A Life Without You Page 5

‘You’ve got your inheritance.’

  That was true. I did have the £5000 my mum had saved in an endowment policy. In fact, the only reason that my dad hadn’t drank it away was because she’d been smart enough to put it in my name and it couldn’t be accessed until I turned eighteen. And of course, I was too sensible to have accessed it, no matter how close we’d come to missing the rent, so every penny of it was still there.

  Five grand wasn’t going to get us very far, though.

  Dee didn’t even pause to register the doubt on my face. ‘And I’ve got that money I saved for a car. Between the two of us we could maybe get together £10000. My mum and dad would help with loans and stuff. Oh my God, this is genius! It could totally work, Jen. My marketing and stunning personality, your accountancy and brains – it’s perfect! Say yes. Aw sod it, I’ll just feed you more cider. After three you’ll say yes to anything.’

  Chapter 8

  Jen, 2016

  CLOSED DUE TO BEREAVEMENT.

  Josie had put that sign up on the door. She’d called me as soon as she’d heard what happened and told me she’d take care of it. Josie was one of those women, the kind who stepped up and took on some cloak of super-strength when things went to shit. She’d originally worked for Mel, who used to own the lingerie shop along the street, and had come to ‘do a nosy’ before we opened. She saw we were in disarray, picked up a hoover, and had the place gleaming in no time. Josie and Val had met that night, and hit it off immediately. Afterwards, we’d begged her to stay, and she’d agreed, splitting her time between the two shops. A few years later, Josie’s son Michael had bought the lingerie shop, and a beauty salon next to it, married Mel and they’d eventually sold up and moved to Italy. There had been a wobbly moment when Josie took that opportunity to retire, but thankfully, she’d discovered that being a lady of leisure, in her words, ‘bored her tits off’ and she came back to work. She was more of a friend than an employee – part of the collective of our hybrid family.

  I paused on the threshold of the door, unsure whether I could do this. I had to. This was what we’d built and I would be letting her down if I let it crumble. I forced the keys into the lock now and pushed the door open. Located on one of the busiest streets in the Merchant City area of Glasgow, in a row of small boutique stores and salons, the shop had been a leap of faith that had – thankfully – resulted in a soft landing.

  Sun, Sea, Ski. I can’t remember if the title was my idea or Dee’s but perfectly summed up our product range – all you needed for a summer or winter break. Our customer base was supported by Dee’s travel blog, which now had thousands of followers who also shopped in our online store. After a tough couple of years as we got established and found our niche, it was paying off in a big way now. And yet, I realised, as I inhaled the scent of Josie’s lemon polish, it had never seemed so pointless.

  All those great adventures and promises of tropical dreams, and now none of them would come true for Dee. She wouldn’t travel to Nepal. Or the Amazon. We wouldn’t go on another girls’ trip, or take Luke and Pete off for a weekend break.

  We wouldn’t celebrate another Christmas. She wouldn’t have children. We’d never be those women who had kids the same age and took them to the park together. We wouldn’t moan about hot flushes and then spend our retirement cruise-hopping and drinking tequila before noon. We wouldn’t have another ‘hello’, or ‘love you’. We didn’t even get a last goodbye… The tsunami of grief swelled again. Coming here was a mistake.

  I closed the door behind me, then leaned against it and fought for breath. The shop still looked exactly the same as always. Of course it did. Yet how could that be when everything had changed?

  Over the years, we’d redecorated and updated the interior to reflect our increased cash flow and growing products lines and services. Back at the start, the walls were a pale yellow, the stock displayed on plain white shelves and rails. The floor had been laminate and a till had sat on a desk Dee’s dad, Don, had made us in his workshop.

  Now, glossy mahogany wood was beneath my feet and the walls were lined with a sumptuous pale blue, glistening paper, the colour of the Mediterranean Sea. The shelves and rails were satin chrome and there were two beautifully carved white doors, one on the back wall, leading to the office and storeroom, and one on the side wall, leading to a bank of three fitting rooms, gained a few years ago when we extended into the small vacant shop next door.

  The left-hand side of the room was the sunshine area – bikinis, sarongs, flip flops, sun creams, and every kind of technological gizmo ever invented for a hot weather break. On the right, the ski zone – salopettes and goggles, gorgeous fake fur hats and shrugs, and cashmere après-ski loungewear that Dee had first ordered in bulk after too many mulled wines last Christmas in Gstaad. Thankfully, word of mouth had brought the customers in their droves and they’d sold out in weeks. This was our third re-stock and popularity showed no sign of diminishing.

  In the centre of the room, there was now a white circular control centre, where the till and two computers were situated, with four chairs around it that clients could sit on while we booked their next trip or activity.

  It was perfect. A shop with everything. Except Dee.

  I stood for a few minutes, trying to come to terms with being here, steeling myself to go into the office. I’ve no idea how much time passed before I pushed the door open, flicked the light on, looking around like a stranger in a foreign landscape, detached, unfamiliar. My tidy, minimal IKEA oak desk sat perpendicular to Dee’s workspace, the original desk Don had made for the shop, disguised by a level of debris that resembled a landfill. I smiled. Every week for nearly a decade I’d suggested she tidy it. Every week for nearly a decade she’d ignored me.

  The pain, when it hit me, was so strong I gasped. It was just a cardigan, pale blue, from the cashmere ski range, but it was Dee’s and it was sitting over the back of her chair, just waiting for her to pull it on when the afternoon chill descended. When my lungs kicked back in, I leaned over, picked it up, inhaled. It smelled of her. My senses took over, sucking all the strength from every part of my body and I slid down the wall to the floor. No tears, none of the wracking sobs that had filled the first week without her, just catatonic numbness as I realised that I had no idea how to function now she was gone. We’d been together for almost every day of the last twenty years and I wasn’t ready to be alone. Didn’t know how to be.

  I yelped with surprise when the office door creaked open. In my daze, I hadn’t locked the front door behind me, and Dee must have disabled the bell that alerted us to customers again. It was one of her more common hangover-survival tactics. I hadn’t even heard movement out in the shop. A shoplifter could have been away with half our stock.

  In the office, sitting on the floor, the first things my gaze connected with were the trainers and my lungs sucked in air as thoughts collided. I knew he’d come. Mid-life crisis over. Oh, thank God. Pete had come back and… My eyes reached knee level and I realised I was wrong.

  ‘Hey.’ Luke. But it still wasn’t the Luke I knew. This Luke had a couple of weeks’ worth of facial hair, bloodshot eyes and a complexion with a tinge of grey that said it hadn’t seen enough daylight. I noticed for the first time how much weight he’d lost, maybe about twenty pounds, so the bones in his face looked more visible, sharper, jarring against the unruly dark waves of hair that were swept back in an unruly tangle.

  ‘Hi,’ I replied, a sad smile hijacking my words.

  ‘Are you going to get up anytime soon or shall I come down there?’ he asked.

  I patted the floor next to me in answer.

  Just as I had done a few minutes ago, he slid down the wall to join me and I took in the ensemble of running shorts and T-shirt.

  ‘Jogging? Really?’

  His smile was as half-hearted as his shrug. ‘Gets us all eventually.’

  ‘Traitor.’ I teased.

  Jogging had been Dee and Pete’s thing. Off they’d go galloping around streets
, across parks, half-marathons, full marathons, up hills, in all weathers, while Luke and I would point out that we might not be super-fit, but at least we’d still have our own knees at sixty.

  ‘Started the day after the funeral,’ he said. ‘Didn’t know what else to do. I bloody hate every step, but at least hating the pain stops me hating the fact that she’s not here.’

  His words took me aback. In all the years we’d been friends I’d never heard Luke talk about feelings in any depth. He did socialising. He did parties. He was a chilled out, laid back guy, but he definitely did making the most of life. He did not do introspection and emotional outbursts. Dee would be astonished.

  ‘So what brings you here?’ I asked.

  ‘Val said you were going to be here this morning. I didn’t mean to come – just ended up here.’ The last word caught in his throat and he paused and stared straight ahead, but I knew what he was thinking. How many nights had we all – Luke, Dee, Pete and I – sat in this office after work, drinking beers, feet up on desks, hanging out while we counted the takings or made plans for our next trip? More than our homes, this had been our place, the centre of our gang of four. And now it was just us two.

  ‘She told me about Pete. Jesus, that came out of nowhere. I’m so sorry, Jen.’

  ‘You didn’t know?’

  He shook his head. ‘Only seen him a couple of times since the funeral, but Matt and Calum were there so we just played a bit of pool, had a few beers.’

  ‘Yeah, I can see how it would slip his mind to mention that he’d moved out of our house and left our fifteen-year relationship.’

  Luke managed a rueful smile. ‘We’re blokes. If it doesn’t involve twenty-two guys chasing a ball, there’s no point…’

  ‘… talking about it.’ I finished the sentence. How many times had Dee chastised them with that playful accusation? Although, granted, there was a grain of truth in there. ‘He told me on the night of the funeral. Left there and then,’ I said.

  That one was a conversation stopper. Luke didn’t know how to reply and I didn’t want to suck up the sympathy and make this all about me. Luke was the one who needed it more. We’d both lost our partners, but there was a chance that I could sort things out with Pete. Luke was never going to have that option.

  ‘What are we going to do, Jen?’ he said, eventually.

  I sighed. ‘No idea.’

  A pinging noise from the iPad sitting upright on a charging stand on Dee’s desk made both of our heads snap round.

  ‘If she’s sent us some kind of answer to that question I’m going to be totally freaked out,’ Luke said. ‘You look.’

  I nudged his shoulder. ‘You.’

  Reluctantly, he stretched over, gently tugged the charger’s flex to slide the iPad across the desk towards us, and then when it was within reaching distance, he lifted it from the cradle and returned to his seating position on the floor.

  I couldn’t look. Had to look. Eventually looked.

  There were two lines of text on the screen.

  Reminder: one month until you leave for New York!

  You have three events booked.

  Nausea and sadness fought for supremacy in my gut. I’d forgotten all about the New York trip. Dee went every year to a huge travel convention there, although in the last couple of years, she’d only spent a day or two at the convention and used the rest of the time to check out cool new places to stay. This time she’d organised a three-day stay in a boutique hotel on the Upper East Side, a freebie in return for a write-up on the blog, and she had talked about doing a couple of shows and seeing what the big stores were carrying in their spring line for skiwear.

  ‘Oh God. She was looking forward to that trip so much. I’ll cancel the flight and get in touch with the hotel to explain.’ Every word was shredded on a blade of grief that was lodged in my throat.

  As we sat there in silence, side by side, Luke’s breathing suddenly grew heavier and erratic, I couldn’t bear to look at him. I wasn’t sure why, then I realised that I didn’t want to see him crying. Somehow it was too raw, too painful. We had been friends for years, had seen each other drunk, sober, happy, sad, angry, laughing, and even once – thanks to an ill-advised skinny dip in a freezing Loch Lomond – naked. Yet, right here, in this tiny, confined space, I didn’t want to see him cry because it would be like taking a brick out of a dam of grief that no amount of flood defences would be able to halt.

  A few moments passed before he spoke. ‘You should go.’

  ‘What?’ I’d heard him, but I just required clarification.

  ‘You should go,’ he repeated. ‘Dee would hate it to go to waste. She’d be bloody furious. You know she would want you to go.’

  This wasn’t in the script. Dee went on the trips, I manned the fort at home. That put both of us in our comfort zones. It worked. I had no desire to change it.

  ‘And besides, you need to keep the shop and blog going, so you need to know what’s happening out there. You need new products, new ideas, new experiences to write about. You know how much this all mattered to Dee and how passionate she was about keeping on top of the latest trends and making sure her blog had loads of great stories.’

  That was true. Dee’s chronicles of her travels had over 10000 followers and the click rate through to the store’s website was a reliable addition to our income, generating over forty per cent of our online sales. Suddenly, this was less of an emotional dilemma and more of a business one. He was right. The reason our business was so successful was because we never let anything get stale. Dee would be furious if I let that originality and innovation slip away. But still, I resisted…

  ‘I can’t. There’s no one here to look after the shop.’ Even as the business had grown, we’d resisted taking on new staff and, instead, kept it in the family. Sometime Val would help out, sometimes, on the weekends, Pete and Luke would pitch in. I couldn’t even think about how that would now be so different going forward.

  ‘I can take a couple of days off work and do it and Val will come in to help me. To be honest, it’ll probably be good for her. She made Don go back to work and he’s doing such long hours that she’s left with too much empty time on her hands. She could do with a distraction.’

  ‘I’m not sure coming in here would be a distraction,’ I pointed out. Val had been a constant support, lending a hand in the shop whenever Dee was away, so I had no idea how she would react to being back in a space that oozed her daughter’s presence from every joist and corner.

  ‘Maybe that’s up to her,’ he said, firmly but not unkind.

  He was right. Maybe it was.

  ‘I’ll think about it.’ I said. It was as much as I could concede right now. Just getting through the day would be a major achievement for me at the moment, let alone planning to cross the Atlantic. I wasn’t ready for that. I needed familiar surroundings. Steady acclimatisation. Not a step into the unknown.

  It was as if the universe heard my thought and answered.

  Another ping.

  Reminder: Remember to check if you can bungee from any NY landmarks.

  A bungee jump. That was Dee’s favourite kind of step into the unknown. But not one that I could even think about taking.

  Chapter 9

  Val

  I still remembered the old days when a supermarket opened at nine a.m. and closed at six o’clock. Maybe an eight o’clock late opening on a Thursday if you were lucky. Now? Twenty-four hours our local ASDA was open and at 3 a.m. I was grateful for it.

  I dragged out every step, going as slowly as possible. I had nowhere else to be and it was not like Don even knew I was gone. God love him, when he closed his eyes at exactly ten o’clock every night, it was more of a coma situation than a sleep. For the last thirty odd years, when he woke up every morning at 6 a.m., a habit that was down to a lifetime of working on building sites, I was lying there beside him. I still was. But now, instead of greeting him with a kiss and a smile, sometimes I’d pretend to be asleep; sometimes
I’d act like I’d just woken up. What I never did was let on that I’d been driving the streets and wandering around supermarkets half the night.

  In the weeks since… since… well, anyway, in the time I’d been coming here, I’d realised that it was like a different world, a nocturnal existence that had been going on the whole time while I, safe and smug in my happy life, had been blissfully unaware of it.

  I’d already started to recognise faces. In the canned soup aisle, I saw Karen. I’ve no idea if that was her name, but it was the one I’d given her and it suited her. She was here most nights – or rather mornings – about this time, in her nursing scrubs, so she must work down at the hospital. Maybe she was in A&E. Maybe she’d been on duty that dreadful night. Maybe she’d even ran to our Dee as they flew through the doors with her, already gone, but desperate to try to bring her back to us. They couldn’t. Maybe that’s why Karen had a haunted look, why I saw her sometimes, just staring at the shelves, not focusing on what was in front of her until she snapped back to the present, picked up a tin of Heinz lentil broth or spaghetti hoops and strode off.

  Over at the bakery aisle, Harry was loading a couple of baguettes into his basket. Ginger, like the prince, and about the same age. That’s where I got his name. And ex-army too, I reckoned. He had that ramrod-straight stance, the broad shoulders, the fearless bearing, none of which was diminished by the altered gait of his limp. I’d seen him a couple of times before I noticed the prosthetic on his left leg. He was one of the few that made eye contact.

  The junkies didn’t. These weren’t the same kind of evil, arrogant drugged up bastard that killed my Dee. These were broken, emaciated, barely-functioning souls who were too busy scanning the place for the half-hearted security guards that patrolled the aisles. Some of the guys in the uniforms were trumped up with self-importance, others obviously just trying to pay the bills for the family they left every night to come here. Some of them, though, were kind to the homeless souls that wandered in for a heat. They walked as slowly as me, the homeless ones, a depressed shuffle, with empty baskets that they left at the till on the way out, as if they’d been unable to find anything they wanted in a shop the size of a football pitch. Broke my heart. There was one, Maggie I called her, must have been in her sixties. Every time I smiled at her she turned away, never smiled back, but I still did it anyway. Maybe one night she would. What had happened in her life that she was left with no home, no family, just second hand shoes and an all-night supermarket coming between her and hypothermia?