What Goes Around

chapter EIGHT

Lucy

‘She’s asleep.’

It’s nearly midnight and finally Charlotte has cried herself out.

I thought she’d fallen asleep at eleven but just as I got downstairs she started crying again. Mum offered to go up to her but it’s me Charlotte wants, so I said no.

Then mum went home.

I asked her to.

She is the very last person I need.

But thank God for Jess.

She wraps her arms around me and takes me to a chair. ‘Do you want something to eat?’

I shake my head.

‘Do you want a drink?’ Luke says. I look up and he’s as white as a sheet, in fact I think he’s been crying again. ‘A brandy?’ he suggests, because I like a brandy now and then.

I don’t answer.

Jess is trying to make me talk but my mouth doesn’t know how to move and then it does. ‘Why do they have to refer it to the coroner?’

‘Because it’s a sudden death,’ Luke says. ‘It’s normal.’

‘He had a heart attack,’ I say. ‘The doctor said that he did. Why does it have to go to the coroner?’ There’s going to be an inquest, I can see it now. I can just imagine the smirk on Gloria’s face.

She looked amazing.

How can someone look better than they did more than a decade ago?

She looks nothing like I remember her.

Things really did get a little lost in translation at the hospital, because Luke must have told Jess that he died on the job and they clearly both think it was with me. They think that all the bites and scratches they must have seen on his chest when they went in to see him, have come from me. They didn’t though - they came from some twenty-something slut and soon everyone’s going to know. I start taking deep breaths because I feel like I’m going to start retching.

‘How could he?’ I gag.

‘He didn’t want to leave you, Lucy.’ Jess’s arms are back around me. ‘He loved you so much.’ She’s trying to make me feel better but so deep is my shame she could not possibly reach in far enough to comfort me.

‘I can’t do this,’ I say, but Jess tells me over and over that I can, that I’ll get through this, that she’ll be here. I just sit as she tells me how much my husband loved me and, because it’s Jess, because it’s the sort of thing she says, I just close my eyes as, oblivious, she adds another layer of pain.

‘Hey, he went out with a smile on his face,’ she says with her sexy Welsh accent. I screw my eyes tighter closed and all I can smell is the sex in my bedroom and I can never go in there again.

‘Do you want some tea?’ Luke’s perhaps a little uncomfortable with the subject matter and I’m offered my fiftieth cup since it happened. Something sparks in my head this time, because I haul myself out of the chair and head out to the kitchen because I have to unload the dishwasher.

‘Leave it, Lucy,’ Jess says. I know she means well, but she doesn't understand, if I leave it now it will still be full in the morning. I need it to be empty in the morning so that I can start my day, and anyway, I need to put the breakfast things out.

‘Lucy, please,’ Jess says as I get out the muesli. I see her cast an urgent look to Luke but they don’t understand, I have to do this now, or everything will go to pot.

It will, I know it will. I’ve always felt I’m just one day away from everything falling apart.

And it can’t.

Simply, it can’t.