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9.15 p.m. Just called Jude and explained psychological meltdown. ‘You have to get online.’
9.30 p.m. Have signed up for a free trial on SingleParentMix.com. Have followed Jude’s advice and slightly lied about my age as who is going to even look at a profile over fifty? Though don’t tell Talitha I even thought that. Have not put a photo up or a profile or anything.
9.45 p.m. Ooh, I’ve got a message! A message! Already! You see there ARE people out there, and . . .
Oh. It’s from forty-nine-year-old man called ‘5timesanight’.
Well, that’s . . . that’s . . .
Just clicked on message:
Just clicked on picture. Is of a plump, heavily tattooed man, wearing a short black rubber dress and a blond wig.
Mark, please help me. Mark.
9.50 p.m. Come on, come on. Keep Buggering On. I have just got to, got to get over this. I MUST stop thinking, ‘If only Mark was here.’ I must stop thinking of the way he used to sleep with his arm across my shoulder, like he was protecting me, the physical intimacy, the scent of the armpit, the curve of muscle, the stubble on the chin. The way I felt when he answered the phone about work and went into his busy and important mode, then he’d look at me in the middle of the conversation with those brown eyes, so sort of smouldering, yet vulnerable. Or Billy saying, ‘Do puzzles?’ and Mark and Billy spending hours doing incredibly complicated puzzles because they were both so clever. I can’t carry on having every sweet thing which happens with the children tinged with sadness. Saliva being picked to play the little baby Jesus in Mabel’s first nativity play (Mabel was a hen). Billy’s first grown-up carol concert. Billy and Mabel buying me the Nespresso machine I’d been wanting for Christmas (helped by Chloe) as a ‘surprise’, then Mabel telling me about it every night in a furtive whisper. I can’t have another Christmas like that. I can’t have another year like this. I can’t carry on like this.
10 p.m. Just called Tom. ‘Bridget, you have to grieve. You haven’t grieved properly. Write Mark a letter. Wallow in it. W.A.L.L.O.W.’
10.15 p.m. Just went upstairs. I found Billy and Mabel cuddled up together in the top bunk. Awkwardly I climbed up the ladder and got in with them and then Billy woke up and said, ‘Mummy?’
‘Yes,’ I whispered.
‘Where is Dada?’ Feeling my insides wrenching apart with pain for Billy, I pulled him to me, terrified. Why were we all feeling like this tonight?
‘I don’t know,’ I began. ‘But . . .’ Billy had fallen back to sleep. Stayed squeezed in the top bunk, holding them close.
11 p.m. In tears, now, sitting on the floor surrounded by cuttings, photographs. I don’t care what Mum says, I’m just going to wallow in it.
11.15 p.m. Just opened the cuttings box, took one out.
Mark Darcy, the British human rights lawyer, was killed in the Darfur region of Sudan when the armoured vehicle in which he was travelling struck a landmine. Darcy, the internationally recognized authority in cross-border litigation and conflict resolution, and Anton Daviniere, a Swiss representative of the UN Human Rights Council, were both killed in the incident, Reuters reports.
Mark Darcy was a leading international figure in victim representation, international crisis resolution and transitional justice. He was regularly called upon by international bodies, governments, opposition groups and public figures to give advice on a broad array of issues, and was a leading supporter of Amnesty International. His intervention, prior to his death, secured the release of the British aid workers Ian Thompson and Steven Young, who had been hostages of the rebel regime for seven months and whose execution was believed to have been imminent.
Tributes have been pourin
g in from heads of state, aid agencies and individuals.
He leaves behind a widow, Bridget, a son, William, aged two, and a daughter, Mabel, three months old.
11.45 p.m. Sobbing now, the box, the cuttings and photos fallen on the floor, memories, sucking me down.
Dear Mark,
I miss you so much. I love you so much.
It just sounds trite. Like when you try to write a letter to the
bereaved. ‘My deepest sympathy for your loss.’ Still, when people wrote to me after you died, I was glad even if they didn’t really know what to say and stumbled around.
But the thing is, Mark, I just can’t manage on my own. I really, really can’t. I know I’ve got the kids and friends and I’m writing
The Leaves in His Hair
but I’m just so lonely without you. I need you to comfort me, counsel me like we said at our wedding. And hold me. And tell me what to do when I get all mixed up. And tell me I’m all right when I feel I’m crap. And do my zip up. And do my zip down and . . . oh God, the first time you kissed me and I said, ‘Nice boys don’t kiss like that’, and you said, ‘Oh yes, they fucking well do.’ I so fucking miss you and miss fucking you.
And I wish our life . . . I can’t bear that you’re not seeing them grow up.
