The Flavours of Love Read Online Free PDF Page B

make it to the upstairs loo. I dash to the small tiled room with a little wall-hung sink, that’s just off the kitchen. I drop to my knees, lift the lid of the toilet and finally let go of the anxiety and worry and horror that have been mixing inside me since the phone rang and my life took another turn for the worse.
    That Day
    My fingers are numb, my body is numb, my entire being is suddenly without air. There are a dozen little splattering thuds of blackberries falling onto the ground, there’s a crash of a white ceramic bowl hitting a white ceramic tile .
    I snap myself out of there, drag myself from the pothole to the past and into the present where I need to be. And where I need to be is outside my daughter’s bedroom.
    She’s quiet, careful, but I can still hear her small sobs, only partially muffled by her pillow. She needs to sleep, and she needs to cry. She needs to be alone with herself so she can feel this. Hiding from the pain will not help her, it’ll become a habit that’s virtually impossible to break. That’s why I took away her interactive distractions,made her come up here to be alone, so she can start to feel this. I don’t want to punish her, just help her to start to accept what’s going on. Unlike losing her dad, there’s a clock ticking over this situation; avoiding it, pretending it’s not happening, will only work for a very short amount of time. With losing her dad, with losing Joel, we can try to defer that grief for the rest of our lives.
    I walk past her room to the main bedroom – it always smarts like a flick at my heart how quickly it became my bedroom after being ours for nearly ten years – but I don’t enter. Instead, I open the door, place the router inside, then shut the door as I usually do, so Phoebe thinks I’ve gone to bed. Next, I navigate the uneven, noisy corridor floorboards and creep back to my place beside her room. I sit on the floor and briefly touch my fingers to the mottled dark wood door. ‘ I love you, baby ,’ I mouth and I hope she feels it. That it seeps through the wood, that it floats through the air to her and she can breathe it in.
    This was all I could do eighteen months ago. Neither Zane nor Phoebe wanted to sleep in the big bed with me, and I couldn’t split myself in two to be with them, so I’d sit here, in the space between their rooms, whisper ‘I love you’ to each of them, then listen powerlessly as they cried themselves to sleep.
    It’s all I can do for Phoebe now, because at the moment she really does need to be on her own, and to feel whatever it is she’s going to feel next.
    *
    ‘Saff? What’s up? What’s happened?’ The familiarity of Fynn’s voice immediately trickles ease through my tense, troubled body and frantic, fretting mind.
    ‘I’m sorry, I know it’s late and I didn’t want to wake you, but I didn’t know who else to call.’
    ‘I’m on my way,’ he says, followed by the rustle of bedclothes being thrown back, of someone sitting up, preparing to slide out of bed.
    ‘No, no, you don’t need to. I just need to tell someone this before my head explodes.’
    ‘Right,’ he says cautiously, bracing himself for the worst. But whatis the worst? He’s heard it, is he preparing himself for that? Is he bracing himself to hear that another person he dearly loves is lost to him?
    ‘ You need to come ,’ I’d said. ‘ Something’s happened. To Joel. Something’s happened to Joel. I need you to come here. I have to go to the hospital .’ He didn’t respond straight away that time. He’d been silent for many, many seconds that felt like hours, and then he snapped out of it and said he was on his way. I called him before I called Joel’s parents, before I called my parents or my sister, because I didn’t know if I’d be able to speak again after I’d said it once. I needed him to come and I needed him to tell other people, because I had other things to do. I had to go and identify him, I had to go and