LITMIR.BIZ

       Carol

      Carol is lying on a massage table having her shoulders pummelled by a nice girl called Stacey. The problem is she has forgotten how to relax. She used to love being pampered. Once a year, for her birthday, her daughter Vanessa would arrange a spa day in a hotel in the New Forest and the two of them would get the train down from Clapham Junction, wheeling their overnight suitcases and anticipating the fluffy robes, a haze of essential oils and glasses of iced water delicately flavoured with cucumber slices.

      Whoever came up with the idea of putting cucumber in jugs of water, Carol always wondered. Or lemon, for that matter. Because you wouldn’t dream of flavouring water with banana slivers, would you? Or carrot sticks. But somehow lemon and cucumber worked.

      The massage had been Vanessa’s idea.

      ‘Do you good, Mum,’ she said on the phone. ‘You deserve some R&R.’

      Carol was sitting in the front room, staring at her slippers. She hadn’t got dressed yet, even though it was past ten in the morning.

      ‘R&R? What’s that when it’s at home?’

      There had been a suppressed exhalation on the other end of the line.

      ‘Rest and relaxation, Mum.’

      ‘Oh. Right.’

      But since Derek died, Carol has found it almost impossible to stop thinking. She’ll be drinking a cup of tea in front of Bargain Hunt and she’ll notice that all her muscles are tightly wound, her shoulders up by her ears, and instead of concentrating on the discovery of some valuable ashtray in the attic of an old-age pensioner from Basingstoke, her head will be filled with the image of a coffin and service sheets and dying flowers and she’ll realise that she hasn’t been relaxing at all. She seems to have lost the knack.

      ‘Relax, Mrs Hetherington,’ the therapist says but the more Stacey tells her to relax, the less she feels able to. Carol’s face is pressed through the cut-out circle on the massage table, like one of those seaside paintings where you pose for photos by peering out from underneath a frilly bathing cap or a pair of donkey ears. The hole is slightly too small to contain her features and she can feel the edges of the lavender-scented padding digging into her cheeks. She wonders if there will be marks there when she turns over. Her skin has lost its elasticity of late. She can be pottering around the supermarket, picking up things for lunch, and the side of her cheek will still be stippled with red-pink indentations from where the sheet left its mark over an hour earlier.

      Stacey folds the towel neatly to one side, uncovering Carol’s leg and prompting a spray of goose-bumps to prick up along her calf. Carol is worried that her feet are ticklish and she won’t be able to stop twitching when the therapist touches them.

      ‘Relax,’ Stacey says. ‘Just think of something soothing.’

      Carol tries to imagine faraway beaches and gently lapping waves but instead finds her mind wandering. As Stacey’s fingers knead against her calf muscles and the herby, sweet scent of the aromatherapy oil floats around the room, she wonders whether the amount you love someone dictates the nature of their death. Whether, if you loved a person – if that person made you happy and you got to enjoy life more because of them – the punishment for this is to make their death as cruel and painful as possible. A cosmic joke, she’d heard someone call it. Like karma, but inverted.

      She’d never believed in God. If He existed, Carol thought, He was a right old so-and-so. All those starving children and poor people with AIDS. What kind of person would allow that?

      Whereas she’s noticed that if someone hasn’t been loved at all and has brought nothing but pain and misery to those around them, they seem to slip easily into oblivion at the end of their lives with the minimum of fuss. Because there’s no one to mourn them, is there? And Carol is for ever being told – by magazines, by Sunday-morning TV shows, by well-meaning friends who bring her spiritual self-help manuals called things like The Day After Grief: Finding and Overcoming your Inner Sorrow’ – that there is a sort of dignity in mourning; that by accepting the death of a loved one, you accept your own mortality and come to a greater understanding of life. That’s the theory, anyway.

      Load of old claptrap, Carol thinks.

      She only poses the question because Connie’s husband Geoff has just died peacefully in his sleep of old age and a nastier, more narrow-minded little man you couldn’t imagine. Even Connie couldn’t wait to be rid of him by the end. And yet for all Geoff’s vindictive, ignorant and penny-pinching ways, he had been spared the wretchedness of a terminal illness. No incontinence nappies for him.

      ‘It was a blessing,’ Connie said at the funeral. It was also, Carol couldn’t help but feel, hugely unfair.

      Because Derek … well, Derek was the shining love of her life, a man with whom she spent forty-odd years of married contentedness, with whom she never had to explain, only to be, a man who still made her laugh, who could make everything all right just by squeezing her shoulders and calling her ‘pet’.

      Oh, he had his failings, of course he did. He snored loudly, left teaspoons on the counter, never wanted to go to the cinema because ‘it will come out soon on video’, but now that he’s gone, Carol sees these petty irritations as lovable quirks. His snoring used to keep her awake. Now she finds she can’t sleep without it.

      Everyone loved Derek: the postman whose name he remembered, the shop assistant at Sainsbury’s on Garratt Lane whose grandchildren he would always ask after and the dozens of friends and colleagues he’d got to know in and around Wandsworth through the years. It wasn’t just old people either. Their grandson Archie could spend hours building model aircraft with him in the back room.

      The two of them were like cuttings from the same plant. She’d catch them sometimes, heads bent over a Spitfire model in the dusky half-light of a weekend evening, and when she asked if they wanted a sandwich, they would look at her in exactly the same way – heads slightly to one side with a quizzical squint of the eyes.

      ‘I’ll take that as a no then,’ she would say, closing the door behind her, unable to stop herself from smiling.

      Even the kids on the council estate opposite would nod at Derek in the street. She never

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