‘So I left,’ I shrug. ‘I upped and left because I didn’t make sense here. I don’t make sense here. Without him I’m just a strange English girl with no friends and no job and no family.’ I heave myself up off the ground. Florian tries to grab on to my arm but I yank it away. I turn to him. I’m furious how he can take something good and turn it into this. Furious at him for bringing it all back up to the surface. ‘But I refuse to be judged by someone who chose to be absent for all the years Ettie was alive, only to act like the doting brother when he isn’t.’
And I walk back home.
Chapter 13
When I wake up,my diary takes the full brunt of yesterday’s argument. At first, it’s a rant, a stream-of-consciousness narrative lacking in structure or punctuation. I relay his judgy little comment, the look on his face, how ridiculous it was that I had invited him back into my life in the first place but then the cairn made an appearance, how light everything had felt when it was just him and me by that bloody flower bed, laughing, working together to try to understand each other a little bit more, and then there’s a strange heaviness, the familiar feeling of embarrassment that sits so closely to guilt. I could have said everything I needed to without bringing up his absence. He at least was trying to make up for the past. I was trying to ignore that the past had ever existed.
And then Sam FaceTimes.
She’s in her suitably smart office, all glass, make-up done, hair impossibly smooth and expensive.
‘Are you okay?’ she asks when I eventually turn my camera on, after clearing my table of any rubbish and slicking down my own slept-in bun with some water. Her voice is laced with concern. When I look at the tiny box in the bottom of the screen, I can see why. I had neglected to take my make-up off yesterday, and most of it is smudged around my eyes making it look like I had spent the majority of my night crying.
‘Sorry, it was a late one, I’m fine.’ I try to rub off the worst of it, but it serves only to make me look more tired.
‘Are you sure?’
‘Yeah, honestly, I left my make-up remover at home.’
‘I just wanted to check in, see if you had anything to send me yet? Happy to look over a chapter or two?’
‘Oh, yeah sure,’ I lie.
‘Ava?’
‘Yes?’
‘I’ve spoken to you every week for the last year; I know when you’re not writing. You do this thing with your face.’ She tries to recreate my furtive expression and I can’t help but smile at my transparency.
‘Look, it’s been… intense.’ I sigh, my hands cradling the back of my neck.
‘I bet it has.’
‘And I’ve tried to sit there and write something but…’
‘But what?’
‘I don’t know, it just all feels a bit fake at the moment. People want a book from someone who’s guiding them through grief, not someone who is ravaged by it every time something unexpected happens.’
‘Oh God,’ she sighs. I can see her look in the corner of her screen before getting up, walking out of shot and then shutting the door. I prepare myself for a bollocking, a speech about how there’s people waiting on chapters, on how I’m being dramatic and flaky, but instead when she sits down she has this gentle, almost maternal, smile on her face.
‘I never took you on as agrief guru. In fact, that’s what I liked about this whole thing: you didn’t know how to grieve, and you were bloody honest about it. No one knows how to grieve, they don’t teach it to you in school; people are so bloody terrified of even talking about death it’s as if they don’t expect it to happen to them. Your blog was exciting because of all that rawness, the anger, the humour, the fact that you don’t preach about how to do it; you just talk about you, about things you found hard and how you coped. Now you need to do the same thing.’
‘I guess it’s just that a lot’s happening; I’m trying to process it whilst writing about it, whereas before it was just weird little peculiarities, there was a detachment to it all.’
‘Tell me about it.’
‘About what?’
‘What’s been happening.’
‘Oh erm, a lot I guess…’
‘Just tell me…’ she continues and I sigh, comb a hand through my hair and start at the beginning. I talk about The American, about Archie and our phone calls, I tell her about Florian, and she sits there blinking, nodding, cackles when I talk about the drunk octogenarians.
When I eventually finish, when I have wrung out every detail of the last week so that I am out of breath, I realise I have been talking for twenty minutes and I laugh. It’s awkward at first, embarrassing even, and then it’s sheer relief and shock that more has happened to me this past week than in the past year.
It’s only when Sam holds up her phone with the recording button still running that I understand her game.
