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 a grief 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.
‘You’re overthinking it, Ava. You just need to do that, with your words. Stop thinking about the book, the chapters, the audience; it’s just a woman on the other side of a screen whose world has been torn apart and you’re talking to her.’
I feel the tears stinging the back of my throat. That dull heavy ache that pulls at me until I have to look away from the screen, grab the back of my sleeves and dab at my eyes.
‘My first ever like on a post was from this girl – well, woman I guess – but her profile picture looked so young. She didn’t post much, but there were pictures of her with a man for a while until he wasn’t there any more.
In my head, she’d lost him too, like me.
She liked every post – I knew because I’d check – until slowly my blog got big enough that it made checking it hard; but, in my head, every time I write something, I think of her reading it. ’
‘That’s lovely.’ Sam nods thoughtfully. ‘You know when this is all done, we can send her a proof, reach out.’
‘So, there’s going to be an ending? I’m going to get this thing finished?’
‘I’ve never doubted it.’
‘Thanks.’ I smile, the emotion turning into a dull warmth of finding a connection you hadn’t expected to.
‘I think you should go and take a drive somewhere, get out of the village. It sounds a little… close.’ She smirks.
‘Yeah.’ I stretch out my arms and yawn. ‘I could do that.’
‘I’ll catch up next week.’ She waves and then we cut the call.
I choose a supermarket forty-five minutes away as my great adventure.
The drive is suitably uneventful; back home travelling anywhere near five o’clock would be considered a suicide mission, but here the traffic jam on my journey consists of a tractor slowing traffic for three miles until it turns off into a nearby farm.
The scenery could be considered boring in comparison to the view from my apartment but its bland tarmac and metal barriers are a welcome change, a return to normality almost. I take it all in, feel a pang of homesickness for London that I have never experienced before.
I had drowned myself in chaos back home; it’s strange not to do it here too.
I even start to enjoy the simple act of driving on my own, the music turned up too loud, the way I can trundle along as fast or as slowly as I like, that strange knowledge that I could turn my car down a road I had never been down and end up somewhere entirely different.
I could, if I wanted to, disappear entirely.
The first real sign of humanity, real humanity, is an advert for McDonald’s.
I follow the sporadic signage until I’m ordering a burger, some chips and a Coke.
I make it to the car park, unbuckle my belt and scroll through my phone.
The 4G is strong here and my Instagram floods back to life.
I ignore the grief account, look instead at my personal one, binge on the lives of old uni friends, cousins, my estranged aunt who is ranting on about her dead hamster.
I take it all in like a drug, let the inane pointlessness of it all sweep over me and feel myself be carried away in a doom scroll of epic proportions until the last chip has been consumed and the straw gurgles at me that the cup is finally empty.
I drive to Leclerc. The building is probably bigger than the whole of Monpazier itself, with its garish white metal cladding and blue neon lettering. I take a trolley for good measure.
Inside is another world: fluorescent lights, screaming children, dozens of brands of the same product all stacked to the ceiling, and it feels strangely wonderful. Something that was such a chore back home, to head to the big ASDA, was my idea of a dream escape today.
Money is a concept I ignore as I glide through the aisles, picking whatever takes my fancy: biscuits I used to love, cheap cheese that the artisanal market stalls don’t sell, some freezer food, cleaning supplies.
I lose myself in the wine section, adding bottles of red, white, crémant and cava, wondering if it’s humanly possible, let alone safe, to consume this much in the remaining three weeks of my trip, but adding it to the trolley anyway because it’s so disgustingly cheap it feels wrong not to.
The clothing section wastes another half an hour.
I find a leopard-print silk scarf with neon green edging and buy it for The American; she’ll appreciate the effort.
Finally, I find myself in the beauty aisle and add face masks, eyebrow tint, make-up remover and nail polish to the trolley, curating a list of things that can fill up an evening and make me look less like a dishevelled pity parade.
It’s times like this when I appreciate being a woman with the multitude of things we can buy and do to distract ourselves for an evening.
When every aisle has been plundered and the trolley wheel has started to squeak with the weight of my impulse spending, I admit defeat.
It’s dark when I leave the car park. The familiarity of the roads leaves me along with the thrill of driving on my own.
Instead, the sparse traffic has been replaced by large, unyielding lorries with headlights so bright I am momentarily blinded, and I resort to a ‘point, shoot and pray’ method that leaves me gripping the steering wheel so tightly my palms sweat.
I try to distract myself by picking at some sweets and turning the music up so loudly that I can feel the bass through my feet.
I am grateful to turn off the A road, grateful to swap the lorries for the occasional car overtaking me, these routes so engrained into their day-to-day lives that they have no qualms about driving at sixty around a single-track blind bend.
When I finally see the small beacon of Monpazier, the yellow streetlights, a halo on the hilltop, I feel like I can breathe. Ten minutes and I can be there. Ten minutes and I will be standing on my doorstep with the daunting realisation of how I’m meant to be getting a boot-full of wine up the—
I hear the hit before I register what’s happening. There is a thud, the crack of glass, the screeching of the breaks, my detached screaming as the car pirouettes on the road, tyres burning on the tarmac, bottles smashing, until everything comes to an eerie silence.
I sit there panting and then when my senses return, I turn off the engine, yank the keys from the ignition and throw myself out of the car. I run to the front, where a deer is slumped, bloodied and limp in a ditch.
The car is facing the wrong direction, the windscreen cracked, a large, deer-shaped divot on the bonnet.
It’s almost like my own father has taken control of me. Without thinking I locate a warning triangle, put on a fluorescent jacket, wrestle on the hazard lights and then I slip myself down the bank, catching my breath in the irrigation ditch on the other side of the road.
I reach for my phone and pause because there’s no one to call.
No one that can help. There’s no Ettie any more to rescue me, no point in calling my parents, no point even in calling Archie, although I’m sure he could say something that would make the situation a little easier to deal with.
I scroll through my contacts, down to the F, down to a number that has only ever been in my phone for the direst of emergency, a number I had only ever dialled once before.
I don’t want to do it.
Yesterday is still all too raw: the look of devastation on his face when I pointed out his hypocrisy is still branded into me but the memory that lingers hotter and longer is the feeling of his hands on mine, his closeness, his softness.
I look at the bashed-up car, turn the phone over in my hand, try to work out how long a walk it would be.
I yell out in frustration, a frayed and guttural sound because I know I have no choice.
‘Ava?’ Florian answers after the second ring. He sounds as confused and worried as he had done the time I told him his brother was dead.