——
We arrived at the headstone shop at the time Johnny’s mother had set, but she was already inside. ‘I got here early,’ she told us. The mason had sketched out on tracing paper the wording that is still scratched in stone on Davey’s grave to this day.
May the Lord have mercy on the loving soul of David George Docherty.
I hated the wording – the implication that God might be anything but merciful to my baby boy – and when I started to cry, Johnny’s mother told him that I was overwhelmed and to take me home so she could deal with this for us.
——
Meena was sitting on the steps that led up to the front door of our house. She had the Polaroid of Jeremy in her hands. Her shoulders were pink from the sun.
‘No luck,’ she said as I approached. ‘I don’t understand how he got out.’
‘It wasn’t me,’ I said.
She gave me an odd look. ‘I know it wasn’t.’
I tried to squeeze some air through my throat, but it felt like it had closed.
Meena stared at me then. ‘What is it?’ she asked.
I sat beside her, and I sobbed so hard that I was struggling to breathe and the hot tears were smeared down my face.
I’d never seen Meena so serious. ‘What happened?’ she asked.
I had to introduce them, I knew, and I couldn’t wait any longer.
‘My son.’ I drew in breath. ‘My son.’
She was very still.
A breeze moved between us and I caught some of the air. She said nothing while I introduced her, at last, to my Davey, whose name I hadn’t even whispered in seven long years. I showed her the picture from my purse, of the little bundle in my arms wearing a yellow hat that just wouldn’t stay on his head, and in the background the flowers from my mother.
When I fell quiet, Meena took me by the hand and led me up the steps. She unlocked the front door without letting go of my hand and led me up the two sets of stairs to our flat, where she sat me on my bed.
I watched as she slipped my shoes off my feet and paired them neatly by the bed. She did the same with her own. Then she took a glass from the cupboard and walked out of the flat. From the bed, I could hear the tap in the shared bathroom hissing. She always waited for the water to get really cold. When she returned to me, the water inside the glass was swirling with the white particles that looked like a snowstorm. I drank from it as though it were the first water to touch my lips.
As I drank, she locked the door, closed the curtains, and then I heard the squeaking of her divan bed’s wheels as she pushed her bed up against mine.
The still-bright sun worked its way through our blue curtains in waves, and the room became the ocean.
She took the glass from my hand and placed it on the dresser. Then she sat beside me, so close that I was sure I could hear her heartbeat, though in hindsight it must have been mine. And in between her eyes, a freckle that I’d never noticed caught my attention and held it as her lips gently touched mine.
And she laid me down on my bed and kissed me.
When I woke, I was surprised to see that the sun was shining.
I thought the world might have tipped on its axis.
Meena’s bed was back on the other side of the room and Meena was gone.
Chickens and Stars
‘DID YOU LOVE Meena?’ I asked Margot.
We were sitting in the corridor outside the Rose Room, both of us having forgotten that this week’s class was cancelled on account of Pippa being on a half-term trip with her nephew. She was taking him to see the dinosaurs at the Natural History Museum.
The corridor was quiet; only the occasional porter went by. Nobody seemed too interested in the girl in pink pyjamas and the old lady in purple, sitting side by side on the shiny floor.
‘Of course,’ Margot said.
Then she looked up to the ceiling and thought.
‘She was always moving, always up to something. Fidgeting, talking, smoking. She was never still. And when I first met her, it was her constant evolution that thrilled me, because I wanted it for myself. I wanted to be able to change out of Margot and become someone better. Someone happier. Or at the very least, someone new. But for all the good things about her, she was headstrong and unpredictable and flighty. And the more I found things I didn’t like about her, the more I hated myself because those things didn’t matter to me in the least and I loved her anyway. But I decided that they should have mattered and I couldn’t love her. So I searched for more reasons, hoping I’d finally pile them high enough that they would matter, and then I could leave London and by doing so escape the unanswered question of the gap between our beds.’