Where the West Wind Blows

“DEAR GOD, Please make it stop now …”

I’ve been in the habit of addressing God as if he were a benign uncle since I was about six years old but this time it isn’t just a school test or a date I have to get through, not even the untimely death of a pet. No, this time I am desperate and ill-equipped to deal with it.

There are no instructions.

James is my best friend, my only friend; in fact he is the only person on the planet that I care about ... and that cares about me. I can’t lose him.  “You
can’t
take him, God, not him. Send him back to me,
please
…’

God doesn’t listen. I feel like a child again, denied the resurrection of my rabbit, only a million times worse. I stand with my back flat against the wall and watch as they struggle to revive him. I am in an alien world. The beeping monitors; the metallic rattle of the trolley; the crack of the plates that they lay upon his chest; the lifeless leap of his body.

The nightmare scene imprints on my mind.

I will never forget this.

I repeat the same prayer over and over, fearful that if I stop silently chanting the words, no help will come and the alternative is something I cannot,
will not
, contemplate.

It is three days since James collapsed, three days and two nights that I have been sitting here at his bedside, clutching his unaccountably warm hand and composing useless prayers to a God I am swiftly losing faith in. This can’t be happening to me, not
me.
I’m a successful artist with my own swish gallery in London, a beloved studio that I designed myself for James to build. James. My adoring and adored husband.

He is a painter too, it was our art that brought us together and kept us together; art and our unshakeable, all-encompassing love. Twenty-five years is a long time, three times as long as most couples last, but we are as much in love now as we ever were. It can’t be the end.

We are not
ready
for this.

It can’t stop now.

Since the very first days together we have been so involved with each other that the rest of the world has never really mattered. We were university students when we married, little more than children really, but we wouldn’t wait and as soon as I reached eighteen, when James was just twenty, we scurried along to the registrar’s office on rainy Saturday morning and made the arrangement legal -
unbreakable
. Since that day, neither of us ever so much as looked at anyone else. We shut ourselves away, engrossed in our own world, a wonderful, intimate world smelling of turps and oil paint, with multi-coloured canvas walls to shield us from the curious stares of strangers.

They are all strangers, for no one comes into our home. At the gallery we mix with colleagues and customers but our home remains exclusively ours. In the early days we make love everywhere, every room, every surface, at whichever hour the fancy takes us.

I am laughing at James dabbing bright blue pigment from his body after a session rolling on wet canvas on the studio floor. He looks up at me, eyes bright, blond hair flopping over his paint-spattered forehead.

That blond hair has long since faded to grey and the forelock is now a lot further back – but to me, he is still that laughing young man.

Shaking away the memory, I look up at him, imprisoned in a clinical world. I frown at his body covered in bubble wrap, the yards of plastic tubing, the monitors, the machine that is breathing for him and I know in my heart that he is gone from me already.

I close my eyes and throw back my head, hanging on for dear life to his limp hand. “GOD, don’t do this, not
this
, please. I will be so
good
; I swear it. I will never ask you for another thing,
never
.”

God doesn’t listen.

I return home in a haze of disbelief and when I open the front door, I am engulfed by familiar smells, familiar things, shared objects that used to bring me comfort. James’ slippers wait by the fire, his paper still open on the arm of his chair, and a scattering of china strewn across the carpet by the French door, his hat still where it landed when he fell.

James is sweeping up leaves in the garden. I am indoors in the warm, sipping a steaming mug of coffee. I watch him through the window, wondering what to cook him for his dinner. Then the door opens and he is there, not looking like himself at all.

I put down my cup. “James?”

His face is grey, his expression vague like an unfinished portrait. Before he falls, he looks at me, his brow furrowed in confusion as he reaches for the table. His body spasms and he grips at the cloth and I am on my knees beside him, scrabbling to loosen his collar, screaming his name.

His cold hand closes over mine and I look into his abstract eyes that gleam with the last flickering of love.

No, don’t!

*

“Is there anyone I can call for you?” The woman who volunteered to drive me home is kind, too kind, her powdered face too close to my own. I draw back from her, shake my head, wrap my cardigan tight about me and swallow the stabbing shard of iron in my throat. I look around the empty room, my heart hollow.

“Nobody,” I croak.

It is the loneliest word in the world.

This isn’t home, not any more. The fire is out and my breath makes small clouds of vapour in the air. I should eat something, make a warming drink, take a shower but instead I perch on the arm of the sofa and stare at the cold ashes in the grate. The hearth is like my life, ashes, flaccid, cold ashes, all warmth extinguished.

I close my eyes.

In a moment James will come whistling in, kneel down with paper and kindling, strike a match to drive away this gnawing, frozen pain. He will slide his arm around me, leave a warm kiss on my frigid cheek and ask me if I want a cup of tea. But, although I wait until the clock on the mantle chimes a funeral knell at midnight, James doesn’t come.

Each stair is a mountain. I drag myself to the top and steel my nerve to open the bedroom door. I can sense him more strongly in here. In this room the memories are overwhelming. It was our sanctuary, our nest. It is the place where I learned to peel away my protective skin and let him burrow into the core of me. 

My coat slides from my shoulders and falls to the floor, and still in the paint-splattered clothes that I’d been wearing when James fell, I climb into bed. I clutch his pillow, still rich with the scent of his hair, and stare unseeing into the darkness.

It was his heart they said, some undiagnosed problem, some
stupid
little malfunction. If only we had known, if only there had been time to say goodbye. But there were no last minute things. All I will ever have is that last, silent message of love and a sort of apology as he clutched at the tablecloth, dragging it with him, destroying my best coffee pot… along with my life.

Losing him is the cruellest thing.

Letters and cards of condolence begin to arrive. Rectangular envelopes flutter from my fingers to make white block patterns on the brown carpet. I read the trite, uncomprehending messages of comfort before soldiering them along the mantlepiece. They don’t really understand …or care, I tell myself. It is only etiquette that prompts their whispered verses, badly constructed rhymes purchased in some corner shop. There is no compassion, no real sympathy and, while I sit here with a knife in my heart, they are going about their lives, shopping, working, loving, planning holidays. None of them can understand how I feel. They think it is enough to seal a few kind words into an envelope and then forget about James.

Forget about me.

At the funeral I shrug off their shrouded kindness and turn again into the grief to let it suck and swallow me in like a black hole. Heartache is my only comfort. I hate them as they gather, for beneath their black coats the wind reveals a flutter of orange, pink or blue – this is a temporary sorrow for them. This time tomorrow they will have put off their mourning and begun to move on.