Saturday

First there is the ambulance.

We are out early, the valley furry with hoar frost and our heads furry with last night’s gin.

Somehow we make friends anyway…

I fumble in the torn lining of my jacket pocket for my keys. Only when I look up I find I do not need them.

The blue door on the first floor is ajar. “Stephen, come here!” I call to the dog as I wearily ascend to the flat.

I try to alleviate my nausea with coffee and books but it’s no use. The alcohol lingers in my blood and I feel like nothing will ever cure me.

So I leave the house on an errand, intent on walking off the hangover. I am surprised to find the police are still here, hours later. One goes into the flat with the blue door.

Then there are the undertakers, smart in their suits. My blood goes cold at the sight of them. They are polite, they smile and make space for me to pass. I stumble out into the early afternoon feeling like I have seen ghosts.

I play hide and seek with a kid on the bus. But my head is filled with the ghoulish image of the maroon sheet covered gurney. Blue plastic gloves discreetly tucked beneath a pillow.

Walking home again, the Hermitage is impossibly beautiful, the winter trees and shrubs still thick with the morning’s frost. I think ‘No, it can’t have been a pillow. If you don’t need an ambulance anymore, you definitely don’t need a pillow.’

‘It must have been a sheet for covering the body.’ And as I come up the other side of the valley to where the early afternoon light hits the trees the frost is dissolved in light as thick and amber as winter blood.
The frozen world pushed up against it’s molten, mirror image is uncanny.

When I get back, everything is quiet. I am the only one left and all the doors are closed.