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Tim is the kind of man who tells, rather than asks – which is why Rachel likes him so much and I don’t particularly like him at all.
Tim didn’t ask me to do this because he thinks I’m funny – or even reliable. He asked me because Rachel and I twist through one another like vines, each written through the other like a stick of rock.
But I’m her longest-standing human, just as she is to me. She has outlasted my husbands, my family, and I – now that her parents are long gone and Tim is going to be her only marriage – have been the same for her.
At two this morning, I took out the line about Rachel and me planning to spend our twilight years drinking ourselves to death while the sunset turns us to leather, funded by the money that Tim – and until recently, Terry – have left us from their life insurance. It’s not the moment for it, or the audience: it’s a private joke, for the two of us.
I look at Tim, straight and pale, his glasses clean and the lines of his suit sharp – no corners or caves or whirlpools – and I see, not for the first time, where I fit. I am the curve to his corners, the soft to his solid and between us we make the exact person Rachel requires. We are an exercise in build-a-buddy.
It is no more real than it was when we were inside, no more possible that my beautiful friend is dead, that her loud laugh and unmatchable cleverness are now a matter of record, of digital files and documents, of Super 8 film and old birthday cards.
Grief is longer and heavier than this. Grief likes Wednesdays and bus queues, a hijack in the most unlikely of situations. Grief likes to be close, and friends for years.
Sudden death is a bomb exploding above you, blindingly bright and showering you with its fragments every time you close your eyes. My thoughts are still shocked, ringing with white noise and scattering around in panic.
And now she never will turn into her mother. She will never have time.
I am afraid of having to tell anyone that I don’t know what I’ll be when I grow up.
Rachel’s parties, with an extra cake.
the Willoughbys never offered anything they didn’t mean.
The Willoughbys knew that money talks, but wealth whispers, and nothing fazed them.
Rachel is in all the conversations, but not necessarily in the words.
how we owe it to her, and the loss of her, to try and find something of the same to give to the world.
There is a hollowness inside me, a change – a before and an after. The person I was with her and the person I am without her.
spending the evenings writing letters to each other to swap in the morning
My teens were ruined by being in love with Tristan Willoughby. The decades that followed were all touched by it, shaped by it. I’ve spent most of my life in love with Rachel’s brother, with the corporeal radiance of him while he was alive and then – far more easily after he died – with his ghost. And Rachel never knew.
I feel awkward sitting here with Tim: this is the longest we’ve ever spent on our own. Being together emphasises our loss.
I like to believe that I had suspicions about Terry as soon as I met him, scents of too-good-to-be-true, wafts of why-didn’t-anyone-else-marry-him, but I didn’t – I was as bowled over by him as Rachel was.
I’ve made poor choices in life: not going to college until I was in my thirties and even then not studying what I wanted to, not following my heart; marrying Evan while I was still a teenager and then, in a triumph of hope over experience, marrying Terry when Evan didn’t work out.
And then she looks right at me. ‘It’s just that at school you were, well, you know – cakes apart – you were a bit weird.’
I knew every part of Rachel, and she knew almost everything about me: she didn’t know that, every day, I was waiting to turn into my mum in the way my mum turned into my gran – wondering when I’d go mental too.
Last night finished in a hail of singing and dancing, as if suddenly the mourners had had enough and switched tempo, dialled up to full party. We bellowed songs and staggered through tunes: we cried at the past, and we wept for the future. The ritual is done, completed, and she is properly gone.
I’ve worked up from nothing before – I can do it again.
She would never sell that cottage, I want to say – but it’s his cottage now and what she would do is utterly and miserably immaterial.
I know how it feels to look at people when you’re as raw as he is, when you need to turn away in order to breathe.
Rachel has left me Clachan. Exactly half of my body screams that I never want to see the cottage again, that it’s cursed and desolate and the last place I ever want to set foot in, while the other half – wrenching and wringing – knows that it’s the only place I’ll be able to find her, the only place she’ll be able to speak to me, and the closest thing I have to a family home.
With every mile, I shed stress like flakes of skin, as if the journey were whittling me clean.
There is a magic to the oldest of relationships, a deep peace that comes from a lifetime of shared experience, of understanding the things that made us.
How well things work is never a Willoughby measure of worth: many things stay in circulation just because no one can remember a time without them.
There is nothing unusual, no foreboding nor clouded sky nor single rook cawing into the warm waking woods. It is not the stuff of horror films, where doors are left unlatched or candles melt down to their stubs. It is bright new daylight, shining on dewy leaves.
We are yin and yang: Rachel, queen of scattering, and I, her equerry – calm and ordered, with a place for everything.
I was too young to know that the sun can feel divine when you need a god that badly.
I see the loss of Rachel everywhere, in every person, every object.
She’s talking about Tristan, about the terrible darkness of his death, about the family having to hold his funeral in Scotland because he simply wasn’t wanted in their home town, not even when he was dead.
‘My life is almost all in the past now, and there are fewer and fewer people who remember the cast of it, let alone the plot.’
‘It’s going to be hard to reinvent yourself.’
When he’s all concern and understanding, I wish that it were possible to be real friends with Terry. History proves it is not possible and that boundaries are the only thing that can possibly work to protect myself against him.
I am peeled without Rachel – and without my marriage. Skinned bare.
Clachan is unchanged. It contains so much of me and the very last of Rachel and yet, in this lazy afternoon sun, it looks the same as it ever did. Where it should bulge with secrets, glare with revelation, it is calm, it is silent, it is still beautiful.
We were, at once, children and adults, loving every second of passing backwards and forwards between the two.
I was a lifelong satellite to a family who no longer exist. The only witnesses to their way of life, their ebullience, their very existence, are this house and me.
I chew the sandwich but much of the pleasure in eating has been gone this last month. Food no longer fills the hole in my belly – that is where my grief lives now, a little burrow it has hollowed out for itself. It has annexed and exiled me so totally I no longer have access to all the parts of my body.
When you’re still a child yourself, you can’t know that there will be value in these photos one day, that they will be the prompts necessary to remember. When you are still a child, you don’t yet know that you will forget some things and misremember others.
The form is indelibly etched: start with thanks and go on to the things you’d like to ask for. Pray like you’d write a letter. Write a letter like you pray.
Do I look like someone who needs a break somewhere nice, with food for my soul?
How do they go on, as if nothing has changed, when Rachel has gone? The helplessness of it is huge inside me, the pressure of being totally unable to fix it.
‘That wasn’t Satan. Ann, you know that, don’t you? You know that was a man? A horrible, vile man? You saved yourself, Ann.’
‘Don’t walk by the canal, or anywhere else that might be dangerous – dangerous because of men, not because of Satan.’
