We Are All Made of Stars (19 page)

‘Sex champions doesn't a great marriage make,' I'd murmured, closing my eyes and sinking back.

‘Why not?' Vincent had whispered as his lips traced their way between my breasts. ‘Why isn't it enough? All the other stuff we can do after. Because whatever it is I don't know about you yet, I know I'll get to love it, or just not even care about it, because
this
makes us perfect for each other. Say yes. Say, “Yes, I will marry you, Vincent Carey, in six weeks' time. I will be your Mrs.”'

And I'd said, yes, yes, yes, yes, oh God, yes.

Realising I'd closed my eyes as I felt the echo of that delicious moment in the pit of my belly, I open them again, and find Vincent watching me. He looks into my eyes, and I swim into his – that brightest of blue, those two pure perfect pools, welcoming the chance to drown in them.

‘The way I felt about you then, Stella,' he says. ‘I didn't want to waste any time. I wanted you to be my wife, to be mine. I knew I was heading back to Helmand for another tour, and I wanted to know, before I went, that I had a wife at home. A proper family. I wanted it to be all right then. I wanted you, all of you, then. With your curly hair and your lovely hands, and your messy bedroom floor.'

‘And you got me,' I say. ‘You got me. I said yes, and we got married at the first chance we had. There was no pumpkin coach; just you and me, and your mates, and my parents, and some of the girls from work, a lot of confetti and the pub afterwards. We did it; we made our own family. We started it, anyway. We were so happy, Vincent, weren't we? We can be like that again, can't we? Are you really telling me that we can't be happy like that again?'

‘Yes,' Vincent says, not unkindly. ‘I am. I'm telling you that we can't ever be happy like that again, Stella, and that's what you don't get. We got married when we hardly knew each other. We've never really known each other. The man you married, the man you care for, he's gone. He won't come back. Not ever. I'm not him any more, Stella. I can learn to walk and run and ride a bike again. But the one thing I can't do is learn to love you, or any one. Not ever again. That part of me went in the incinerator along with my leg. If you stay here and try to love me, and try to make me happy or wait for me to make you happy, it won't happen. I can't ever be like I was. And you, you're not like you were, either. And I don't know if we can even live together, let alone be in love with each other, when we are two different people – two such different people from the ones we were when we first met.'

‘Yes,' I insist, because I don't know how to stop insisting. ‘Yes, we can. Because I still love you.'

He says nothing, but a noise, exasperated, raw and painful, sounds somewhere in his chest.

‘Look, you haven't slept, you're barely sober. We both need some rest. We need some time out from this life. What if we take a walk down the road? Go to the Turkish place like we did every night for a week when we first bought this house? What if we have a drink and just talk – not about what's happened, not about anything. We can just talk about nothing, the way that we used to. Just be together. I'd really like that, Vincent. We could just take a break, couldn't we – from hurting each other – and just have a date, be together and see what that feels like?'

‘You've been running,' he says, suddenly focusing on me.

‘Yes.' For some reason I touch the toe of my trainer, as if for good luck. ‘I run every day to work and back; it's why I've got so skinny. I don't know why I haven't told you before. It's not like you couldn't still run rings around me. I run, I run a lot. It … helps me cope with missing you.'

There's a moment of silence. I see the muscles in his jaw tighten – I'm not sure if it's grief or anger – and then a kind of exhaustion that sweeps through his body in one long continuous visible wave. For the moment, at least, he is defeated.

‘I hate hurting you,' he sighs. ‘I'm tired of hurting you. OK. We'll go out to that Turkish place tonight. We'll eat and have a glass of something. That sounds nice. I really fucking wish that I wasn't hurting you so much. I'd do anything not to.'

‘I just wish I knew what to do.' I reach out and take his hands. ‘I just wish I knew how to bring you back again.'

‘You can't bring me back; I'm not here any more,' he says.

‘But you are here, you are.' I lean my cheek against his knuckles. ‘I can feel you.'

Vincent removes my hand from his face.

‘I don't want to be here like this,' he says. ‘I want to be the man that scooped you up and chucked you over his shoulder and took you upstairs. I want to be the man that was six inches taller than you, that you had to stand on your tiptoes to kiss.'

‘But you still are …'

Vincent turns his face away from me.

‘We can be happy again if we just try,' I tell him. ‘You're still alive. We're both still alive, and we still have so much to be grateful for. We just have to try.'

‘You don't get it,' he says. ‘You shouldn't have to try to be happy.'

‘Just come upstairs with me,' I say. ‘Come to bed, and let me hold you while I sleep. Please, Vincent, please. If you can't do anything else for me, do this.'

I get up and hold a hand out to him. After a moment, he takes it and follows me.

Dear You,

It's hard sometimes not to let it get you all down, not to feel despair. Sometimes you feel like you are trying so hard, that you are always, always walking uphill and you never get to the top. I know you feel that way – you don't have to tell me. And I know you've been trying to keep it from me. You've been putting a brave face on for me, but you don't have to.

I know sometimes days weigh down heavily on your shoulders, and they seem cold and miserable, even in the hottest of summers. I know that sometimes you can't see the point of getting out of bed, that you only get out of bed for me. Because I need you.

Soon I will be gone, but you have to still keep getting out of bed. You have to. And you have to keep going to the shops, and going to work, and talking on the phone to your mum and taking the dog for a walk. You can't stop just because I have. You have to go on living. You have to live.

Ask for help. Tell people how you feel, how you are struggling. Say if you feel alone and you don't know what to do. Don't hide it if it feels as if just one heartbeat after another is too much to bear.

You love me, so live; that's the legacy I want most. I want you to live.

Not just to exist through all the days from now to the next time I see you.

But to live, and laugh, and be a thousand times happier than you ever have been, before. Live, my love. Live.

Me x

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

‘Let's go outside and play,' Ben says, and for a moment I thought he meant like we used to, when we were kids: inventing complicated games of pretend where he was a Premier League footballer and I was a warrior princess with a dragon. But he means let's go out in the dark and take our guitars and play them, which is even better. Except, except I don't feel like I should be happy, not today. A person, a person who I knew a little bit, who I read to, who I liked, is gone. I feel like I should stay inside and miss her.

‘Let's go outside and play; play to the moon and the stars, for Issy,' he says.

I had thought he might not come back after yesterday's awkwardness over the kiss thing, and then the fact that I couldn't sleep, or stop crying or let go of him. He stayed for a long time, and let me cry. Stayed while I went through my physio, even though physio was the last thing I wanted, and stayed until sometime after I went to sleep. It all got a bit intense, and I know how much he doesn't like intense. So I thought he might not come back tonight. I thought he might go to the pub, or round a mate's, instead, and I would haven't blamed him, but here he was, right after work, still wearing his work shirt and his name badge.

I stare at the reflection of my room in the glass door, trying to picture myself sitting on this bed, trying to get a good look at who I really am. Who is this woman, this nothing person, who's done nothing, been nowhere, and sooner or later, but most likely sooner, will be in the ground without anything left behind to show for her life? I see myself, for just a moment: the ghost of living me. And I feel so disappointed in myself.

‘It's November,' I remind him.

‘It's warm, though,' he says. ‘It's stupid warm – probably global warming or some shit. And last night, after you fell asleep, I couldn't face going home, so I went for a wander around the garden, and I've got something to show you …'

‘That sounds like some sort of threat,' I say.

He picks up my guitar and throws a scarf at me. ‘Put that on,' he says. ‘In case there's suddenly a snowstorm or something. Come on. Something sad has happened; we owe it to Issy to mark the occasion, in the only way two outcast emo kids know how: with maudlin songs and introspection.'

He's right, of course.

It's oddly quiet outside as I follow him past the optimistically named patio and down a little path that slopes away towards where the canal is. I follow Ben down what quickly becomes a stony track, disappearing into the thick fringe of woodland that skirts the ground's borders. I pretend that the light that slants through them is generated by the moon, and not a thousand reflected street lights. Strange shadows give the path a magical feel, and it's a little surreal; perhaps if I keep following Ben, I will end up in Narnia or Wonderland.

Ben stops, and motions for me to wait. For some reason, we aren't talking, just absorbing the sounds of the night around us: the wind in the trees, the hum of the market beyond, and beyond that the thunder of the trains, and the greatness of the city, creaking with life. Ben messes about with something ahead, as I stand there waiting, listening, leaning into the quiet, straining to catch a fleeting note of something else. And then, quite suddenly, I see the glow of a lantern sitting on the stump of a tree, and then another and another. Eventually, a small circle of candlelight encompasses us, revealing a congregation of low benches made out of roughly cut logs, converging on a large carved wooden chair. I vaguely remember Stella telling my mum about story-telling events for the sick children at Marie Francis and for the kids who have lost someone close to them. Stories and role playing – ways to help them cope with layers of loss. This must be the special place she was talking about; this is the place where children come to try and understand death. I wonder if Issy came here.

Ben settles on one of the benches and takes out his guitar, easing it onto his knee.

For a moment it feels wrong to be here, in this place, like we are somehow trespassing. Not so much on the place itself, but on the feelings that have been faced here, the realities that have somehow been accepted, by people much smaller and braver than me. And yet I sit myself down and rest my own guitar on my lap. Through the trees I can see the lights of Marie Francis burning bright from the fourteen full-length windows. Issy's room is still dark tonight; tomorrow the lights will be switched on again.

Trains rattle by on the other side of the canal, and the eternal thud, thud, thud from the market persists. But I don't listen hard. I withdraw inside this little world and pretend that all there is to the whole existence is the candlelight, something like the moon, the stars and Ben.

He leads the singing again, on the song we are working on – the one I started and he picked up and made brilliant. I listen to his lone voice for a few bars before my fingers begin to move across the strings of my guitar – working, thinking, catching up – to make the song happen. And then, all at once, it comes just as it always does: the moment when I am not thinking about what I am doing any more. I'm just there in the moment, in the music, and it's part of me, running through my heart and to every nerve ending. Joy and purpose swell in my chest and I feel fit to bursting with certainty. I think of Issy, and how she loved it when Ben sang. And I sing not only for her but to her, because somehow, as foolish as it seems, just for a few moments I think I sense her somewhere near. It's so rare, it's so special, and then it's finished.