Sleight of Hand by Nick Alexander Read Free Book Online Page A

of shopping over the doorstep, her heart conked out. Just like that. Like a motor that had run out of petrol. I didn’t know heart attacks could happen like that, without warning. A neighbour found her lying amongst her groceries and phoned the ambulance, and she phoned me as well, but by the time I got back she was gone. The groceries had been picked up too. They were all stacked neatly in the fridge. Even the tins and the toilet roll were stacked in the fridge.
    I have never felt so alone in my life. If I hadn’t had Sarah to look after, I’m not sure what I might have done.
    Of course I had faced loss before. Freddy, and then Dad … my divorce from Nick, then losing my boyfriend and best friend both at once because the one ran off with the other … But I still had Mum. And Mum wouldn’t leave me, no matter who she met, no matter what I did. The advantage of family. Well, that’s what I thought.
    With Mum gone that only really left Tom. I don’t really know how I ended up with so few friends. Moving around, maybe. Nick drove a few away, as alcoholics do. Of course, I
knew
other people, but they were my daughter’s playmates’ parents really, my links with them as fragile as mydaughter’s own friendships – which at four-and-a-half were
very
fragile.
    And Tom, well, he never really stepped that far into my life, not the way Mark did. Tom had always been too wrapped up in himself to really get in there and make a difference, for good or for bad. But he was there for me when I left Nick. And he was there when Mum died, and he was the only person who was. I’ll give him that.
    It’s a terrible thing to admit, but once Mark arrived, all I really wanted was for Tom to leave. I wanted to work out how I felt about Mark, and with Tom buzzing around like an angry wasp it was impossible to even think straight.
    I had been in the back garden all day. I couldn’t bear to be inside the house because it had death in it. That will sound irrational I’m sure, but I could sense it, hanging like a damp mist in every corner of the house. Everywhere I looked I could see a shadow of that missing person, missing from her kitchen sink, missing at the door to her bedroom, missing from the hall floor where she had, they said, collapsed.
    Sarah thought the hotel was a great adventure, and seemed to assume that it was normal for Mummy to behave this way in the new environment. We lay on crisp white sheets with their memories of men on business trips and young couples and secret affairs, but not death. At least they didn’t smell of death.
    We zapped through a thousand channels of rubbish TV and shared chocolate from the mini bar. And I felt like a passer through. I felt like everyone else. I felt like
anyone
else. And that was a huge relief. If we could have stayed there forever, I think I might have done so.
    I thought the house would be OK after the funeral though. Well, I didn’t really, but I
hoped
it would.
    It was a hellish day of course. I hadn’t seen Mum die, so the vanishing coffin was my moment. It happened during prayer, but I opened my eyes and peeped through tears as it vanished from view, and I thought,
“Who will catch me now? Who will catch me if I fall?”
and then wondered if that wasn’t a song lyric. It sounded corny enough. But true.
    When we got back, the house didn’t feel better, in fact, I couldn’t even step inside the hall. Her shadow lay there strewn across the tiles like a police outline and I simply couldn’t step over it so I went around the back and sat in the garden instead. I decided that getting really drunk would probably make stepping inside an achievable goal.
    The air still crackled with Tom’s irritation and then later, once he was gone, with Mark’s simpering need for forgiveness and I still couldn’t tune in to how I felt because I was busy thinking about my mum being dead, and someone somewhere