‘Our last hurrah?’ She tilts her head, the question loaded with sadness.
‘Our last Christmas together . . . I’ll remember this for the rest of my life. My family will remember this for the rest of their lives too.’
As I say these words, anxiety tugs at them, like there is a loose thread. It’s been a while since I’ve felt it, that little nick, that dragging feeling that reminds me that I shouldn’t really be here.
‘I wish I was really here, that we had done this when I was alive.’ She examines a small gathering of batteries curiously, picking it up for me to explain.
‘Torches,’ I reply.
I sink down onto the step ladders, still open ready for me to reach up and pull down the cases that I will pack tomorrow, and draw my knees up to my chest. My eyes reach out to the old board games, the broken sledge that we used last year, the old baby swing that would rock a fretful Oscar, kept just in case we had another child, the box marked Easter, filled with plastic eggs to be filled with chocolates, the signposts for the egg hunt, the fake tulips and daffodils that would replace the poinsettia.
Kerry grins and pulls a Christmas jumper over her head: the Grinch’s green face is stretched into a grin. Kerry presses a knitted gift-wrapped box stitched into the belly-button area and battery-operated lights begin flashing as a tiny rendition of ‘Jingle Bells’ begins playing.
I laugh quietly, stand, smooth down the pile of gloves and scarves that await the cases, and turn off the light.
Chapter Seventy-Four
Jennifer
We’ve been on the sleeper train from Helsinki for a couple of hours. Kerry and I went through an Agatha Christie stage when we were teenagers and always wanted to go on the Orient Express, so this is the next best thing. ‘It’ll be an adventure!’ I’d told Ed. Kerry has been with me the whole time but she’s not here right now, not in this cramped compartment; it’s a good job because there wouldn’t be enough room.
Hailey is asleep with me in the top bunk, Oscar with Ed in the bottom. Sleeping/not sleeping on a train is a surreal experience and so far, me and Ed have spent most of the night talking in whispered tones so’s not to wake the kids. It’s the best way I could have spent tonight; the idea of seeing Kerry’s death from behind my closed lids is something I’m happy to stay away from . . . tonight of all nights. Oscar, we have since discovered, snores louder than a truck driver and fidgets constantly in his sleep, whereas Hailey mumbles, often saying random sentences, making us dissolve into giggles.
‘This feels like the first night we spent together, do you remember? We watched The Rocky Horror Picture Show and you were too shy to try it on.’
Hailey mumbles something about grainy peacocks as I lie on my back and look at the ceiling. I feel Ed smiling below.
‘I wasn’t too shy,’ he answers quietly. ‘I was waiting for you to do it . . . which you did.’
‘I did.’
‘You did it very well as I recall.’
‘You weren’t too bad yourself.’
I close my eyes and remember that night, how soft his lips were when I kissed him, how gentle he was . . . as though he didn’t want to break me.
‘You were so gentle,’ I say quietly.
‘I’d waited a long time. I’d fantasised about that girl standing on the train platform, one arm raised in a right angle behind her head, eyes looking off at something or someone further up the platform, not at me . . . you only glanced in my direction as the doors closed.’
I hear Ed shifting himself onto his back and rolling Oscar onto his side towards the wall. ‘I wonder what you were looking at,’ he muses.
‘Another man,’ I reply, deadpan.
‘He was probably more your type too . . . dark hair, brooding eyes—’
‘Intelligent, mysterious . . . Nah, I was probably looking for Kerry. She was always late.
‘What happened when the doors shut? Did you stare out of the windows like a lost puppy? All sad eyes and palms against the window?’
He laughs quietly. ‘No . . . but I do remember hitting that girl with a door.’
‘You made me see stars.’ I hang my head upside down over the edge of the bed, my hair falling down towards Ed’s smirking face.