‘Watch she doesn’t catch herself on that lip there, Bernard. You don’t want her to smash the other hip.’
Oh, God, I think. Is this what it was like for you, Will? Every single day?
And then my sister is in the doorway, pushing past Mum. ‘Oh, for God’s sake, Mum. Come on, Hopalong. You’re turning us into a freaking sideshow.’
Treena wedges her shoulder under my armpit and turns briefly to glare out at the neighbours, her eyebrows raised as if to say, Really? I can almost hear the swishing of curtains as they close.
‘Bunch of bloody rubberneckers. Anyway, hurry up. I promised Thomas he could see your scars before I take him to youth club. God, how much weight have you lost? Your boobs must look like two tangerines in a pair of socks.’
It’s hard to laugh and walk at the same time. Thomas runs to hug me so that I have to stop and put a hand against the wall to keep my balance as we collide. ‘Did they really cut you open and put you back together?’ he says. His head comes up to my chest. He’s missing four front teeth. ‘Grandpa says they probably put you back together all the wrong way. And God only knows how we’ll tell the difference.’
‘Bernard!’
‘I was joking.’
‘Louisa.’ Granddad’s voice is thick and hesitant. He reaches forward unsteadily and hugs me and I hug him back. He pulls away, his old hands gripping my arms surprisingly tightly, and frowns at me, a mock anger.
‘I know, Daddy. I know. But she’s home now,’ says Mum.
‘You’re back in your old room,’ says Dad. ‘I’m afraid we redecorated with Transformers wallpaper for Thom. You don’t mind the odd Autobot and Predacon, right?’
‘I had worms in my bottom,’ says Thomas. ‘Mum says I’m not to talk about it outside the house. Or put my fingers up my –’
‘Oh, good Lord,’ says Mum.
‘Welcome home, Lou,’ says Dad, and promptly drops my bag on my foot.
CHAPTER THREE
Looking back, for the first nine months after Will’s death I was in a kind of daze. I went straight to Paris and simply didn’t go home, giddy with freedom, with the appetites that Will had stirred in me. I got a job at a bar favoured by expats where they didn’t mind my terrible French, and I grew better at it. I rented a tiny attic room in the 16th, above a Middle Eastern restaurant, and I would lie awake, listening to the sound of the late drinkers and the early-morning deliveries, and every day I felt like I was living someone else’s life.
Those early months, it was as if I had lost a layer of skin – I felt everything more intensely. I woke up laughing, or crying, saw everything as if a filter had been removed. I ate new foods, walked strange streets, spoke to people in a language that wasn’t mine. Sometimes I felt haunted by him, as if I was seeing it all through his eyes, heard his voice in my ear.
What do you think of that, then, Clark?
I told you you’d love this.
Eat it! Try it! Go on!
I felt lost without our daily routines. It took weeks for my hands not to feel useless without daily contact with his body: the soft shirt I would button, the warm, motionless hands I would wash gently, the silky hair I could still feel between my fingers. I missed his voice, his abrupt, hard-earned laugh, the feel of his lips against my fingers, the way his eyelids would lower when he was about to drop off to sleep. My mother, still aghast at what I had been part of, had told me that while she loved me, she could not reconcile this Louisa with the daughter she had raised, so with the loss of my family, as well as the man I had loved, every thread that had linked me to who I was had been cut. I felt as if I had simply floated off, untethered, to some unknown universe.
So I acted out a new life. I made casual, arm’s-length friendships with other travellers: young English students on gap years, Americans retracing the steps of literary heroes, certain that they would never return to the Midwest, wealthy young bankers, day-trippers, a constantly changing cast that drifted in and through and past; escapees from other lives. I smiled and I chatted and I worked, and I told myself I was doing what he wanted. That there had to be comfort, at least, in that.