Читать книгу When Bad Things Happen in Good Bikinis - Helen Bailey - Страница 22

The ties get me: James had so many, and such lovely ones. I have tried to give some of them away to people who knew him – I don’t want some stranger who doesn’t appreciate how lovely he was wearing his ties – although I think some people were slightly freaked out by my insistence that they have a tie. I did not get many acceptances so they are still there in the wardrobe, reminding me what I have lost. ~ Linz

It’s been the most shockingly tearful start to August I’ve ever known, even worse than the time when my parents warned me in advance that I wouldn’t be getting a pony for my twelfth birthday. I’ve sobbed the length of Oxford Street, at the bus stop and on the bus; all over a poor woman walking her dog on the Heath (I bet she wished she’d never asked how I was); on the phone, and in the changing rooms at Uniqlo whilst trying (without success) to find a pair of jeans to fit my depressingly flat butt.

At just over five months, I thought the days of the Widow’s Wail had gone, but I was wrong. Along with feeling completely overwhelmed by the terrible past, my frightening present and a bleak, JS-less future, that uncontrollable guttural roar of grief and frustration returned to further knock me off my already unsteady Converse-clad feet.

On Friday lunchtime, I was in tears whilst frying some out-of-date halloumi cheese, when suddenly I couldn’t stand at the stove for a nanosecond longer. I felt incredibly restless and anxious and began pacing the kitchen crying out, ‘No! No! No!’ clenching my fists. Then – ‘WAAAAAAHHHH!’ The noise was so loud, such a lion’s roar, it sent The Hound ricocheting through his cat flap in a barking frenzy.

The Widow’s Wail is perfectly acceptable (if horrible) at home, but a bit more difficult to deal with when out and about. I remember some months ago sitting on a loo in the toilets of John Lewis in Oxford Street, weeping, when one suddenly emerged. In an attempt to get myself under some sort of control, I tensed up only to realise that I was beating my thighs with my fists whilst making squeaking noises. To those washing their hands at the sinks on the other side of the door, it must have sounded as if a chimpanzee was using the cubicle.

As if life isn’t hard enough at the moment, I’ve been having lots of problems with my BlackBerry: the touch-screen keeps freezing and the phone goes through a total reboot without warning, usually whilst I’m using it.

JS loved gadgets, and when my BlackBerry started playing up I fantasised that the unpredictable nature of the phone was due to his ‘energy’ interfering with the electronics. Then I faced up to the more mundane reality that it was a software, not a soul problem. I really should go back to the Orange shop, but I can’t face explaining my problem to some eighteen-year-old, sinewy lad called De-Wayne who oozes with street cool and wears a diamond stud in his ear, the outcome of which will undoubtedly result in me being cut off, or emails going missing, or SIM cards not being recognised and lots of frantic calls to Orange and tears, because even in the best of times, that seems to always happen to me and my moby.

As a stop-gap, I keep taking the battery out and starting again, but I’m going to have to sort it out because the phone keeps randomly ringing the first name on my contact list: a woman who I don’t want to speak to, though as she never rings me back, I suspect she doesn’t want to speak to me either. I’ve tried to delete her contact but when I press on her name there’s a delay, and instead of going to my address book it rings her, cue frantic battery action.

But on Saturday, as a break from Grief Googling, I looked up my BlackBerry problem on the internet. Just as I had no idea that there were so many grief-stricken widows and widowers out there, nor did I have any idea of the grief a frozen BlackBerry Torch screen can cause those who are addicted to their CrackBerries. It seemed that I could do some sort of re-install via my computer, IF I had the right lead. I have lots of leads – they lie entwined like a basket of snakes snoozing in the sun – but of course none of them were the right lead, so I went hunting for other places the lead might be lurking. I became quite manic on the lead-hunt, convinced that if I didn’t do the back-up and re-install within the next few minutes my BlackBerry was going to die along with all my contacts, texts and random photos of The Hound looking cute. So determined was I to find this wretched lead, I rushed into the spare bedroom, opened a cupboard door, and then I saw them . . .

Ties.

Beautiful, shimmering silk ties.

Row upon row of them hanging on tie racks.

Though a quietly understated man in most areas of his life, JS did like a statement tie and I loved to buy them for him. He’d get a kick out of going somewhere and someone commenting on his tie, and I’d feel proud when he’d smile and say, ‘Thank you. My wife bought it for me.’ His ties were even mentioned in the eulogy at his funeral.

And there they were, a rainbow of colours, a reminder of events we’d been to, weddings we’d witnessed, business trips we’d been on, parties we’d enjoyed. The only tie I never liked was his MCC tie, the egg and bacon colours (or pus and blood as I used to sneer) worn by so many old buffers at Lord’s cricket ground, but even this seemed a tragic tie. Just before he died, JS was looking forward to cutting back on work, spending more time doing the things he loved: watching cricket was one of them.

But the saddest tie of all was the one that he hadn’t quite put away – the one looped casually over the front of the others. A Christian Lacroix, shimmering pink tie, undoubtedly the last tie he ever wore five-and-a-half months ago, left hanging, waiting to be worn again. It was the same tie he was wearing in the photograph that sat on his coffin in the crematorium.

I stared at it, and then I wept and wailed until I could no longer breathe.

And then I closed the wardrobe door and went and made a cup of tea.