Poppet

The Grief Calculator

FLEA STANDS IN her low-ceilinged kitchen and makes breakfast. Standing so close to the stove at last a bit of warmth begins to crawl back into her bones. She’s showered and scrubbed, but it’s taking for ever to get the cold of the quarry out of her.

She stares blankly at the eggs and bacon sizzling in the skillet, turns them automatically. The bacon is the Old Spot stuff from the local farmers’ market and the eggs are from a neighbouring family who, in spite of her insistence, are trying to say thank you for two hours she spent fixing a manifold pump on their under-floor heating. As a diver she knows about pumps, it wasn’t a difficult job, but they keep leaving eggs at her back door. Eggs, eggs everywhere. Eggs coming out of the walls.

She slides breakfast on to a plate and plonks it down without ceremony on the table. A heavy mug of strong coffee and a jar of sugar with a spoon stuck in it. She’s a proper support-group sergeant – likes her breakfasts fried and unfussy. The ketchup is in a squeezy bottle. No airs and graces here. Mum and Dad would have both fallen down in a flat faint if they’d ever caught the faintest whiff of pretension.

‘So,’ she murmurs as she pulls up a chair and begins to eat. ‘Just as well you’re not here then, isn’t it.’

She chews with concentration – elbows on the table. She doesn’t look up, doesn’t look to either side. It’s better sometimes not to remember where you are. Especially when it’s the house of your dead parents. Dad would know what to say to her now – he’d put his hand on her shoulder and answer her questions. She’d say: Dad, is it OK to just let things be? And if it is then what do I tell this guy – how do I explain it to him, because one thing’s for sure – he’s not going to leave it be.

Dad would kiss her head, talk to her gently, reasonably. He’d know the answers. And if he didn’t know what to say, he’d talk to Mum. They’d go into the room at the end of the house, switch on the light over the piano and sit in facing armchairs. They’d speak in low voices – talking until they had a solution to her problem. They’d close ranks and Flea would be safe.

She has to stop chewing then. She pauses, and, with an effort, swallows the mouthful. She picks up the mug and gulps a few swigs of coffee to wash it down. Then she sits for a while, her head lowered, staring at the eggs and bacon.

There must, somewhere, be an equation for how long grief lasts. A calculator like they have for currencies online: you’d jab in things like your age, your gender, your job, your social life. You’d divide it by how close you were to the person who’s gone, you’d have to add lots of points for the fact you haven’t got a body to bury, and you’d get a number – a finite quantity – a guarantee that after exactly 573 days the pain would stop. Christ, if you can convert the Pakistani rupee into zlotys, if you can map the human genome and work out what Martian soil is composed of, why can’t you calculate when the hurt will be over?

She gets up and chucks the food in the bin. Washes the plates. She’s got a long day ahead of her. If she’s lucky, by the time Jack Caffery arrives at the search site she’ll have got an explanation together. If she’s unlucky it’s going to be the coldest, wettest day of the year and she’ll end up crying in the shower at the end of it.