While I think about how best to fix this, I make a list of the details I need to check.
Did Emma go straight into her master’s after her undergraduate degree?
What were Emma and her dad’s exact movements when she was a child? （I know her father served with several different Marine commandos, but I’ve no idea which ones, or when.）
How exactly did her mum die?
John Keats is asleep in the Queen Anne chair behind me, even though he’s banned from the furniture. I watch him sleep, one paw twitching like a tired eye, and weigh up the pros and cons of just texting the list of questions to Emma, with an apologetic note blaming Kelvin.
It takes seconds to reject the idea. She’s reopened the door on life; the last thing she needs is a reminder of her own mortality. Just this morning she went running, and afterwards sent me a picture of her shiny red face. I AM ALIVE! she wrote. FUCKING ALIVE!
I’m also far too ashamed to admit to her that I don’t know exactly how her mother died. She’s only ever said it was a birth complication, and it’s never felt right to drill down for details she hasn’t offered.
Emma has a plastic folder of important bits called FOLDER OF IMPORTANT BITS. I’ve never looked inside but I imagine it’s exactly the same as my own box file: birth certificate, degree, letters, that sort of thing. The folder lives at the top of her filing cabinet, which she keeps locked, but I give the door a light nudge anyway. This would be a far easier means to the same end.
The door rolls quietly upwards. It makes the tiniest hair-split noise, but it’s enough to wake the dog. He and I both stare inside.
I can’t remember the last time I saw the inside of this cabinet. Emma never leaves it unlocked; she’s terrified of a burglar making off with her non-computerised research. If we go abroad she comes down here to get her passport out personally: you’d just forget to lock it, she always says, which is absolutely correct.
I wonder if she’s slipping into one of her Times. It’s not like her to leave it open.
After a pause, I reach up for the folder, which clicks open.
John Keats looks worried, so I put on a jungle album from our Spotify favourites. Ghosts of My Life, it’s called, by someone called Rufige Kru.
The folder is all but empty.
There are a few recent things; her PhD; a thank you letter from a charity she’s been sending money to for ten years; the last paper driving licence counterpart Emma had before they became obsolete. A photo of Emma and her father outside an enormous naval ship, an old work ID of Emma’s. But nothing else.
The dog is still watching me.
This cupboard is seldom open, but I’ve seen this folder often enough. It’s always been overstuffed, just like mine – life is perplexingly full of vitally important papers that never actually get used. The files we use to store them expand and fatten to the point of bursting: they don’t slim down to almost nothing.
I pull out her work ID, still attached to a well-worn lanyard.
EMMA BIGELOW, it says. BIOLOGICAL AND MARINE SCIENCES. I smile at her photograph. Even with the required impassive expression, my wife looks at once subversive, beautiful and amused.
I stand back to get a good view of the cupboard. She must have moved the papers to a different shelf.
Only she hasn’t. Everything else is labelled and accounted for. I could open up all the lever arch files in front of me, but what would be the point? She’s not going to have hole-punched her birth certificate.
I go upstairs to look at the piles of stuff in our bedroom, but there’s no pile of papers there.
They haven’t been left in the mess on the landing.
They aren’t in the empty box she’s recently started using for haphazard document storage, perched halfway up the stairs.