there when you’re just pausing for breath, readying your next word. Sculpting a phrase with your tongue. We’re seizing the space you’d rounded out for yourself. Our mouths wide open before yours had even closed. Spittle on our lips. We might point a finger. We might even stand up. Stand over you. Lining you up through our cross-hairs. And then we launch. Our opinions tearing at you like missiles. Right in there on God, independence, nuclear waste. On mental health. On climate change and food banks and the monsters that spread fake news.

Don’t take it personally. I fill my own silences too. Speak to the dead more than the living some days. ‘Don’t go in there, lass. Bloke’s just hung himself,’ the policeman had said outside our front door. And then I was out in the dark street while they cleaned it all up. The world was different in those days. Before social media. Before mobile phones. Before the Internet. I try to describe the new world to the dead lover. Tell him about the future that he’d twisted off with a belt. Use words that I hope he’ll understand. Twitter, I tell him, is when you tell the world your latest umbrage and you type it out on a little machine and send it out like a telegram and lots of people you don’t know might send it on to lots of people they don’t know. He raises an eyebrow. His teeth are neat and white except for the crooked one at the front. His jaw hasn’t sagged. His skin is still smooth tablet brown. He can’t grasp it. Twitter? He motions to his sketch book. Passes over a blunt pencil. I reach out to stroke his cheek. How do you draw a tweet? His questions skim over the cool of my bare arms, slip through a barely open window, slither into a thin shadow at the back of the shower. I watch him in the mirror. Running long pastel-smudged fingers through the dark curl of his hair, buttoning up his brown striped shirt, kneeling down to fiddle with the laces of his cherry-red sneakers. I don’t look at his neck.

After his death I kept his photograph in purses then wallets then inside pockets. A passport photo he’d given me the day after we’d met over spilt cider in Mathers. I was dressed up as a gnome. He must have liked gnomes. Took that photo with me backpacking across Australia. Hitchhiking on river boats down the Sundarbans. Cycling the Andes. In the evenings, lying lonely in dank hostel bunks, I told him everything. The crocodile eyes floating on night rivers like scattered diamonds. The tiger prints disappearing into the muddy swirl of mangroves. The volcanoes puffing and panting out coils of thick grey ash.

Smudged and faded, the photo curled at the edges and every so often I’d put it between a couple of books to flatten it out. And then one day it wasn’t there. ‘Sorry’, I said. I’m so sorry for all of it’. He didn’t reply. He never says it wasn’t my fault. It isn’t, wasn’t in him. One day he’d taped his last Rolo to the handlebars of my old brown Raleigh. Another time he’d sent me a ‘miss you’ card to the French hotel I was staying in without him. ‘It’s not you, it’s me’, I’d said as we’d stood on the platform on Waverley and he’d begged me not to go. After the funeral I tucked that card into his sketchbook. On dreich days, when the starlings crowd in on the guttering with their heads hunched low and their tiny beaks pressed up hard against the glass, I get it out and trace the words with a finger.

I don’t hurl my opinions at the dead. I whisper. Bargain. Petition for clemency. Plead for release. I curl my tongue around my crimes. Roll mercy into the balls of my cheeks. Sometimes the dead lover catches me out. I see him slipping down London Road, or turning up Leith St. I call out to him through closed lips, without sound. Once, on the bus, the words escaped, voluble, fizzing. ‘I love you,’ I’d said. And someone young looked up from a mobile phone, then turned away. Embarrassed for me. As with the living, as with the dead. I fill silence. I can’t help myself.

This piece was originally written for the Scottish Book Trust’s Blether series 2019