Chapter 1
‘So, what could this adventure lead to?’ thought Kate, as she sat waiting for the plastic surgeon to size her up and prep her for the surgery that lay ahead. Her breasts had always been ample, of course; ‘more than a handful and more than an eyeful’ was one particularly delightful, male-delivered, description she remembered from her earlier years. After the awkwardness of adolescence she grew to understand what a couple of assets she had, and despite the odd hiccup, such as having to reprimand the more blatant men for talking solely to her breasts, she found them to gain her a small sort of notoriety which she considered useful for gaining the edge in meeting people and being remembered.
Latterly, though, they had become more of a burden than an asset. To this end, Kate felt that the start of a new chapter was required. The irony wasn’t lost on her: hospitals were a place she vowed she would avoid for ever, after losing Nick. But life had moved on and Kate felt sure that this was the key to reinventing herself. ‘Because life is a series of reinventions, isn’t it?’ she thought, as the nurse was going through the very familiar standard health checks. Her thoughts were interrupted by the nurse.
‘One hundred per cent oxygen level – you can’t get better than that!’ she exclaimed.
This jolted Kate back to those painful last weeks with Nick, watching him monitor his dwindling oxygen levels until, at the end, the carbon dioxide ably won the fight against the oxygen and Nick could simply no longer breathe. ‘Anyway, back to reinventions,’ Kate thought, in a bid to drag herself away from those dark memories. There was the time she had reinvented herself as Madonna, shortly after the Lady Diana phase: off with the twin set and flicked hair, and on with the lace gloves and scraggy perm. Kate often wondered whether she and her friends were single-handedly responsible for the hole in the ozone layer, due to the sheer amount of hairspray they used in the 1980s. Or what about the time she had reinvented herself as a poet, writing endless thought-vomit during the university years?
So past reinventions may not have been the most successful – but what about the future?
Kate considered the bizarre situation she once again found herself in. It was fairly ill-thought-out by all accounts, as Kate found that when she devoted too much thought to something, she would almost certainly never do it. Waiting in the hospital that day, she pondered what bad luck it was to have such a good-looking doctor performing her surgery, not least when he arrived armed with several marker pens and proceeded to draw all over her upper body. Ten minutes later, while he was still creating a masterpiece of body art, Kate wondered whether things could get any more embarrassing. Of course they could, because Kate tried to break the embarrassment by making a humorous remark or two. What she received in response was: nothing. She concluded that this must be some sort of breast surgeon code of ethics; surely it couldn’t simply be that she wasn’t that funny! How weird it seemed to her that over the several appointments prior to today she had not realised quite how attractive the doctor was. Had fear blinded her on previous occasions? Perhaps he had recently partaken of plastic surgery himself, she thought, while giggling.
‘Hi! I’m the anaesthetist,’ announced another devastatingly handsome man who walked through the heavy wooden door an hour later. ‘Well of course,’ Kate thought, ‘it couldn’t possibly have been someone old, or ugly, or both. And just for good measure, both of these handsome individuals will later have the delight of seeing me in surgical stockings and not a lot else, oh joy!’ For Kate, who had never been body-confident and was today required to show her boobs to every single person she met, this was a terrible situation. When changing at the gym she would go to great lengths to find a small cubby-hole, in order to avoid the embarrassment of showing any inch of flesh. She had once resorted to opening all the lockers down one side of the gym to form a makeshift door to undress behind – thereby drawing much more attention her way than if she had simply changed in public. She might as well have changed in the reception area! So while a breast reduction had felt like the right thing to do, as recurring health issues were not going to improve with age, this was all seriously testing Kate’s metal.
At 44 years old, Kate found herself living comfortably in Kent. Things had been financially less comfortable six years ago, when she and husband Nick sold everything they owned and bought the house of their hopes and dreams, agreeing to a monstrous mortgage that would see them paying it off well into their seventies. They were hoping that ‘something would come up’ prior to that, so they could at least pay back the generous relatives who had helped fund the move – but they weren’t sure what that would be, let alone when. So things had been precarious for a while.
Kate liked to be known as the creator of reinvention, but in practice she would only really reinvent herself if absolutely needed. She knew she was most comfortable in a pair of wellingtons, but equally she still adored the opportunity to dress up – Nick used to call her ‘the magpie’ due to her penchant for anything that glittered and sparkled. Ultimately Kate was a home-girl: happy to glam up, but even happier to strip off all the glitz and glam at the end of the night and return to PJs and wellingtons. After all, someone would have to give her horses their night-time snack. In fact, there was a ritual that Kate loved when stripping back the make-up after a night out. Hot chocolate in hand and a Marmite sandwich on the side, she would sing her favourite song:
After the ball was ov–er,
She took out her glass eye.
Put her false teeth in wa–ter,
Shook from her hair the dye.
Kicked her cork leg in the cor–ner,
Stripped off her false nails and all.
Then what was left went to bye-byes,
After the ball.
Surrounded by fabulous friends, a menagerie of pets and the rolling hills of the North Downs, what more could Kate ask for? Her life wasn’t perfect – and she certainly didn’t live in Little House on the Prairie – but it was well within the realms of sufficient. She had never stopped wondering what life could be like if she chucked it all in the air and did something radical; but to date, the nearest she had actually come to ‘radical’ was the surgery she was just about to have! However, her memories could last her a lifetime, and she and Nick had made it their mission to live life to the full at all times, ‘just in case’.
This is the story of that ‘just in case’ moment when it came – and what happened afterwards.
Letter to Nick.
Is this misuse of the money you left me? This surgery isn’t cheap, well out of range if you were still alive, but I just have to have it. So why do I feel so bloody guilty? Why has every waking hour for the last few weeks consumed me with dread that somehow you will come back from the grave and tell me off?! You never even told me off when you were alive, so why would you start now you’re dead? Ok, I do realise that last-minute wobble when I started asking the surgeon about a facelift was a bit shallow, but I was panicking about coming through the general anaesthetic and thought I should get my money’s worth. It was lucky the surgeon talked me down from that one in hindsight. So how do you feel about this reinvention of me so far?
Widow, 44, seeks someone.
Chapter 2
‘I just want a sink in the downstairs loo for the wake,’ sniffed Kate.
She was half-talking and half-sobbing to the tall plumber who had been recommended to her by her mother and sister. He was in fact highly rated and came by the nickname – unknown to him – of ‘Fit Plumber’. Why? If Kate had to explain, she would say his height was part of the package, and he was an all-round nice guy – the dependable, level-headed, capable type… not to mention good-looking, too. Kate had phoned him, saying she had an urgent job that she would very much appreciate his help with. She had never met him before, yet he had met members of her family on several occasions, so the chances were that he was going to swing wide of her. But, to his credit, he did nothing of the sort, and arrived later that same day to assess the job.
When she called the plumber it had only been five days since Nick had died. Kate had had a moment of clarity: if the wake was going to take place in the building site of a house she lived in, there would be a requirement for a sink in the downstairs bathroom. Never mind the hideous Axminster carpet from the 1980s, or the immense amount of clutter that had inevitably built up while Nick was ill. Or the back door that would have leapt off its hinges if you gave it so much as a hard stare. People would just have to deal with those things – but a sink was absolutely necessary.
Kate realised that Fit Plumber was awaiting some sort of instruction.
‘Oh, would you like a drink?’ she asked, playing for time, as she wasn’t sure what she had been halfway through saying when her mind had wandered. This was a trait she had distinctly noticed in the five long days since Nick’s death: an absolute inability to concentrate on anything. No matter how big or small, retention of information completely evaded her at all times… She wondered if this was this the lack of—
‘No, thanks,’ interrupted his reply.
‘Right. Oh,’ continued Kate, ‘the thing is, I can’t show you the downstairs loo, as there’s a spider in the way.’ The words came out before she could stop them. ‘You’ll have to move it for me.’ That was it now – Fit Plumber would unquestionably realise that Kate was related by blood to the rest of the family that he had met.
A few minutes later, spider moved and job looked at, Fit Plumber promised he would fit the job in prior to the wake. He started trying to back out through the front door while Kate was attempting to explain why the house was such a mess.
‘Nice car,’ he remarked on his way out, trying to lighten the situation – which turned out to be a big mistake. He was referring to Nick’s precious kit car, the one he had been building until he got sick: a beautiful powder-blue car, which now sat forlornly on the driveway waiting for someone to love it and, more importantly, to finish building it.
‘It was my late husband’s,’ Kate said, noticing she was using the term ‘late husband’ for the first time. ‘He built it from scratch… Such long evenings… Meticulous attention to detail… So much pride… Zetec engine… Was going to race it.’ It all came tumbling out in half-sobs, half-squeaks.
Realising that this was a pretty heavy situation for Fit Plumber to deal with on his first meeting with her, Kate tried to lighten the mood with humour: ‘Well, I guess he won’t race it now, will he?’
The effect of this, of course, was to make her more miserable and Fit Plumber more awkward. Could this get any worse?
The truth was that Kate didn’t want to have to talk about U-bends with plumbers, or deal with spiders in her way. She didn’t feel equipped to do so, or ready to communicate with the outside world at all. A huge black hole had opened up five days ago and she wanted to dive in head-first, never to be seen again. Didn’t the universe realise that it was supposed to have stopped at exactly 4.03 a.m. that Sunday – at the moment Kate had uttered those fateful words, ‘Oh, that’s brutal’? In hindsight it seemed a strange choice of words to utter upon watching her precious husband die, but they came from the feeling of absolute injustice that something as automatic as breathing could suddenly evade someone like that – without much warning. Of course, Kate had known he was very ill; but she had thought there would be a more formal pronouncement of the impending end. So the term ‘brutal’ summed up exactly how she had felt: she and Nick had been brutally robbed of the life they loved. She hadn’t rehearsed a fancy speech for such an occasion and therefore had to go with whatever came out in the moment. Being the master of random comments at inappropriate times and places, it could have been very much worse.
‘Soooo… I’ll see you in three days’ time,” ventured Fit Plumber, in a bid to round things off and get the hell out of the place.
‘Yes, please come back,’ begged Kate. As she turned around to shut the front door she caught a glimpse of herself in the window. ‘Dishevelled’ would be a generous way of describing her appearance, she thought. ‘Utterly down and out’ would probably be more accurate. Worn to a frazzle by several nights of not sleeping, Kate realised she had barely managed to dress herself, let alone wash or brush her hair. If other people could have done these things for her, they surely would have. No one envied her at that point, and absolutely everyone had offered ‘whatever we can do’. ‘It stretches beyond hair-washing and dressing, though,’ she thought as she walked back into the house. ‘But it could incorporate house work,’ she said out loud with a wicked little grin, as she surveyed the mountain of washing-up and general debris around the newly-spacious kitchen.
Kate knew she should concentrate on at least one of the million things that needed doing, but could not decide which. Pages and pages of paperwork to wade through: forms to fill, documents to copy, envelopes to be addressed – just listing them made Kate want to run for the hills, screaming. She settled on finding pictures for the order of service. Photo albums piled up around her as she sat on the floor, desperately searching for those perfect pictures which summed Nick up in one stance, one glance, one smile. Kate was at least relieved that she had been so methodical in cataloguing photos over the years. Inevitably, as she worked her way through the many albums – an adulthood of glowing memories – her heart broke into several more fragments with each page. She finally settled on three pictures, which really showed the man Nick had been: fun, sporty and larger-than-life. ‘You were so strong,’ Kate told those images of Nick, while tears poured down her cheeks. She stared at the picture of Nick dressed in his Mr Strong T-shirt, with his bike held way above his head, on that bridge in Dartmouth. ‘Fearless, too!’ she mused, hugging the photo to her, unable to choke back the huge sobs that were welling up inside. Letting go, she threw herself back onto the floor and lay there weeping, allowing self-indulgence to completely take over for what seemed like forever. Eventually, however, the raw emotion subsided. All Kate was left with were sore eyes and a throbbing headache.
Letter to Nick.
To my darling Nick. There are so very many things that we left unsaid, which was right at the time for us both but leaves me feeling empty now. I would like to start by saying how very happy I am to have met you all those years ago. I grew in strength, self-confidence and as an all-round human being after meeting you, for which I am eternally grateful.
I must address my guilt at not spending enough time with you during your last few days and weeks. Please forgive me, as I bitterly regret that now. Sixteen years together and so many, many memories. Holidays, days out, promotions, job changes, gigs, parties, barbeques, walks, rides, surfs and just spending time together laughing and laughing and laughing.
You will always be my strength and my inspiration and I will always love you and miss you.
Widow, 42, seeks absolutely no one. Certainly not looking for love, companionship or even someone to breathe the same air with. Had good sense of humour, but does not feel she will see the funny side of anything ever again – therefore no sense of fun required. Please feel free to apply if you intend never to make contact, especially due to the fact that this lovely lady has yet to move into the twenty-first century, having no Facebook, Twitter or any other form of social media account whatsoever.
Chapter 3
The daily routine had quickly become familiar to Kate. It inescapably included opening the heart-warming numbers of sympathy cards that were arriving every day. Each one completely different both inside and out, Kate would read and re-read all of these, carefully soaking up the affection that each one emitted. Irrationally, the ones that began ‘To Kate and Family’ made her angry – they made her want to shout ‘He was mine, no one else’s!’ The ones she liked the best contained anecdotes, things people remembered and loved about Nick.
Today’s highlight was from one of Nick’s work colleagues. It made Kate chuckle that it started ‘Dear Mrs Rogers’ – but better was yet to come, as this was a card of two halves, almost as though it referred to two completely different people in the picture it painted. ‘I was so truly sorry to hear the news about Nick. The quiet dignity with which he endured his illness was amazing to witness.’ Pride welled up in Kate and the emotion spilled over, making it difficult to read the next part. ‘I shall remember him with fondness shouting “Jaegerbombs!” at the top of his voice at last year’s Christmas party, just when the rest of us were ready for our beds.’ What a tonic this was to Kate, to hear that the true spirit of Nick had not been lost amongst quiet dignity and enduring patience after all!
Arrangements for the funeral were going well. It had been particularly easy to choose everything for the day, as though it had all been prepared in advance, which it had not. No discussions had ever taken place over the previous year about end-of-life. It were as if a discussion of this nature would have hurried the end on, and therefore was taboo. Kate felt she was in suspended animation during the period leading up to the funeral. Her sole goal was to arrive, intact, at 17 June – past that, nothing registered or seemed to matter. The problem with nothing registering was that anything and everything had a strong chance of being forgotten. In a bid to counteract this, Kate had invested in several packs of bright pink sticky notes, to write important reminders on. Looking around her kitchen, she smiled at the overall effect they were starting to create on every work surface and cupboard door they had been stuck to, all shouting instructions at her: ‘call plumber’, ‘take clothes to funeral director’, ‘put bins out’. From the mundane to the ridiculous, they unashamedly littered her beautiful new kitchen, but she didn’t care in the least. ‘All roads lead to 17 June – beyond that, who cares?’ was the mantra which helped see her through those wretched first days.
‘So, time for my walk,’ announced Kate to no one apart from the cats, who had taken to moping round the house all day looking like lost souls. ‘You’re not helping!’ she said to them, with fake annoyance, on her way out of the door. Walking was something that Kate had previously thought solely the domain of people who either didn’t have a car or didn’t have a life – weirdy-beardy hikers, for instance – but she had found walking to add a therapeutic effect to each day, especially during the glorious June weather. There had been no conscious decision to take up something therapeutic; just an urge to be doing something at all times, in order to avoid long hours of sitting and thinking. The sun was high in the sky and superbly warming on her face as Kate made her way along the beautiful green lanes towards the North Downs. Walking allowed time for healthy thinking, she found. Somehow the forward momentum of the physical activity allowed much the same for the thinking: ideas of what was to come, not what had passed. So, what was to come? Thoughts settled mainly on the funeral, of course, and the finer detail of what would happen on the day. Who would come? What would people say? How would she feel? What would she wear? Kate had a firm rule on attendance at funerals – black should be worn at all times – so that was a relatively easy decision. ‘But how “together” should I look?’ she asked herself while scrambling over the stile into the next field. ‘I mean, if I turn up looking well-groomed, made-up and ready for anything, people might think I don’t care about losing the love of my life,’ she muttered. ‘But if I turn up looking dishevelled, people will worry… Is there a middle ground?’ Kate could not think what that middle ground might be – well turned out, but crawling into the crematorium on her knees in grief? Or perhaps she could don one of those black veiled hats to hide the hair and face? No, Victorian fashion was not for her, she concluded. ‘I’ll just have to make every effort – it’s the least I can do,’ decided Kate, as home came into sight once again.
Home had always been a welcome sight to Kate. ‘Where the heart is’ described how she felt about her beloved house; yet as she rounded the corner that day, there was no leap of the heart or feeling of pride that said: ‘That’s my house.’ There was just nothingness, a mechanical feeling of ‘this is where I dwell’ – which saddened Kate even further, because nothing seemed to evoke any reaction in her at that time. There was a protective layer wrapped a thousand times around her – not the warm and fluffy kind, but the type that blotted out all sense of feeling, sight and sound. It was hard to comprehend how this would ever change. ‘Is it a waiting game?’ pondered Kate. ‘Do I have to wake up a certain number of days until finally I wake up feeling something?’ By nature Kate was an optimistic person, but she was struggling to see how this could possibly have a happy ending. As she arrived at the
