Page 33 of Postscript

Lots of love,

Daddy

‘Oh Dad.’ I reach across and take his hand. ‘That’s so lovely.’

Mum is standing by the kitchen sink, listening. ‘That was the day Jack jumped off the roof of the shed and cracked his two front teeth.’

We look up at her in surprise.

‘And I ate all the birthday cake,’ she adds.

I stalled after Gerry’s death. His letters got me back on my feet again. The following year I began to cycle and I’d been pedalling fast ever since. But now, I must be still, and learn to walk again. It is this simple quality of life and rhythmic functioning, almost like a production line, that gets me thinking: I’m equally terrified by life and ecstatic to be living it at the same time.

I selfishly thought after Gerry’s death that the universe owed me. I experienced a great tragedy at a young age and I thought that was me done, I got it over and done with. In a world of infinite possibilities, I should have known there is no end to the loss that we can experience, but neither is there to the knowledge and growth that arises because of it and in spite of it. Now I think surviving the first prepared me for the second, for this moment, and for anything else that lays ahead. I can’t stop tragedy from unfolding, I am powerless in the face of life’s sleight of hand, but while I lick my wounds and heal, I tell myself that although the car knocked me off my perch, momentarily tore my confidence, ripped me raw and broke my bones, I’m healing and my skin is growing back thicker.

My mind sent an SOS to my roots. This is what my roots have come back with: my unravelling at this time could be the making of me. After all, it happened once before, so why can’t it happen again?

Once upon a time I wanted to die.

When Gerry died, I wanted to be dead.

When he died, a piece of me did die, but a part of me was born too.

But in the midst of my grief, if I had been faced with a speeding oncoming car, I would have wanted to live. Perhaps it is not death that angers or scares us, it’s the fact that we have no control over it. Life cannot just be taken away from us without our consent. Given time, and our permission having been granted, we would accept our fate and plot our own timely deaths. But we can’t. All of which thinking brings me back again and again to the PS, I Love You Club.

Play dead to survive.

Play at living while dead.

We want to control our deaths, our goodbye to the world, and if we can’t control it, we can at least control how we leave it behind.

14

Gabriel is quiet at breakfast. I arrived at his house late last night, just as he was going to bed, and I joined him, thankful there were no stairs to negotiate. At my parents’ home I’d been going upstairs on my bum nightly like Gretl von Trapp singing ‘So Long, Farewell’. We didn’t talk, at least not about what we last argued about, and then I slept, Gabriel didn’t. I could tell each time I opened my eyes and found him sitting up reading through his phone. Either my accident has affected him deeply, or our argument, or I’m being naïve and there’s something else on his mind. He stands at the island, naked from the waist up, concentrating intently on his boiled eggs.

‘Are you OK?’

He doesn’t answer.

‘Gabriel?’

‘Hmm?’ He looks up.

‘Everything OK?’

‘My boiled eggs are hard,’ he says, studying them again. His toast pops. It’s burnt. He sighs dramatically, joking, ‘It’s going to be this kind of day.’

I smile. He butters the toast, sending cremated crumbs all over the counter.

‘You’re going to help the PS, I Love You Club, aren’t you?’ he says, sensing my thoughts.

‘Yes.’

He’s silent. He moves his boiled eggs and toast to the breakfast bar at the edge of the island and sits on a high stool. Calm face, busy head. He picks up the toast that’s been cut into neat soldiers and dips it into the egg. The toast bends. It doesn’t dip into the yolk as he likes, doesn’t send it oozing down the side of the shell and cup for his finger to wipe and lick.

‘Fuck,’ he says angrily, and drops the toast.

His outburst gives me a fright, though I was dreading this reaction from my usually cool-headed boyfriend.