After You

Chapter Two - Goodbye My Lover

"I'm gone, but I'm still with you.

We're apart, but we're always together."

- Rhys

It had been four months since you left. I like to think of you as leaving. "Gone", not "Dead". It's easier to keep the lie going; to prolong the charade of speaking to you and hearing your reply. It was four months, one week, two days and about fourteen hours since Luke had said my name in that horrific voice; ruining my life-long nickname in an instant. So much had changed since that day, and at the same time, nothing had, because life seemed to shift into reverse gear and I started moving backwards.

Luke had called my parents and talked my mother into insisting that I move back home for a while. Mum and Dad began to watch me with hawk-like eyes; Tabby was only ever a phone call away and Luke was always on standby in case I should need him. I regressed, like a child who needed to be controlled; under strict supervision, because she couldn't be trusted on her own.

Luke was going to look after me now, he'd said, not realising that I was impossible to fix; that I had no life without you. I hadn't had the strength to argue with everyone, so I agreed to return to the family pile, spending the first month of my new life as a widow, back in my childhood bedroom. I tried to keep our conversations to a minimum – I doubted that it was healthy to speak to your dead husband at every turn – and in those earliest days, it was necessary and possible. There were so many other people around, you see? I wasn't ever really alone. I had my parents, your parents. All of our friends. The girls, my crew and everyone from work. There were people constantly watching over me; giving me looks, talking for the sake of talking. I soaked it all up to blot you out – bad wife! – but it was the only way I could get through each day.

Weeks were spent in that ghastly box room I'd grown up in. The bright orange and garish yellow walls – painted in a Battenberg effect – were just as offensive as you'd thought them when I first took you home to meet my parents. I remember explaining to you that my mother loved bright colours; that the design had been her idea. Telling you that I'd tried to mask the dreadful colour scheme by sticking up posters from the Smash Hits magazines I used to buy with my pocket money. You'd laughed, and told me that I obviously wasn't a "cool kid" growing up.

Now that you were gone, the Battenberg paintwork held a new memory for me; not one of sticking up three identical Ronan Keating posters side-by-side (I'd thought it looked artistic; having things in threes), but of your twisted smile as you tried not to laugh when Mum had given you "The Grand Tour".

Sleeping in that room as a widowed thirty-two year old, I basked in the ghastly colour scheme, sadly marked by Blu Tack; grease patches from some imitation-brand adhesive, and chipped flecks of paint (where I'd carelessly stripped the wall when changing one poster for another). Even the room I'd grown up in reminded me of you. All those years of adolescence pushed into the ethers of my memory, by your incredulous frown when you'd stepped foot in my shabby, garish box room. Your memory stole everything you'd ever touched. There was nowhere I could escape you, because you hadn't just been my husband or a part of my life. You were my life. There was no me without you. Everything I had, you owned; even in death.

I spent hours in my old room, holed up on the single bed we'd clumsily had sex in, staring at my tatty posters, trying to remember what you'd said about each one. I'd eventually replaced my Smash Hits posters with movie posters, thinking it more "mature". I remember explaining to you that it wasn't "geeky". That collecting movie posters was cool. You'd told me it would be, if the films I'd chosen to commemorate were in any way Art House, but that Bridget Jones' Diary didn't count. That you weren't falling for it; you knew I crushed on Colin Firth.