Apart

Chapter 1

Amy: Don’t Go Breaking My Heart

I’m woken by the doorbell. It’s Saturday morning and I’m having a lie-in – at least I was until I was disturbed.

Now the doorbell is ringing again. A long ring.

Too long for our postie, too early for a friend to call round unexpectedly.

James, my amazing but bike-crazy boyfriend, went out cycling a while ago, even though it’s freezing out there today, so I know I’ll have to get up and answer it.

I hurriedly pull on a jumper over my pyjama top.

Our house – or bungalow, I should say – is cosy, but it’s not as warm out of bed.

It is January after all. And now the doorbell is ringing yet again. Give me a chance!

I open the front door, and an icy wind makes me shiver.

There are two policemen standing there, which is odd in itself.

You hardly ever see one policeman in the little Cotswold town of Chipping Wotton, never mind two.

And what can they want? I’m racking my brains for what I could possibly have done.

I tend to think of myself as a fairly normal law-abiding person.

The policemen have strange looks on their faces.

And now, before either of them says a word, my stomach turns.

‘Not James, please not James,’ is all I can think, on repeat.

‘Miss Fairlight?’

‘Yes.’

‘Could we come in please?’

I don’t want to ask why. I don’t want to know. On autopilot I show them into the living room. We all sit down a bit awkwardly.

‘What’s—’

‘It’s about James,’ one of them says, before I can finish.

I feel myself shuddering. It’s like the temperature in the room has just plummeted.

‘What’s happened?’ I manage to force out of my mouth.

‘I’m very sorry. There’s been an accident, a collision, an Aldi lorry—’

‘Where is he?’

‘I’m so sorry, Miss.’

And they spell it out and repeat it, because I can’t take it in. There must be some mistake.

He’s the one. The one I’m meant to be spending the rest of my life with. The only man I’ve ever loved completely. He can’t be dead. He just can’t be.

Time changed that day, like it moved to a strange kind of slow-motion zone, where a day can feel like a lifetime, and a weekend can feel like an eternity.

And yet somehow ten months have passed, and here I am feeling just as broken as I did back then.

My default mode is still sorrow. Anything else, like cheerfulness, requires effort, and auto reverts to sorrow in moments if I don’t actively maintain it, and sometimes I just can’t.

I don’t want this life. I want things to go back to how they were before.

I want to click the option to restore factory settings, but somehow it’s not there.

James was everything to me. He was amazing. He was my world. I guess he can’t have been completely perfect. No one is, right? But right now I’m struggling to remember what wasn’t perfect about him.

I’d fancied him pretty much the moment I saw him.

More than fancied him, I was smitten. I was working evenings in a pub, while I applied for grad jobs in marketing.

And that’s where I first saw him. He was all grown-up and sophisticated, one of the cool guys.

He was in the army, and I guess that gives you a head start in the cool stakes.

But even by military standards James was supercool.

But it wasn’t the supercool thing that got me.

Nor that he was tall and strong and brave, and smart and funny and gorgeous, although all of those things were true.

This might seem strange, but the thing that really made him stand out was how courteous he was.

It’s not a quality you see so much of these days is it?

Not much of that gallantry, like you see in black and white movies.

But James was always courteous. Instead of thrusting his way forwards at the bar like lots of the guys – and girls – he would keep an eye out for who was actually due to be served next and let them go ahead even if he got asked for his order first. No doubt he would often be served before his turn because he was so attractive and charismatic.

Certainly, where I worked there was no shortage of bartenders, both male and female, eager to get his drinks.

And that slightly old-fashioned chivalry, combined with everything else, made him completely irresistible.

I was fresh out of uni, completely na?ve and not streetwise at all.

Just finding my feet in the real world. I’m not even sure why he gave me a second glance.

But he did, in fact quite a few glances.

And after that we started chatting a lot whenever he was in the pub, and that became most nights.

In the end it was Elton John who was responsible for getting us together.

Well, I say Elton John, but it was actually Elton John and Kiki Dee.

James and a couple of his army mates had formed a band and they were really good, so they’d been asked to do a gig in the pub one evening.

After they’d done a few numbers of their own and some covers, they started taking requests.

They’d just done Springsteen’s ‘Badlands’ and someone asked for ‘Don’t Go Breaking My Heart’, which was obviously going to be trickier for an all-guys band to sing.

So James was looking around for a volunteer and he caught my eye – as he often did.

As it happens, I have a pretty good singing voice, and taking a break from serving drinks to go and sing with a hunky tall blond soldier didn’t feel like too much of a hardship, so I didn’t need a lot of persuading.

I went over and he took my hand and helped me up onto the little stage, and as we sang the duet, looking in each other’s eyes, it felt like the chemistry between us hit a whole new level.

And that night he waited around till I’d finished work, and we went for a walk in the moonlight.

It sounds like such a cliché, but it was one of those perfect summer evenings, and we walked along by the river that flows through the centre of town, and talked a lot.

Later, he walked me back to my car, and when he leant in to kiss me goodnight he said gently, ‘I’d never break your heart, Amy. ’ And, like a fool, I believed him.

What do I miss most about James? I miss everything, the whole of him, the essence of him, the tiny little things that all put together made James James, if you see what I mean.

I miss the smell of him. I wash with the shower gel he used, but somehow it doesn’t smell the same without him.

I miss him curling his lip slightly when he wasn’t convinced about something. It was very subtle, and most people wouldn’t have noticed, but if you knew him well, you’d spot it.

I miss him helping me put things in perspective, reminding me there was another way of looking at things, helping me laugh at myself when I was taking life too seriously.

I miss just looking at his face – particularly when he wasn’t aware, like when he was busy or asleep. His face had a strong, assured, grown-up look about it, but sometimes a boyish smile would appear on his face, and if you caught it, it was wonderful, and you just knew he was up to something.

I miss the taste of kissing him. I never used to drink beer. I’ve always been more of a wine or gin and tonic girl, but I find myself drinking beer now just to try to recapture the smell and taste of kissing him when he’d been drinking it. It’s strange the things you miss.

When I was first dating him, I was telling a friend at work about him and she said, ‘So Amy and Jamie?’ – but actually that was never it.

He was always James. Never Jamie, Jim, Jimmy – always James.

It’s not like he was super-serious, although he could be when it was appropriate, but the full name ‘James’ somehow just suited him.

It was just who he was – which to my mind was perfect.

And there’s the problem. I’m still in love with him.

Completely. Before I met him, I didn’t know it was possible to love someone this much.

How much do I love him? Put it this way, if someone said to me I had to give away either my right arm or the letters he sent me from his last tour in Afghanistan, I’d seriously have to think about it.

Time heals, everyone says. But how much time?

I can put on a brave face most of the time.

I can get out of bed now, most days, and I’ve managed to hold down my job in marketing – thanks to my understanding boss, and being allowed to work from home a lot.

I can get to the shops, put together a meal of sorts, clean the house, do all the things normal people do.

I’ve even managed to stop dressing in black every day.

But inside I know nothing’s changed. The grief isn’t going anywhere.

I still cry myself to sleep every night.

I still wake up every morning looking like I’ve not slept in a year.

I know it’s bad ‘cos even my iPhone doesn’t recognise me first thing.

I kid you not. I mean, my iPhone and I are pretty much inseparable, so if it doesn’t recognise me, things have clearly hit a low.

In the morning I swipe up for Face ID and it just stares back at me blankly, as if to say ‘Sorry, who are you?’ I try again.

‘No, still don’t recognise you. You definitely don’t look like the woman who took me to bed last night.

’ It’s like some kind of nightmare date scenario.

It’s time to move on. I know this because people keep telling me it is.

‘It’s not like you were married,’ they say.

Yes, I know very well we weren’t married.

My wannabe ‘mother-in-law’, Carol, reminds me of this at every opportunity.

She introduces me to anyone and everyone as ‘just his girlfriend’.

Like the other week when she dragged me along to help her prepare for the WI harvest supper.