The Love of My Afterlife(92)
I laugh again, clutching my ribs. “You need to stop making me laugh.”
“I can’t promise anything,” Leanne says, lifting her chin, a proud smile on her face. “But I’ll try to hold off until we finally go for our drink.”
“What drink?”
“The one you agreed to join me and Mum for in return for giving you late-notice time off.”
Ah yes. That. God. It seems so long ago now.
It’s odd. When I’d agreed to that, I’d immediately started to think of ways I could renege. But now, in the midst of everything being terrible, I can see how it might just be a salve.
47
My procession of visitors continues a couple of hours later with Jan. When she shows up, I’m crying again, because that’s now all I am able to do.
Mostly I’m crying for Cooper. Because as each day goes by that he doesn’t wake up, the more likely it seems that he won’t wake up at all. And when Amy told me that Cooper was in love with me, I didn’t really stop to think about how I felt about him.
Yes, I knew I fancied him. I knew he made me laugh in a way that felt like freedom. I knew that behind the surliness was a tender and generous heart. I knew that he had shown me how to use my body as an instrument for joy instead of fear. But I assumed that was just lust. Now I’m facing the prospect of not getting to see what comes after lust.
I wanted to know him. Really know him in a way that takes longer than ten days. To listen to him brushing his teeth, to hear what he thought of the TV shows we watched, to find out his favourite colour, breakfast cereal, poet, side of the bed, toe. To sit up all night again, like the night after the gala. Talking about everything and nothing—all of the inconsequential things that add up to mean that you almost know what the person’s going to say before they say it.
What if I never again get to feel that fizz in my stomach, the one that tickled and sparked with pride when I made him laugh or come or shake his head like he couldn’t believe I was real?
“I made a batch,” Jan says, handing me two tuna sandwiches wrapped in cling film, along with a bottle of Lucozade and a bunch of green grapes.
“Thanks so much.” I already know that I will not eat the sandwiches based on Leanne’s earlier tale. I grab a fresh tissue from the box on my bedside cabinet and blow my nose before dropping the used tissue onto the large disgusting pile of snotty ones I’ve been constructing like some pathetic game of Jenga. “Sorry, Jan. I never used to cry at all, you know. Was hard as steel.”
Jan tuts. “Well, that’s nothing to be proud of.”
I think of my mum always telling me that only wimps cried, that Bookhams are made of sterner stuff.
“Crying means you’re feeling,” Jan muses. “That you’re living. That you’re loving.”
“That you’re laughing?”
She ignores me. “It means that you care.”
“It sucks, though. Now there are all these people around. And I like them. And I miss them. And I can’t stop crying. That objectively sucks.”
Jan laughs. “No! No, it doesn’t. Well, it does, but god, wouldn’t it be a dull old life if you never had anything to cry about?”
I think about the last twelve years of my life. How I absolutely ensured that I had nothing to cry about.
“Were you aware that emotional tears have a higher protein concentration than tears that come from irritation?” Jan asks, as if this is something that the everyday person would know. “I read online that the higher protein content makes them fall down your cheeks more slowly—increasing the chance they’ll be seen by people and attract help. Your body is literally built for community. Tears literally attract people. So cry away!”
“That’s beautiful,” I say despite myself.
“I think so too.”
“I never wanted people, though. They make everything messy.”
“That’s a good thing, love. The thing about people is you have to let them drag you to places you don’t want to go. Let them tell you things you don’t want to hear. Let them break you and put you back together. Like my beloved Stephen Sondheim wrote—Somebody hold me too close, somebody hurt me too deep. That’s what being alive is.”
“I don’t know what to do, Jan.”
Jan grabs my hand. “What you do is you focus on getting better. You get back to life as best you can. And you keep hoping. You keep hoping that life will turn out the way it’s supposed to.”
The kindness in her eyes, the genuine care, makes me feel like I’m going to burst into sobs all over again. I steady myself.
“Did you kiss Deli Dan?” I ask, remembering the way they were flirting at the party.
Jan raises an eyebrow and gives an unusually throaty laugh. “We did more than kiss, Delphie love. I’ve had a crush on that fella for years. Never thought he’d look twice at someone like me. But that’s what I’m saying. Fate has a way of giving you exactly what you need, when you need it.”
I look out of the window, out into the distance, to wherever Merritt and Cooper may be right now.
I sigh, long and low. “I really hope you’re right.”
* * *
It’s something Aled says on one of his visits that gets my brain cogs whirring. He asks me how on earth Cooper and I got to dating after living in the same building for so long with nothing more than the odd snipe between us. When I tell him about Cooper needing me to pretend to be his girlfriend so that his parents wouldn’t set him up with their next-door neighbour, Aled cries, “Fake dating! My favourite of all the romance tropes. You were destined to fall in love.”