The Trouble with Henry and Zoe (16 page)

The iPad is set up with both of our email accounts, so it’s not like I’m actually snooping. It’s all just sitting there, available at a single touch. His inbox is filled almost
exclusively with junk now, the electronic equivalent of the envelopes that drop through the letterbox – discount codes, special offers, concert dates. Occasionally, he will receive a message
from an old colleague or acquaintance looking to reconnect, and I reply with a cut and paste explanation of what happened last October.

It wasn’t until February, four months after his death, that I plucked up the courage – the defiance, maybe – to trawl through his message history. There were no emails to or
from a lover; no evidence of the affair I had feared. Not proving Alex’s innocence – maybe he was simply careful – but neither confirming his guilt. The only woman he wrote to
with any regularity was his mother.

Within a day or two of a new month turning over, she would email her son, filling him in on a variety of domestic events, family news and local gossip. And Alex would reply in kind, long, warm,
funny emails, about work, football, his lunch, a funny dream. About me. Expressing a simple affection and contentment that shines a harsh light on my own misgivings. Working forwards from last
summer, I read the emails they exchanged in July, August, September and – the last time Alex wrote to his mother – October. He told her we had argued about the wallpaper, expressing his
regret for acting like a ‘complete pillock’. He told his mother that he would make it up to me at Christmas. But Christmas never happened.

Ready to delete Alex’s account, I scrolled upwards through the junk correspondence of November and December. But when I came to January, my drifting eyes locked onto a single glaring
dreadful email. Two short paragraphs of a mother’s farewell to her dead boy, pouring out her pain and loss and incomprehension and telling him they would be together again one day soon. There
was another, unopened and forever unanswered sent in February. When I checked again in March, there was another, and again at the beginning of April. The raw heartbreak gradually giving way to a
more prosaic familiarity. Today is the fifth of May, and my heart tightens as I click on the familiar greeting: Hello Son.

It’s my job to look at bad teeth. Well, it is on Fridays. Even so, I have to suppress a wince when Jenny Tseung opens wide. Maybe working only one day a week at the chair
has made me soft, but this dreadful collection of wonky brown enamel, more gaps than teeth, is painful just to look at.

Her skin is largely unlined, but it appears thin and delicate, stretched tight over unusually large cheekbones. According to her records, she is seventy-two and last visited the dentist nine
years ago. Visibly nervous, she holds my hand in hers as we talk. Jenny speaks in broken, heavily accented English, and has a habit of speaking from behind her hand – but while her discourse
can be hard to follow, it’s easy to understand that her confidence is as shaky as her remaining teeth.

‘Ha! You not look like dentist,’ she says. ‘My son shave his head too, you know.’

‘Stylish guy,’ I say.

‘I don’ like,’ Jenny says. ‘On my son, look like a . . .
a kei ji gwo
.’

‘A ki . . . sorry, Jenny?’

‘
Kei ji gwo
, what you say it . . . fruit, like a—’ Jenny breaks off into what I assume is Cantonese before returning with, ‘. . . like hairy egg, haha! Green,
innit.’

‘A kiwi fruit!’

‘Yah, that’s it. Head like a green fruit. Your head good shape, though. Your head suit you.’

The dental nurse looks at me and raises her eyebrows.

‘Thank you, Jenny. So, what can we do for you today?’

Jenny pats my hand. Her fingers are crooked and swollen with arthritis at the knuckles. ‘Yes,’ says Jenny, holding a hand to her mouth. ‘You have gir’frien?’

Whether it’s confusion, embarrassment, nerves or loneliness, it’s not unusual for patients, particularly the elderly, to talk around the issue, and I’ve found it’s often
best to let them find their way to the point.

‘Er . . . no, I have a date tomorrow, though.’

Enjoy your date
, Zoe said last night.

As if drawing a line under my clumsy attempt at flirting. But – and I’ve replayed it several times now – I felt she was drawing that line reluctantly.

‘I married forty-seven year,’ Jenny says.

‘Wow.’

‘Wow, haha! Yes, wow. I use be very pretty, you know. Maybe you don’ believe, but—’

‘I bet you were,’ I say, and I mean it. Her hair is thinning slightly, but has kept its colour and hangs past her shoulders. Her wide eyes are yellowed, but alive with warmth and
humour, and yes, I bet Jenny has turned a lot of heads in her time. The past tense of my declaration is floating and I’m inclined to correct it –
are, Jenny, you are
– but
it would be patronizing, and besides, I don’t think Jenny needs it. ‘So . . . your teeth.’

She nods, pats my hand again. ‘Is too late to fix?’

‘Not at all. Do you have pain?’

Jenny nods. ‘Very. You give me new teeth, though. Or new.’

‘Or new?’

‘
All new
,’ she says, indicating the entirety of her mouth. ‘All new, all white.’

‘Jenny, that’s a lot of work.’

‘I have a money, you know. Is expensive, innit?’

‘It will be, yes. But, it’s also . . . it’s a lot of work.’

I take x-rays, photographs and impressions. Some teeth need extracting and those that are viable will have to be chopped down and crowned. Over several weeks and visits, Jenny will require nine
titanium implants and twenty-eight pieces of porcelain. It will be the most complicated dental work I’ve performed, and as to who is more nervous – me or Jenny – well, toss a
coin.

‘Okay, Jenny, that’s you done for today. Talk to the receptionist on the way out and she’ll book you another appointment in about two to four weeks.’

‘Good good,’ says Jenny, shuffling off the chair. ‘An’ you enjoy date, innit.’

I fear I have become compactualized.

Or maybe the proper word is condensified, it’s hard to be sure. The world is out there doing Friday night, and I’m in here doing . . . this.

The darkness is so complete my eyes could never in a thousand years adjust to it. Funny . . . how we refer to absolute dark as a ‘completeness’, when it is in fact an absolute
absence – if there is so much as a single photon in here, then it’s a very determined little particle. I need to get out; I’ve done what I need to do and the air is heavy with my
recycled breath. But it is kind of cosy, sitting here, drifting, in my ten-tog bubble.

When you work in a five-thousand-employee, cross-continent law firm, you become inoculated against corporate nonsense. You inhale and ingest words like diagonality and intellactual without
coming out in so much as a rash, let alone throwing up. I thought I’d left all that behind when I moved to the faraway land of once upon a time, but publishing, too, it seems, is a breeding
ground for bullshit. Approximately once a month we have a ‘lunch and learn’ – some industry somebody talks for an hour about the demise of bookshops, the rise of digital,
harnessing the power of social media, whatever. This is the price of your ‘free’ lunch. You take a notebook, pretend to listen and eat as many sandwiches, wraps and muffins as possible
before people start giving you funny looks. Today’s price of admission was a slow hour on ‘Adjusting the picture book format to digital constraints’, or, in the words of our
guest, ‘compactualization’. I really could have done without, but last pay day is a distant memory and my purse is empty. So I took a seat near the sandwiches, and pretended to take
notes while I worked out my budget – it’s tight as a fat man’s hat, but I have econominimized, scrimproved and budjettisoned.

On the way to work this morning I stopped at the post office and dropped off a parcel wrapped in brown paper; the last of my halfway decent handbags. Lucky bargain hunters up and down the
country are stepping out in my Kurt Geigers, Alex McQueens and strappy Pedro Garcías. They are carrying their keys and lippy in my cast-off Mulberry, Moschino and Max goddamn Mara handbags.
But the proceeds will pay for hiking boots, a backpack and a whole bunch of tickets, so fair exchange. No one at work knows I’m planning on travelling, but I’m going to have to tell
them soon. As of next week I have three more ends of the month before I board my plane to I don’t know where.

Vicky and Rachel are going out for dim sum tonight, but I don’t get paid for a week so I’ll be having spaghetti hoops. Again. And I kind of like it. Not so much the Heinz product as
the disciplined frugality. I’ve realized that getting there – on that plane to somewhere – is an important part of this adventure. And there is something satisfying about this
minor act of self-denial. About this compactualization.

What would they think if they could see me now, sitting on the bed tented under my duvet with a pair of scissors, a bottle opener and a Paterson tank? Or Henry? That he’d had a lucky
escape, probably. All day I’ve been wondering whether I shouldn’t have let him walk me home – it’s been a while since anyone has. I still have one hundred and seven days
until the cabin crew close the doors. And God knows this bed feels awfully big some nights. Most nights. Less so, however, when you’re cocooned inside a heavy duvet.

You don’t need a darkroom to develop film. You need a dark space for five minutes, that’s all – just long enough to transfer the film from your camera into the developing tank
– a canister about the size of a cocktail shaker, or an urn, maybe. You can buy bags, like the things magicians use for storing rabbits and flowers and silk handkerchiefs, but Alex
didn’t buy one of those. Everything else, but not a black bag. His plan was to tape black card to the windows in the study (
nursery
), to somehow seal the gaps between the door and the
frame. But he never did, didn’t develop a single roll after I mocked him and his approach.

At widows’ counselling they talk about having a ‘bright place’. Somewhere you can return to in your mind, a happy memory of you and your dearly departed. Many of the women
recalled their weddings, honeymoons, proposals, the births of their children. We didn’t have those. Maybe that’s why their grief seemed so much more real than my own. I’ve done
the groups, the books, the blogs, the forums. Online I lied, claiming we had been married two years, but while the sympathy felt deeper and more sincere, it was more than offset by my feelings of
guilt and fraudulence. In the counselling group we were told to bring a notebook; I couldn’t even get that right. Twelve women in my group, with floral, pink, patterned pads and me with the
only black book out of the dozen – as if I were trying too hard to play the part. We wrote down memories good and bad, promises to ourselves, permission to smile, acceptance of what has gone,
our bright places. On the third session I wrote in my book:
I will not come back here
– and I kept my promise. My notebook is now filled with numbers, destinations and scribbled
pictures of cats, crocodiles and penguins.

Once you have removed the film from your camera, you go to your dark place and open the film canister. You can buy specially designed gadgets but a tin opener will do. Next you snip the corners
off the leading edge of the film and – with nothing but your fingers to guide you – you feed all 1.4 metres into your Paterson tank. Screw on the lid and you’re ready to go
downstairs and add your chemicals. The first roll took me more than half an hour of fiddling underneath my blanket, and a part of me hoped I would get it wrong. If I exposed the film, then I
wouldn’t have to see the last pictures Alex took on his silly German camera. Of course there were no pictures of him; Alex was behind the camera. Instead there were twenty-one shots of
shopfronts, litter, knackered fences, crooked goalposts – urban decay, I suppose. But instead of being interesting they were obvious, and cold and bland. At the end of the roll were three
photographs of me, sitting on a bench on the common, unaware of the camera (or pretending to be, I don’t remember) and staring into space. Whether I was happy or not, only that girl
knows.