Sandcastle in the Storm

I remember standing on the pale sands in warm sunlight watching the boy who kneels near his sister. He is using the top of a red plastic shovel to shape each turret on the sandcastle towers with deep concentration.

She is looking down at him and smiling. He is her best ever birthday gift as he was born on her birthday. Who needs a doll when you have a real baby to cuddle?

Only, I don’t remember this at all. I never had children. I wanted them desperately, but never had even one. I didn’t even get so far as a miscarriage. Why does this scene keep haunting me and then, as if a mist came up and snatched it all away, vanishes?

Maybe part of me remembers being married and the longings that I had then for children, for everything that society accepted as normality. I didn’t need to do the math to recognise that my divorce like my wedding day had been more than a few years ago. Nothing in my current life persisted from back then except some of my books and clothing so neutral that it evoked no memories. That marriage of a dozen years could have happened to someone else.

What bothers me most about this daydream is that I have nobody to interpret it except myself. Not that I would ask anyone I know now. But I always confided my dreams to her and those odd visions that came up sometimes when I sat with her to practice meditation. My restless mind never found the calm that she did. And, without fail, whenever I told her, she perceived the undercurrents and personal mythology underlying the apparent chaos and it made sense.

Dust curls have gathered on everything after six impossibly long months: the top of the dresser, the bookcase, even the far side of the dining table has scraggly grey fur slowly growing, out of nowhere. I don’t like it but I do nothing to change it. This is not the way I ever thought I would live.

It isn’t as if I am particularly psychic. I have a hunch now and then, the odd intuition to step into a certain charity shop that I have never been in before and find a fantastic paperweight to add to my collection which also gathers dust. I don’t, however, ever see things for other people. Besides, I do not know anyone who has children similar to the pair that I keep seeing.

And even if I did know someone, what would I tell them? It is a happy scene. I would gladly inhabit it myself if I could wave a magic wand and transport myself there. It doesn’t feel like I need to give some warning. Not that I know anyone with a boy and a girl. The people I know who have children either have more than two or just the one and not planning any more.

I reach out to the curls of dust on the bookcase, then draw my hand back. I was about to write a word in it, but what? I don’t want to touch it actually. What if it infected me? Stupid thought, but it looks malign, like it is just waiting to transfer itself to my skin where it will corrupt and spread as easily as a few drops of food-colouring spread in a glass of water.

I shake my head and walk briskly to the kitchen, take the shopping list from under the Isle of Wight fridge magnet and add dusters to the list, underline this twice and add an exclamation point.

The kitchen is not dusty. I drew the line there. Once we moved into the mid-terrace house and cleaned it together from the top of the pantry to every corner of the ancient linoleum, I put myself in charge and kept it clean.

I still do. I refuse to tolerate a kitchen anything less than pristine. It would feel as if I was letting her down. What if she came home tomorrow? Such a bittersweet thought which I cannot banish.

This kitchen is, in fact, my favourite room in the house. Autumn leaf colours:  pale yellow with accents in maroon and gold. Maybe because I knew how to cook and enjoyed making our meals while we talked and laughed about our mutual days.

I didn’t care that the fittings were old fashioned. The cooker worked fine. We got it checked before I used it, just in case. The fridge, though it mumbled to itself, kept everything chilled or frozen appropriately.

I walk over to the calendar to check what day it is. The days blur together. To be honest, they always have, though I don’t tend to tell that to anyone if the subject comes up. I don’t like people to worry. I have made it a habit to cross through them after I have my after-dinner cup of tea with a digestive biscuit. It helps me prepare for the following day, as well, if I need to get anything ready.

Tuesday is the last day crossed out. I move my finger to Wednesday, absurd habit like fingering words while reading them as a child but it focuses my gaze, concentrates my mind. I read my tidy writing in the square: Clear out Wardrobe.

Nothing else is written as I had known the task could well take up the whole day. I glance longingly at Thursday, but don’t allow myself to read the future. I am not going to start swapping days, as I would always tackle the easiest things which would leave the worst ones for last or possibly for never.

I get a roll of white bin bags from under the kitchen sink and march upstairs. As soon as I enter the bedroom at the back of the house, I turn on the portable radio to push silence away. I open all the windows wide. Three boxes sit on top of the dresser from yesterday’s task, but I ignore them other than to be pleased that at least one box is full as I can see the top is sealed with brown parcel tape.

I open all three doors of the built-in wardrobe, grateful that none of them have a mirror. The chaos inside daunts me, but I persevere. Like with like, I remind myself, and wheat from chaff. I take out a purple blouse with frilly ruffles. Then, reconsidering, I put it back. I start instead with the long skirts, taking each out and shaking it, inspecting, folding neatly and layering in the bin bag.

When I have filled the bin bag about halfway, I go back to the purple blouse with frilly ruffles. Her clothing was never practical or sensible like mine. I shake it gently, examine for any stains or rips, and fold it carefully to add to the bin bag.

I remember her wearing the next one: a cerise number tiny little flowers sprinkled in clusters here and there. I shake, examine and fold it regardless. If I start entertaining memories, I will lose a good part of the day.

I am sorting a tangle of her silk scarves when I realise that I am ravenously hungry. The watch that was a birthday gift from her tells me it is nearly noon.

While waiting for the kettle to boil, I watch a blackbird in the garden. It flits from perching near the empty bird feeder to sit on the equally unprovisioned bird table. Then it vanishes in a flutter of wings. I feel a pang of guilt. I meant to get some bird nuts or seeds the last time I went shopping.

I take the plastic-wrapped bread out of the bread bin and remove a slice, then another. Brown bread though I used to eat white bread before I met her.

I go outside into the tiny square of garden and rip up the bread, placing the fragments on the bird feeder. Better than nothing. When I go back in, I add bird food to my list under the exclamatory dusters.

She always fed the birds, day in, day out, not just in autumn and winter, but all year round. They were her joy, she used to say. And she was mine.

Difficult to admit, somewhat sickening, like watching a cat cough up a hairball.

Emotions never were my strong point, still aren’t and probably never will be. I prefer to think of them as needs. I needed her like she needed me, at least as far as I could tell.

Only she was gone now. I, for reasons beyond my understanding, remain here, a solitary creature. Or maybe not even a creature, maybe more like the shell that the hermit crab leaves behind when it moves on to a bigger one.

Like some automaton, I make my cup of tea with precisely one flat-topped teaspoon of sugar and no milk. I liberate another two slices of brown bread and stuff them in the toaster slots, push the lever down and listen to the faint mechanical noises that result as the mechanism heats up.

Marmite, spread as thinly as possibly, then toast cut into the triangles she always preferred. Everything tidy, as usual: toast on China plate rimmed with swans placed alongside mug decorated with a pair of swans on pale blue tray covered with images of perfect white roses.

She always liked the purity of white better than any colours although she never wore white except a white swan brooch that I gave her or that imitation pearl necklace and ear-ring set she was so fond of wearing which was from her mother whom I never met.

I carry the tray to the living room, debating why cygnets are pictured so seldom. I didn’t know what one looked like until I moved here where you see them on the canals. Somehow, I missed out on reading The Ugly Duckling. More likely, I found the story of a baby swan being raised alongside ducklings too reminiscent of the misfit I was at school to hold the image in if I did read it.

As I sat with the tray beside me and sipped the tea, the perfectly pictured roses bothered me. I never saw a rose bush which had every rose blooming. Some would be mere buds while others would be blown or possibly decaying unless the gardener in question was out there tidying up. Perhaps the Queen’s gardeners ensure that she never has to see a rose in the process of dying.

Inevitably, I thought about the story of Siddhartha whose regal parents shielded him from all earthly woes. Then, when he escaped the royal cage, tragedy washed up against him like a raging sea: poverty, illness, grief and death.

I doubted I had chosen the right four aspects of life as she had not told me that story as often as some of her other favourites. I refused to hunt through her bookshelves to find a book which would correct me. She loved her books so much that those would have to be the last possessions I sorted.

Our books inhabited every room except the bathroom. We both agreed that bookshelves make the best wallpaper. Cookbooks in the kitchen, of course. Physics and philosophy and other subjects that fascinated me on one wall of the study. Poetry and Dickens and all her favourite authors on the opposite wall as well as the Tao Te Ching and all her mystical explorations as well as her ventures into psychology and anthropology. Novels in the living room, mostly her choices as I rarely indulged in fiction.

I needed to decide whether to start reading her books, one at a time, or give them away. In the early days, when I picked up a book to make that choice, I replaced it on the shelf due to indecision. Now the caked dust on the shelves puts me off even touching a book, mine or hers.

The cookbooks continue to be accessible, though. Sometimes I try a new recipe as if I wasn’t cooking only for myself. I never write them down in the recipe book, though. She always did that once we started living together as her handwriting was much more readable.

“I can’t breathe with all this dust.”

My voice sounds so loud in the silence. I feel sure the neighbours on either side would have heard me talking to myself and might perhaps report me to the authorities.

I want to go knock on their doors and reassure them that it’s only if I start to argue with myself that they should become overly concerned. But I can’t bear the pity in their eyes.

I belatedly realise I was only sipping my tea. I bite into a corner of the toast to find it has gone cold, but continue eating. Waste not, want not. I have eaten worse, but that was before we met.

Once recently, too lacking in enthusiasm to do things properly, I ate corn kernels directly from the tin. Though I like them when they are heated and served with a modicum of butter, I couldn’t buy them any more after that. I suppose that small measure of nourishment on what must have been a difficult day helped keep my reluctant soul tethered to my body.

I stare at the mute piano which I fancy looks sulky. Was it possible the faux ivory keys missed the touch of her fingers as much as I did? She could make music simply by walking across the room. When she sat down at the piano, letting her hands dance over the unpromising white and black keys, she created a kind of magic.

After she died, her death became a black hole which has slowly been sucking everything into the dark void: mutual friends, shared habits, my own hobbies. Our life together seems full of sunlight, looking back, though I suspect my selective memory is only revealing the sunstruck moments.

In our early days, we built a sandcastle some distance from the ocean’s edge because the tide had gone out farther than usual. We wanted our sandcastle to be safe, not realising at the time that a heavy rain could destroy it as completely as onrushing waves. Everyone thinks they are safe until the day comes when they discover there is no such thing and never was.

I felt bereft sometimes in such an abysmally daunting way as if I had misplaced her at King’s Cross among all the crowds of people. Not sure which train she chose, I couldn’t follow, so I was stranded with no idea where to go next. So very absurd my flickering hope that she would return. I don’t even believe in an afterlife. She combined all the kaleidoscopic permutations offered by her religious studies like mythological pick-and-mix.

Despite my once keen desire for tidiness, I abandon the empty mug and crumb-covered plate on their tray and climb the stairs. Not to return to today’s task of clearing the wardrobe. Finishing that was only a remote possibility, to be honest.

I hesitate at the closed door to our bedroom. This is against the rules, going up in the middle of the afternoon, but I enter, immediately cross to the window and pull the cord to shut the blinds against a day that is too bright.

After removing my spectacles and setting them down on the nightstand, I rub my eyes. With a rapid abandon which is unlike me, I strip off everything else and drop it all haphazardly on the cosy chair she sometimes inhabited early in the morning to watch me sleep.

I dig under the covers for something deucedly more comfortable, drag it on and burrow into the enormous bed like a cream-coloured mole into a snowbank.

Ignoring the question of whether moles hibernate and whether they are ever born albino, I snuggle down, dragging a pillow to hold tight, and try to think of something she might say, though this is becoming more difficult as time goes on.

Finally, giving up the effort, eyes tightly closed, I attempt to imagine her playing the piano, sending the music drifting through the kitchen and up the stairs, invisible notes curling around our bedroom.

I pretended I could tell her how I imagined this later. She would smile and wave her hands like a conductor as she produced a flawless vocal rendition of the Sorcerer’s Apprentice while providing a quick aside to me that the notes are becoming visible and then rainbow-coloured like soap bubbles for a puzzled tabby cat to chase.

I wished with all my might that I had brought home a kitten for her or encouraged her to adopt a cat of any kind. We could have gone to a rescue shelter and spent hours debating the merits of different cats. She would want to bring them all home, naturally, but doubtless there would be one that came to her or stared or was too precious to abandon.

Allergic to cats, that was my excuse with which I had stolen the feline happiness she would have appreciated so much. Belatedly, having too much time to avoid mulling such things over, I understood that cats are clean animals and probably a damn sight tidier than a dog tracking in mud on its paws and jumping on the sofa, et cetera.

Maybe living in such a dusty house was what she would call the inevitable karma for being overly focused on tidiness while she was alive. If I could post a letter through time to myself, only being allowed four words, it would say: get her a cat!

Trying to hide from my self-recriminations, I finally escaped into sleep. I ignored the knowledge that when I wake again, everywhere except the kitchen will be dusty. Only silence will echo throughout the house because she is not here.