Disclaimer

35. SUMMER 2013

Everything I do now is with Nancy’s blessing. I feel more certain of that when I wear her cardigan, all the years she wore it absorbed into the wool. It is a constant, although a little out of shape from where I have stretched it around me. I wear a hat of hers too, one that she knitted. There are strands of hair still in it, her DNA snuggling up against mine. It takes me back to a time when we were as close as any two people could be: how we were when we first met, before Jonathan, before she became a mother. When it was just the two of us. I feel as if it is the two of us again now. Collaborators. Coauthors. Our book now, not just Nancy’s.

It was me who gave it a name. We always helped each other out if we were stuck for titles and I could almost hear her clap her hands together and say, “Yes, that’s it,” when I came up with The Perfect Stranger. The ending is mine too. Nancy had come up with a different end, a little more subtle perhaps, but I decided that for the book to make an impact on its first reader we needed something stronger. It was me who killed the mother off.

Still, it was Nancy who did the hard graft. I try not to think too often of her sitting alone in Jonathan’s flat, writing, staring at the photographs and discovering the truth about why our son was driven to save that child. She succeeded in filling in the haziness surrounding his death and making sense of its senselessness. I’m sure it kept her going, gave her a reason to get up in the morning, as it had me, and it was only when she had finished that she allowed the cancer to take hold. That’s why she didn’t call on me during that period, the book was enough for her.

My local bookshop has sold quite a few copies according to Geoff, and a few have gone in Catherine Ravenscroft’s too. Not as many, but a few. It gives me a small thrill to know there are strangers out there who dislike her, that I am gathering my forces and widening the net. Softly, softly we creep up behind her. More and more of us.