Precious Thing by Colette McBeth

Author:Colette McBeth [McBeth, Colette]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Fiction, Crime
ISBN: 9781472205964
Google: 2ei-Ofn6TukC
Amazon: 1480574570
Publisher: Hachette UK
Published: 2013-07-30T08:00:00+00:00

Chapter Fifteen

IN MY NOTEPAD I still have the words I wrote down when I was told how Jonny died. My handwriting is unsteady and would be illegible to anyone but me. I think I can see the words without actually reading them. Their imprint will stay in my mind for the rest of my life.

I remember the WPC, our family liaison officer, relaying the details softly softly with her head cocked in sympathy, looking at Sandra, then turning to me and saying a million times over, ‘I understand, I understand.’

She told us that Jonny’s body was found not far from Preston Park in a wooded area which ran off a path. It had been covered for days, they presumed by heavy snowfall, until Monday when it melted and a dog walker came across it.

‘When we found his body, he wasn’t wearing a coat, just jeans and a T-shirt. It was minus six over the weekend.’

He was out there alone and needing me and now he was gone.

I told them Jonny would never be that stupid, he wouldn’t have just got drunk and fallen asleep. ‘He was supposed to be flying out to Afghanistan the next day.’

Sandra was sobbing next to me. The WPC took her hand and gave me a look that said, This isn’t helping.

‘I understand it’s a traumatic time,’ she said again, as if she had just seen the person she loved most, cold and blue on a mortuary slab.

On the train back to London I sat alone, staring out of the window as the empty, frozen countryside zipped past. Daylight was falling; a dark gloom settled over the carriage. I wondered: what if the sun never rose again; if the world stopped turning on its axis and we were forever trapped in this grey half-light. Would the trees and plants be the first to shrink and die? Then we would surely follow.

Because we all need to feel the warmth of the sun to survive, don’t we? Just as we need to be loved and wanted, to be the focus of someone’s attention and adoration. If we don’t have that, how do we know we even exist?

I had basked in the heat of your attention once, Clara. I’d sprung to life like a flower under your gaze, and then you let it drift elsewhere and I was left to shiver in the cold. I remembered the pain of it so clearly, like a knife slicing through me, hollowing me out. Oh, I’d recovered, Clara, I’d found a way through it, but it wasn’t until Jonny came along and made me the centre of his universe that I realised how cold I had been, how much I had missed the warmth. Now he was gone I could feel the freeze gripping my bones again and a suffocating blackness rolling in like sea mist. I was sinking into it, disappearing once more.

The invisible woman.

I heard the sound of the drinks trolley trundling through the aisles and looked up just in time to see it pass me without so much as a word from the steward.

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