Chapter 62
Lewis
I didn’t intend to be here, at Andrea’s cottage. I didn’t intend to be standing outside, like a Peeping Tom, watching those two young women go through their own personal hell.
I didn’t intend any of it. It just happened.
I was out walking with Betty, a sad and solitary affair without Andrea, and my feet seemed to bring me here of their own accord.
It’s happened a few times now – it’s as though I enter some kind of fugue state, and when I emerge, I find that I am here, outside her front door.
Looking through the windows at a life that is no more. At a home that has lost its heart.
Betty, as she is doing now, knows that this is a special place – a place where her human friend will open the door and give her a cool bowl of water and, just possibly, a nice sausage as well.
She is whining and scrabbling at the gravel in the driveway, keen to get inside and curl up on Andrea’s sofa.
Much like myself, Betty hasn’t yet quite come to terms with the fact that Andrea is no longer here.
At first, I’m not quite sure what has happened to provoke the anguish I can see through the window, until I catch the mournful sound of that David Bowie song she loved so much.
And then I know. They are on T, and that heartbreaking letter she scrawled to them the night before she left the cottage for the last time.
She’d wanted to take it out the next day, replace it with something more cheerful – ‘T for Tom Cruise, darling, they could watch Cocktail and throw drinks around the kitchen! That would be so much more fun!’
But I’d insisted she leave it in, and did my Firm Lawyer face until she finally agreed.
I felt it was important. That they needed to know – to know how much she was suffering, and to understand how hard all of this was for her.
They needed to know that it wasn’t all about their own pain – but about hers, as well.
Now, as I gaze nervously through the glass, I see the end result of that knowledge.
The two girls – grown women, I know, but always girls to me – are huddled together on the sofa, their arms wrapped around each other like small children cuddling, weeping uncontrollably.
Their misery, their distress, is so tangible you could practically reach out and touch it.
I am a voyeur, intruding on their private pain, a spectator of their agony, and I cannot quite tear myself away.
They’re strangers to me, and yet they are part of Andrea – and I am on the outside looking in, watching them sob, unable to help.
I feel sharp tears sting my own eyes, and let them come. I’m old enough and ugly enough to let my emotions take over at times like this. Times of such pain, and such loss, that all we can do is roll over, legs in the air, and surrender.
I wonder if I should knock. Call in for a cup of tea. See how they are getting on. I wonder if we could console each other, us poor lost souls trying to rebuild a life that Andrea’s passing has devastated.
But no, I decide. Not right now. They are consoling each other, or at least sharing their unhappiness – and that is, after all, what Andrea had wanted.
Seeing them there like that, faces raw and twisted with grief, doesn’t feel like much of a victory – but I realise, in a way, that it is.
And that they have a few more steps to take yet.
The A–Z, I know, becomes altogether more random towards the end.
She was running out of energy, out of time, out of everything, and I found myself often answering the door to delivery men bearing boxes of movies and other strange items. Those last few days were terrible, just terrible – how she managed to rally to make that final video, I still don’t know. Sheer bloody-mindedness on her part.
And love, of course. That was always her motivating factor – the love she felt for these two sobbing women; her precious grubby angels.
I put Betty back on her lead – it will be the only way to get her to move – and walk on as quietly as I can, hoping they don’t hear my feet crunching on the gravel. I’m sure they won’t – they are lost in their own moment.
As I leave, I am still crying, the tears streaking through the dust that our walk has left on my cheeks. I feel as though I might never stop crying, and yearn to be back out in the hills, where I can be alone with my memories.
My life feels so dull without Andrea’s light to illuminate it, and I am clinging to the forlorn hope that all of those stories I was told as a child are true.
That, when my time is done, and this useless old body finally catches up with my mind and decides that it’s had enough, we will be reunited.