‘Shhh, sweetie, that’s really just for us, so we’ll remember it.’
‘But we’re not like Daddy,’ he says, as if I have come down in the last shower. ‘It’s called “Charlie and Mummy’s Excellent Adventure”。’
I avoid eye contact with everyone. All of this, every part of it, is too close to the bone.
And just like that, it’s over. Hugh walks us out.
He scoops Charlie into the air and lifts him high above our heads, where he whoops and hollers delightedly and settles into Hugh’s arms for a big hug that hurts my heart. I need paracetamol again, the way I needed it the night Cam died. I wasn’t prepared for how much this goodbye was going to hurt. Hadn’t considered I was piling another type of grief onto the first.
‘Look after Mummy while you’re away,’ Hugh says to Charlie, who’s still in his arms. Just seeing a man holding him again feels bittersweet. Hugh is purposely avoiding my gaze now, which gives me an opportunity to really look at him, and that only drives home the distinction of what I’m giving up.
‘We are going away for a very long time,’ Charlie informs him. ‘Will you forget us?’
We’re obsessed with memory in our house. Goes with the territory.
‘I won’t forget you,’ he says, and Charlie throws his arms around Hugh’s neck again, almost strangling him as Hugh looks at me over Charlie’s shoulder, reaches for my hand, and squeezes it. ‘I promise.’
40
I cry from the tarmac at Sydney airport to the tarmac in LAX, and half the time I don’t even really know what I’m crying over. It’s not just about Cam. Or Hugh. It’s about everything. Even the freedom lying ahead. How the customs official will recognise puffy-eyed me from my passport photo, I don’t know. Ironically, we’re stopping in LA to start our trip with a visit to the Happiest Place on Earth, which has its work seriously cut out for it.
The princesses get to me in the first five minutes. So smiley and perfect. Peddling lies about life and love and magic and happy endings. Sometimes you get your prince, I want to shout at them. And then he is taken away!
I miss Cam at every turn. This was never meant to be just Charlie and me. Cam and our baby were meant to be here as well. I spend the whole time queuing behind complete families, trying not to look as ripped off as I feel, while Charlie, oblivious to my sadness, soaks in all the wonder.
By the time we reach New York City and fall into our seats at a Broadway matinee, I’m starting to acclimatise. We’ve only been here half a day and I have fallen under the city’s spell. The lights, the activity, the way the neon billboards in Times Square flash on the wall of our hotel room. Just the relentless ‘getting on with it’， I think. And then I take Charlie up onto the roof of the Empire State Building late at night.
‘This is in that movie you like,’ he says.
‘Sleepless in Seattle,’ I confirm.
‘People who truly loved once are far more likely to love again.’ If life was really like a romantic comedy, I’d turn around and Hugh would be standing here, surprising me. Surprising us.
But this is not fiction. And Hugh is ten thousand miles away, giving me exactly the space I insisted on.
Charlie and I look downtown towards One World Trade Center and I’m overcome at the collective grief this city has faced. So much loss on such a large scale in one morning – the families of every victim just as fractured as our own.
And yet this city’s lights still dance.
Central Park still blooms.
The shows go on. Grief is absorbed into its story. And it’s extraordinary.
If Disneyland was the low point, New York is a turning point for me. I realise selling our house and travelling was exactly the right idea. Being here is the fresh start of the rest of our lives.
When Charlie falls into bed after a long afternoon playing in the autumn leaves in Central Park, I take out my laptop, open a new document and type the words I’ve resisted for so long.
Chapter One.
I stare at the screen for a long time, trying to work out where best to begin, pretending I know what I’m doing. Then I remember the workshop at the festival: ‘Almost fiction’。 Write what you know, even if the details are different.
If you wanted to, you could be with him in minutes.
I read that a widow’s only job in the first twelve months is to keep herself alive, and I understand the achievement. Because when your husband dies, he never stops not being here. He resolutely stays away. Silent.
In the dark days immediately following his death, I couldn’t imagine grief more raw than it was then, when the wound was freshly inflicted and exposed.
Back then I hadn’t known that the wound would never close over. Hadn’t known it would slice open, over and over again – at the sound of a song, or the sight of the perfect gift for him in a bookstore, or at a certain scent on the breeze.
Two years after his death, the triggers of grief were as acute as they were two days in. More acute, perhaps, because at two days there was the benefit of disbelief: this couldn’t be true. It’s not happening.
At two years, it is real. Embedded.
And then I found myself in New York City. A city in which my heart remembered how to beat, not just because it had to, but because it wanted to. This city scooped me from rock bottom and dragged me to the surface where I could burst through and breathe again. It showed me that maybe my world didn’t end because my husband’s did. Maybe there’s a life beyond ‘widow’。 Maybe I wouldn’t die of grief, after all . . .
The more Charlie and I see of the world, the closer I feel to Cam, but the nature of those feelings is changing. It’s as though our adventure is dialling down the pain of grief and dialling up the memories and love. The seasons change again as the temperature cools and I show Charlie all our old haunts. Paris and Venice and Prague.
‘Mummy and Daddy lived here for three months,’ I tell him outside the black door of a terrace apartment in Bloomsbury in London. ‘Daddy had a research grant to write a book on medieval prose.’
‘Hose?’
‘Prose. It’s when we write the way we speak, rather than doing fancy things with words, like making poems. Anyway, you don’t need to understand what Daddy wrote about yet. One day you’ll read his books and you’ll see inside his thoughts. Aren’t we lucky to have that? Now, I know you’re only five, but I want to show you Daddy’s favourite pub in the whole world. It’s just around the corner.’
The Lamb is a gorgeous Victorian pub, brimming with nostalgia and history. Flowers in hanging baskets, antique ‘snob’ screens so the patrons don’t have to look at the bar staff. Storybook stuff.
‘There’s a famous writer called Charles Dickens who used to drink at this pub,’ I tell Charlie. Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes used to meet here too, but there’s only so much literature history Charlie will tolerate.
I close my eyes, put my arms in the air, spin around slowly and take a huge breath.
‘What are you doing, Mummy?’
‘She’s soaking up the literary spirit of the whole of Bloomsbury,’ I hear Cam say. ‘Just like last time.’
Goosebumps erupt on my skin. I slow the spinning but keep my eyes shut, a smile emerging straight from my heart and spreading through my body like sunshine. I should have known he’d turn up at the Lamb. If I stay very still and very open, our energies feel so close it’s as if we can almost touch. This feels like neither space nor time. It’s a vessel where love is infinite. Limitless. A transient crossover between where we are and wherever Cam might be.