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NOW

Turning over in bed, Sophie looked at the sun through the gap in the curtains. Outside, she knew, people were carrying on with their lives; going to work, the supermarket, getting some petrol, cleaning. But she wasn’t ready, yet, to join them.

Her mind kept flashing back to the bridge. To the words that Tom (her mind?) had spoken.

She wished she’d kept more of him, more mementoes. But when she’d been clearing the flat after the sale, she’d somehow wanted rid of it all – everything had been too painful back then.

Will came to help her clear; methodically encouraging her to sort Tom’s things and stopping her from flinging it all away.

‘What do you want to do with this?’ he asked, holding up Tom’s rugby shirt.

‘Keep,’ she said, nodding towards a rather overflowing cardboard box. Then, ‘No, get rid of it.’

‘You sure?’

‘Yeah,’ she sighed. ‘I mean, it’s not him, is it?’ She felt herself get tearful again but choked her emotions back. They only had today to finish the job before the cleaners she’d booked arrived, and she didn’t have time to break down. ‘Thanks for helping me with this, by the way. I would have been hopeless.’

‘It’s OK,’ he said. ‘Any time.’

She nodded. ‘You too, you know,’ she said. ‘If you ever need help.’

He smiled. ‘Thanks. Although I don’t think you’d want to help me clean out my flat. It’s not the tidiest of places. And, well, it’s hardly the standard of living you’ve been used to.’

She gave a small laugh. ‘I’m sure it’s great.’

He smiled. Tom had often joked about Will’s flat, although she’d never been. ‘Going back to your Harry Potter room, mate?’ he’d ask. Or he’d make jokes about the possibility of Will letting out some of his space. ‘You’ll rattle around in that enormous place on your own!’

Will, she knew, came from a similar situation to her. ‘Ordinary’, as she would call it. ‘Impoverished’, maybe, through Tom’s eyes. Yes, he’d made it to Cambridge, made friends with people like Tom, but had worked harder, taken less for granted. Now he had some high-tech, software-related job that she had no idea about, but still refused to move out of his tiny flat where the rent was affordable. ‘I’m saving up for a deposit,’ he’d often tell them. ‘Have to save as much as I can.’

‘I’m hardly used to the high life,’ she told him now. ‘You know I grew up in a Victorian terrace in Biggleswade? Tom used to joke he could fit my entire living space into one of their bathrooms.’ She smiled sadly, the ache inside her intensifying as the memories came to the fore again.

‘So you’re a normal person?’

‘Yes, or from Tom’s point of view, “impoverished ” ,’ she said, putting on a posh accent for the last word. Will laughed, but she suddenly felt wretched. Tom wasn’t here to defend himself; it didn’t seem right. ‘Sorry,’ she added, to nobody.

They were silent for a moment. ‘You know, I think it’s OK. To joke about him,’ Will ventured. ‘I was going to say it would be what he’d want but that sounds really pathetic. But you know what I mean? Tom was a real person and he liked a joke. I like to think he’d be laughing along with us.’

She nodded. ‘It’s going to take time, I think, to remember him like that.’

‘I know.’

‘It’s hard to know how to be ,’ she said.

‘I get it, completely. I mean, I don’t want to forget him, but talking about him is… it feels weird.’

‘Yeah,’ she said sadly, clearing the last of Tom’s desk drawers.

‘What will you do?’ he asked then.

‘What do you mean?’

‘Well, I know you’re going, like, home to your parents’ for a bit. But after? Have you thought about it?’

She shook her head. Because it had been hard enough to imagine a future when she’d had Tom – optimistic, resilient, unlucky Tom – by her side. And when she looked into the future now, she saw nothing at all.

Sophie forced herself to fling back the duvet, step out onto the soft pile carpet and make her way to the shower. It was a time for new beginnings.