Extinct Doesn't Mean Forever by Phoenix Sullivan Read Free Book Online Page A

unforgettable blend of surprise and joy. He holds up a ring, and she offers him her hand. She almost forgets to say yes.
    He doesn’t know how long he’s been sat on the bench. He looks at the empty space beside him. The rain is easing now, but it still colours the landscape in long shifts of grey. He wonders when that first supernova of passion faded, when exactly his obsession with the car began to corrode their marriage.
    After the picnic they go for a walk, down the hill to the ruined abbey, then along the stream. They walk for miles, all the way to the weir. They hold hands, and he enjoys the feeling of the ring on her finger. They take some leftover pastry from the quiche and feed it to the ducks.
    He doesn’t feel like doing that today. He gets up from the bench and walks back down to the car park. Does he feel better for having come here? He feels less alone, certainly. He can feel her energy here. Some part of that other day still remains on the landscape here, underlaid faintly beneath it. A watermark of the past.
    He sits in the car for a while before leaving. His breath turns the cold windows opaque, and the world outside seems to become a little less real. The bare trees grow faint, as though they are moving away from him, shifting into another dimension. He can barely make out the hill.
    When he gets home he finds that the clothes of hers that he hung on the chair are gone. He looks on the floor, under the bed, but he can’t find them. He wonders whether he put them away himself and simply forgot. He wonders whether he hung them there at all.
    ~~~
     
    The will is straightforward. Mr. Skinner, the solicitor, reads the document, but it’s a formality. John remembers being here with her when she made it, a month after she’d been diagnosed. When the reading’s finished, John stands and waits to shake Mr. Skinner’s hand, but the solicitor remains seated.
    “There’s something else,” he says, and he reaches into a brown envelope on his desk and pulls out a black notebook.
    “What’s this?”
    “Her diary. She posted it to me with the instruction that I give it to you on the reading of the will.”
    “What does it say?”
    “I haven’t read it.”
    At home, John sits on the bed, under the gaze of their photographic pasts, and reads the diary. It tells him some things he knew, some things he didn’t, and some things he knew but had never admitted to himself. He reads the diary from beginning to end, and when he has finished he goes back and reads it again. As he reads the words they take on more substance, become more resonant, become livid or joyous or sorrowful, until eventually he is no longer reading ink on a page but hearing her words as she whispers them to him.
    Terry’s very understanding. John’s working less and less, and when he does come into the workshop, he seems distant and unfocused. The parts that Bill scavenged from the oil sheikh’s wreck arrive, and John begins the painstaking task of repairing, refurbishing and refitting, but his work on the car is autonomic. There’s none of the joy that he once felt. He just uses it as a reason to get out of bed now.
    “I thought you loved that car,” Craig says to him, and he can’t think how to answer. He did love that car. It was the most beautiful thing he’d ever seen.
    Terry takes him to one side, says that his heart’s obviously not in it at the moment, it’s quite understandable, it’ll be all right in time, he should take some time for himself. John nods.
    The next day he takes the photograph from the mantel and drives down to the coast. He’s sure that the picture was taken in Brighton. He pushes through the Lanes and down to the seafront, and when he gets there he holds up the picture of her and tries to calculate where it was taken.
    The wind has a sting to it, and it whips the sea into splintering peaks. He doesn’t remember being here. He holds the picture in front of him and tries to match the two horizons, to