For When I'm Gone Read online

  Dedication

  For my mother, in gratitude.

  Title Page

  FOR WHEN I’M GONE

  Rebecca Ley

  Contents

  Dedication

  Title Page

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  7

  8

  9

  10

  11

  12

  13

  14

  15

  16

  17

  18

  19

  20

  21

  22

  23

  24

  25

  26

  27

  28

  29

  30

  31

  32

  33

  34

  35

  36

  37

  38

  39

  40

  41

  42

  43

  44

  45

  46

  47

  48

  49

  50

  51

  52

  53

  Acknowledgements

  Credits

  About the author

  Copyright

  ‘And my death is not my death,

  but a pillow beneath my head, a rock.’

  from ‘Spoken For’, by Li-Young Lee

  1

  Sylvia’s Manual

  It’s definitive now, you heard him. ‘Nothing more we can do,’ he said, before using words like ‘comfortable’, ‘time’ and ‘family.’ Soothing sentences, carefully chosen.

  He didn’t find it easy, I’ll admit that. Dr Z: young, earnest frown, getting it right. But it was a job to him. And I resented that. Never mind his sweet professionalism, his unblemished skin. It turns out dying hasn’t made me a saint after all, you see. I so wish it had.

  Anyway, now we know for sure, I’m doing this. Since it turns out that all the treatment and trials, the cannulae and caffeine were for nothing, it seems right.

  I’m not going to tell you that I’m writing this. Not yet, anyway. I don’t think you’ve accepted things, even after what Dr Z said. You seem to be operating on your own flight path, denial holding you in mid-air. I know that’s what is making it possible to get out of bed, get the children to school, hold my hand. But I miss feeling like we’re heading to the same destination.

  You don’t want to talk about it. What we’ve lost. And all I want to do is chat. About what happened to us, the good and bad. Our everyday tale of love and mutilation. That ordinary, precious happiness we stumbled upon. The times you surprised me out of surliness with a dropped kiss on the back of my neck as I made packed lunches. The unsolicited cups of tea, sofa suppers, hugs where soaking up the other’s radiant warmth felt like sunbathing.

  And when I try to turn to what happens next, you shush me like a child. Make me feel morbid. That focus on the present, always your way. An accidental Buddhism. I’ve always envied you for it, but now it leaves me dissatisfied.

  So, I’m writing this. A manual for when I’m gone. The how-to guide nobody ever wants to write. It’s all the rage nowadays, don’t you know? There seem to be so many of us going through the same thing. Clustering on chatrooms, like masses glowing on MRI scans. Swapping tips about the best hiking socks to keep our feet warm and which disgusting tea really has the most antioxidants.

  And lots of us are writing guides for our families. In order that they remember when to de-flea the dog and where the window keys are and, in turn, to remember us. It’s a vain attempt to weave ourselves into your future, just like we did the present.

  Yet, I’ve debated endlessly about whether to write one. Knowing the exact brand of plastic cheese that Jude favours isn’t going to change my absence. But that’s not all. There’s the other stuff too, the things I should have told you before it was too late. Like a furball lodged at the back of my throat.

  Now, ironically, I’ve got time on my hands. So many hours to fill. I’m bored of box sets. At last. Tired of novels. And I can’t do social media any longer. Those sunsets, salads and smiling children have lost their allure. Frankly, it’s a bit of a relief. I’m starting to draw in.

  I did wonder briefly if I should do this in the form of a vlog instead, so you and the children have me talking to you, properly. A hologram from the other side. But I’m so reduced now. I side-eye mirrors and shun fierce daylight. I don’t want this to be how you remember me, as fragile. You helped me find a strength and purpose I didn’t realise I was capable of. That’s the woman I’d like you to fix in your mind, forever.

  There’s a pathetic corollary to that, one it embarrasses me to admit. I assumed that after all of this I wouldn’t care about how I look, but vanity still lingers. I miss my hair. My breasts. You do too, don’t deny it. That look on your face, when I unveiled the reconstruction, like a child biting into a chocolate bar with an unexpected filling.

  So, look at old pictures to remember my face. Those thousands of snapshots stored in a digital cloud, like unshed raindrops. Photographs pre-diagnosis, pre-treatment – maybe even pre-kids, when I was soft-faced and still thought life was easy and circumscribable. And then read this, to remember the rest of me. Who I am now.

  I’m just so sorry to leave you in this position. I wouldn’t want to be you, trying to be me, facing those tantrums and parents’ evenings on your own. The food on the floor. The detritus on the stairs. The flotsam of family life that washes in every night, like a tide.

  But I’m angry, too. I can’t bear the unfairness. I’m not done. After what happened to Rosa, I thought our bad luck was done. It is unjust that you can’t euthanise me like your animals. All those cancerous cats, submitting to your gentle touch and murmured words, oblivious to their sheer good luck.

  I know I’m supposed to say that I hope you move on. I have said that. And I do mean it. Or at least part of me does. My best side. But there’s another bit of me too and, in the spirit of full disclosure, I’m going to lay it down here. I struggle to bear the thought of you with someone else. If she’s nice, it will be even worse. The children will forget more quickly, I’ll be bottom-drawered.

  Sometimes, in the small hours, I imagine this faceless woman holding them, when I can’t. Sitting in our kitchen, where we shared so many happy times. I’m worried she might be a better mother than I was, perhaps the one they deserved all along. Calmer and more organised, adept at reward charts and batch cooking. But I know she won’t love them as much as I do. For all my shortcomings, my many faults, of this one thing I am sure.

  And, I expect – encourage – you to find her anyway. I’m just offering up my honesty as a final love token, like a lock of the red hair that I should have harvested for you before it was gone forever. All I have now are grey chemo curls. The new me. So, my candour is my gift. Please take it as such.

  2

  Then

  The pug had been chomped into like an apple, leaving a livid wound in the black plush of his flank.

  ‘Did you see who did this?’ said Paul, glancing up at the dog’s owner, then back to her pet’s squashed, pleading face.

  ‘It was a Staffie,’ the woman replied, gesturing towards the door, her breath frayed. ‘At the park round the corner. Some boys. I thought they would call it off but …’ Her shoulders rose as she ingested a sob.

/>   Paul nodded, gently probing the animals abdomen, fingertips grazing tiny, useless nipples. It was the third such injury he had seen in practice that week. High summer was coaxing the city towards crescendo, a scream of satisfaction or anger – or something between the two. But he usually treated the fighting dogs themselves, brought in by slender, quietly furious youths, rather than those caught in the crossfire.

  ‘Can you fix him?’ she said. ‘Will he be ok?’ Paul noticed her then, his focus momentarily diverted from the animal. A wide mouth and patrician nose, Lucozade hair, a constellation of freckles on thin arms. Twin stains of high colour on her cheeks. He felt freshly aware of the smell of urine in the small room. The hairs from his last patient littering the table between them.

  ‘I’ll do my best,’ he said, wanting to reassure her, but far from certain of the outcome. It was clear the dog had lost a lot of blood. It was a deep injury, the aggressor casually intending to kill.

  ‘He’s called Ted,’ said the girl. ‘I’m Sylvia. It was my little joke. Our passion knows no bounds.’ She stroked the dog tenderly on its nose, in the centre of its smashed face.

  Paul normally despised owners with breeds like these. Style over substance. Bulldogs with sclerotic arteries, cats with dreadlocks, obese house rabbits with pressure sores. But her love for her pet was obvious, this animal no mere fashion accessory.

  ‘Leave him with me,’ said Paul. ‘Ring the surgery in a couple of hours.’

  ‘Please save him. I couldn’t bear it if something happened …’ She trailed off, looked at him, a frown fissuring her forehead. ‘He’s my best friend.’

  Paul didn’t answer but watched her go as he squirted antiseptic spray onto the examination table. The room freshly bleak in her absence.

  * * *

  ‘So, he’s going to be all right?’ Sylvia banged through the swing door, heading for the bed where Ted sat recovering, still dazed. ‘My darling.’ As she kneeled down, bangles crashed together, tiny cymbals.

  ‘He should be,’ said Paul, cautious. The surgery had gone surprisingly well and Ted had woken from the anaesthetic and eaten. Good signs. When Sylvia had rung the previous evening, he had told her that she could collect him the next morning. ‘He’ll need a course of antibiotics, of course. And lots of rest.’

  ‘Thank you … so much,’ said Sylvia. She stood, jangling again, the corners of her too-large mouth turned downwards, like a child trying to be brave.

  ‘I’m just relieved it looks like he’ll …’ Paul paused. ‘Survive. Those dogs are lethal. Why the police don’t do more is beyond me.’

  ‘I don’t know what I would have done,’ said Sylvia. ‘If …’ She made no attempt to brush away the plump tear tracking down each cheek.

  ‘Let me sort out that prescription for you,’ said Paul, turning to his computer, abashed. ‘The next few days are still critical. Here.’ He signed the slip and handed it to her. ‘Three times a day. With food.’

  ‘Thank you,’ said Sylvia, extending a hand for it, her face mottled. Then, before he had quite realised what was happening, she drew him into an embrace, pressing her damp face against his shoulder surprisingly forcefully, imprinting her features through his shirt.

  ‘It’s all right,’ said Paul, awkwardly. He hesitated, before bringing his hands loosely around her back, into what he hoped was a reassuring, platonic pat. He could feel her rib cage, fragile as kindling.

  ‘I know,’ said Sylvia, drawing her damp face back from him, unembarrassed. ‘Can I buy you a coffee or a drink or something? To say thank you properly.’ She stood back from him, assessing. There was something plausible, familiar even, about this man.

  ‘Um,’ said Paul, thinking of Alice, the girlfriend he had only just broken up with. She would be neatly tapping away at her computer, hair pulled off her face. It had been her plan – theirs, really – to return to Melbourne in a year, via Thailand, then try for a baby. But he had woken one morning with the inconvenient conviction that he wanted something else.

  ‘Sorry, is it inappropriate to ask?’ said Sylvia. Occasionally she overstepped, she was told. Danced over invisible boundaries. But she was going to be thirty on her next birthday. Thirty! Then, what? This man, safe and sensible, but not unattractive, looked like someone a thirty-year-old would have a relationship with.

  ‘I’d love to,’ he finally said, reluctantly smiling. The girl with the paintbox-hair presenting him, irresistibly, with another version of himself to try on.

  * * *

  The truth is, nobody thought for a second it would last. Sylvia had many boyfriends. And as a couple they were too dissimilar. Sylvia’s friends, a feckless and charismatic bunch, etiolated from lack of sunlight, were perplexed by Paul’s solidity.

  ‘Does he give you money?’ her friend Ariadne, with the heavy fringe, wondered aloud, as the girls sat on their decaying sofa in their flatshare, smoking.

  ‘No,’ Sylvia replied, sweeping her face down to kiss the top of Ted’s head, where he sat in her lap, his scar still knitting together. ‘I just … like him. He’s nice to me and he’s … he’s good. You can just tell.’ She flushed, internally wincing.

  ‘He just seems a bit boring,’ said Ariadne. ‘Sorry.’ She shrugged.

  ‘Don’t be,’ said Sylvia, recovering. ‘Just don’t worry about it.’ She inhaled the smoke from her cigarette and considered Paul. She still couldn’t articulate what she liked about him precisely, aside from his goodness, the fact he had saved Ted. Then she thought of his astonished smile when she had asked him out. The warm, clean comfort of his shoulder. Even Barbara, her mother, who valued exoticism, thought Paul was dull, not that she said as much. Rather: ‘He’s not exactly what I pictured, darling. He seems … quite ordinary.’ Then, pushed: ‘He is what I would have hoped for you in some regards, but not in all.’

  Ted made his disdain for Paul evident at every possibility, although that was straightforward jealousy.

  In turn, Paul’s friends, many of them Antipodean exiles in London, thought of Sylvia as an exotic fruit, like a custard apple or a lychee. Attractive, certainly, but at the end of the day you’d rather just eat a banana in the morning, surely?

  And Alice. Poor Alice! When she found she had been replaced so quickly and by such a shimmer of a thing, she rang his parents in Melbourne and told them he was throwing his life away.

  ‘Alice is a good girl,’ said Paul’s mother, Miriam, that night, her voice needling on the phone. ‘You have a great history together. I thought she was the one.’

  Only Paul’s father, who he spoke to afterwards, proffered any support. ‘You like this girl?’ he said.

  ‘I really do,’ said Paul.

  ‘Then it’s the right decision,’ said Mick, who was to die of his pancreatic cancer, hidden deep in his core, a mere six months later.

  The thing was, it wasn’t a matter of choice, for either of them. Sometimes it isn’t. The universe conspires, the planets align, those things we read about are true. That’s how it was for Sylvia and Paul. Stitched together from the start, different as they were.

  * * *

  The street was a gelato counter of pastel colours, hushed with wealth.

  ‘Where is it? It’s definitely on this road somewhere. Oh yes, that’s the one.’ Sylvia was triumphant. ‘My dream home.’ A pistachio townhouse, wreathed in a creeper, with a port-hole window on the third floor. ‘It’s so pretty. Completely ridiculous. Just imagine living in such a place. You couldn’t worry about anything in a house like that.’

  ‘It is sort of … sweet,’ said Paul, slowly, reaching for the correct response. He wasn’t sure why he so badly wanted to impress her. She was clearly what his mother Miriam would describe, in scathing italics, as emotional. He avoided people like that, usually, as he’d been taught. His parents’ relationship had always been contentedly undemonstrative. He remembered as a child once seeing a couple arg
uing in the street on a Saturday afternoon. He had been riveted by their abandon. Visible veins in the man’s throat, the woman shrieking like a car alarm. Angry, but thrillingly free. As Miriam had tugged him away, he had looked back over his shoulder to see the man kneeling on the pavement, imploring the woman. To hit him or kiss him, perhaps, by that point Paul was too far away to tell. He often thought of what he had seen, but in the face of his own family’s placidity, it took on the air of a cautionary tale.

  Yet here he was, at Sylvia’s suggestion, lingering in a postcode smarter than either of them could afford, courting excitement as if he didn’t know better.

  ‘I love it,’ said Sylvia. ‘Maybe one day.’ She moved her arms out in an inclusive gesture, as if she was trying to hug the air. Ted’s lead was pulled taut and he looked up, long-suffering but adoring, at his mistress. ‘Of course, my sister – Tess – thinks all property is theft. She’s a total hippy, lives in a shed in Cornwall. But you know she would come and stay like a shot all the same.’ Sylvia rolled her eyes. ‘She’s always tried to save the world. When we were kids she used to spend hours roping me into making posters about the ozone layer, or organising litter-picks on the beach. She’s so different from me, but … she knows me better than anyone.’

  Paul smiled, indulgent. He had scant interest in the house. Or the off-grid sister. His main point of focus, at that moment, were the bands of flesh Sylvia had exposed for their sojourn. Her arms, calves and, unexpectedly but delightfully, her stomach, flat and white as a sheet of A4.

  ‘You don’t like it?’ said Sylvia. ‘Sorry, is this a stupid idea?’ She glanced at the ground. ‘We don’t have to hang around.’

  ‘Not at all,’ said Paul. ‘It’s great. And it’s good to see you again.’ He had been unsuccessful in his attempts not to think about her.

  ‘Thanks,’ said Sylvia, nodding and holding his gaze.

  ‘So, how’s the patient?’ said Paul, suddenly awkward, leaning over Ted, looking for where the neat stitches he had made extended around the dog’s trunk. Ted glowered at him, ungrateful as a beloved child.