What to Do When Someone Dies Read Online Free PDF

eyes shut and forced myself to remember – dark trousers and a pale blue shirt; his favourite jacket over the top. That was it: his non-accountant’s accountant’s outfit.
    I started systematically to go through everything in the cupboard. I felt in each pocket, and found only a receipt for a meal we’d had in an Italian restaurant two weeks ago. I remembered: I’d been upset and he’d been patient and optimistic. A crumpled flyer for a jazz night that had been put under our windscreen wipers a few days ago. I pulled open the drawers where he kept T-shirts and underwear, but I didn’t discover any lacy women’s knickers or incriminating love letters. Everything was as it should have been. Nothing was as it should have been.
    I stood in front of the mirror, examined myself and found myself wanting. I weighed myself and realized I was shrinking. I boiled myself an egg, broke open the top, then dabbed my spoon into the yellow yolk. I made myself eat half of it before I felt so sick I had to stop. I had stomach cramps, a grim, familiar backache, so I ran a bath and lowered myself into it, hearing the phone ring. I couldn’t bear to answer it and heard Mary’s voice saying into the answering-machine that poor little Robin was running a fever, she’d be round as soon as she could. I lay in the hot water and closed my eyes. Then I opened them and watched a curl of red blood run out of me and spread, then another.
    So.
    It wasn’t to be, after all. Once again, as with all the other months of trying and hoping and praying, I wasn’t pregnant, and Greg had died in his car with another woman and left me alone, and what on earth was I going to do now?

Chapter Four
    It was drizzling. Gwen and Mary arrived early, when I was still in my dressing-gown trying to decide what to wear. The pair of them were dressed in almost identical clothes, and I could see they’d been aiming for the casual but smart, sober but not sombre look I was intending for myself. Mary had brought some Danish pastries, which were warm and sticky in their paper bag, and I made us a big pot of coffee. We sat round the kitchen table, dunking the pastries, and I was reminded of when we were students together, sitting just like this in the kitchen of the house we’d shared together in our final year.
    ‘I’m so glad the two of you could be here,’ I said. ‘It means a lot.’
    ‘What did you think?’ said Mary, heatedly. Her face was flushed with excitement. ‘That we would let you go through this alone?’
    I thought I might cry at that, but I didn’t, although grief felt rather like a fishbone that was gradually working itself loose in my throat. I asked Mary how her son was and she replied in a constrained, self-conscious way, very different from the eager assumption she had made in the past that I would be interested in every belch and gurgle he made. I had crossed into a different country. No one felt able to have an ordinary conversation with me, no one was about to tell me their petty anxieties and daily fears in the way they would have done a week ago.
    I went upstairs and chose my clothes: black skirt, stripy grey shirt, black woollen waistcoat, flat boots, patterned tights, hair tied back. I was so nervous that it took me three attempts to thread my earrings through the lobes of my ears; my hands trembled so that I smudged my lipstick. I felt as though I was about to be put on trial: what kind of wife were you, anyway, that your husband was with another woman? What kind of fool, that you never had the slightest idea?
    When we reached the coroner’s court, a low, modern building that looked less like a court than an old people’s home, the feeling of unreality continued. At first we couldn’t find the entrance, but pushed uselessly against glass doors that refused to budge until a policeman on the other side mouthed something at us and pointed, indicating we should try further on, the next entrance. We went into a corridor that led through