The Single Mums' Secrets - Janet Hoggarth Page 0,90

familiar. Her heart would beat faster, her ears suddenly muffling, and she would vigorously push the trolley towards the unsuspecting stranger. They invariably turned round, alerted by Louise’s zealous footsteps, and she could see they looked nothing like Nigel. So she’d skid to a halt, fighting tears, embarrassed.

The truth was, Sainsbury’s was the last place Louise would ever find Nigel when he was alive, so why would he visit the place when he was dead? She wasn’t setting foot on a golf course any time soon…

‘Mum’s asked if she can have a selection,’ Phil said. ‘That’s OK, isn’t it?’

‘She can have whatever she wants. I just didn’t want her here doing it, sobbing and howling, making a scene.’ She suddenly felt dreadful, badmouthing their mum. Nigel would never have heard a less than complimentary word said about Jean – she was a saint as far as he was concerned. ‘Sorry, I’ve got no filter. I shouldn’t have said it in that way.’

‘Don’t worry about it. Mum is overdramatic. The last thing you need is one of her histrionic displays about Nigel.’

‘They’re not just reserved for me, then?’

‘God, no! Any chance she gets to let the world know her son died and how she’s crushed from it, she grabs it. We all grieve in our own way, but I think even Dad is getting cheesed off with it now. Nigel was his son too. Mum doesn’t have exclusivity.’

Louise thought it must be quite an absurd feeling for Phil – Jean was acting like she had no surviving children. It was as if Phil had died alongside Nigel, or never been born at all. She couldn’t decide which was worse. She did know one thing, this decluttering was making her itch for a cigarette and so far she’d managed to stop smoking since Christa had moved in. Just one wouldn’t kill her, would it?

‘If there’s anything you want to keep, just take it. I’ve had a quick forage and have taken a few posh shirts for Ted and Isaac and cufflinks, his Rolex, wedding ring, small sentimental stuff.’ Louise eyed Phil in his scrappy Levi’s worn thin on the right knee; they looked like they’d belonged to a seventies geography teacher. His baggy V-necked navy jumper fraying at the cuffs was most likely out of a charity shop. She almost laughed at the thought of him incongruously wearing some of Nigel’s expensive threads.

‘Nigel and I had very different taste in clothes,’ Phil replied, trying not to smile, a ghost of Nigel dancing around his mouth. The brothers looked totally different apart from certain expressions and the same thick dark hair, flecked with grey. ‘But I’ll see if there’s anything. It’s good to recycle things, give them a new life.’

Two hours later, her room was mobbed with black bin bags, rather like those Arcadian Kent fields dotted with plastic-wrapped hay bales. Nigel had once mentioned he and Phil used to jump between them when they were set out in a row, like giant stepping stones. One year, Phil had missed his footing and fallen, breaking his wrist. They never told Jean it was because he’d smoked an entire joint and was fucked.

Louise had ventured into Nigel’s domain, the shed, to poke around. Apart from all the gardening paraphernalia and some deckchairs, everything else could go. His smart green Hunter wellies were lined up by the door, his golf clubs and his top-of-the-range aluminium-framed racing bike that he’d bought after the London Olympics leaned against the lawn mower. He was always on the shitting golf course, and he could hardly cycle there with his bastarding clubs on his back, could he? In the end, Louise thought he’d ridden it about four times.

There was also a set of dumb bells that were so heavy she couldn’t lift them (obviously Nigel hadn’t either), the old coal BBQ only saved from the scrap heap in case they ever went camping (they didn’t), and his workout bench. She had no idea how any of it was going to fit in Phil’s Skoda Octavia – it wasn’t even an estate. Maybe she could sell the bike for fifty quid on Gumtree? She knew it was worth at least a grand, and if Nigel could see what she was thinking, he would start rattling bike chains in a Marley-esque manner, haunting her until the day she died.

But he hadn’t made an appearance so far, and she’d condemned his precious lawn. Moss had crept up unimpeded round the edges where the