Sleight of Hand by Nick Alexander Page A

Sarah her breakfast. She claims to be unable to lie in any later these days anyway, and that certainly isn’t a problem I share. At nine, she wakes me with a mug of tea and returns upstairs to bed.
    I walk Sarah to nursery and pick up any shopping we need on the way home.
    When I get back, I Skype Ricardo – the only moment in our corresponding timezones when this is possible. We talk for at least an hour every day. We discuss Jenny’s illness (Ricardo is disgusted that the NHS still haven’t given her any indication of what’s wrong, something he calls worse-than-third-world-service). We talk about Jenny’s mourning and Ricardo suggests that I find a way to get us out of her mother’s house – clearly a great idea with no apparent solution.
    Because Ricardo brings the subject up, we repeatedly discuss Tom as well. I detect a note of jealousy in his repeated probings about Tom’s presence (which so far has been limited to a few crisp phone calls to enquire about Jenny.) Ricardo’s jealousy irritates me, but of course it reassures me too.
    In fact we talk about pretty much anything as long as it revolves around
my
life rather than his and I’m left wondering if it has always been this way. Anything to do with how Ricardo might be feeling is quickly sewn up with a short sharp, “I’m good, I told you.” As ever, I can’t work out whether he is selfless,indestructible, or an emotional cripple. But the hours he’s prepared to spend talking to me prove his devotion, and I’m never left in any doubt of the fact that he loves me and misses me. Unless he is interrupted by another phone call or the need to go to work, it is never Ricardo that ends our conversation and by the end of our daily chat, even at five thousand miles, I’m always left feeling as loved as I have ever felt. And in the sombre landscape in which I find myself, that love shines like a lighthouse in the distance. The fact that he exists, the fact that he loves me, the fact that he’s waiting there to wrap his arms around me makes it all ultimately bearable.
    On Thursday, when Jenny hands me my mug of tea, she says, “You should, you know, take the room upstairs. There’s a bed going to waste up there. This whole sofa thing is silly.”
    I sit up, wrap the quilt around me and pull a face. “I know,” I say. “But I don’t feel that comfortable about … well …”
    â€œI know.”
    â€œYou won’t even go in there.”
    Jenny nods and slumps on the sofa beside me. “I know,” she says.
    â€œIt’s full of all her stuff.”
    Jenny nods. “I know,” she says again. “I’m sorry, I can’t … I thought if it was your room, rather than hers, well, that might help. But I can’t clear her stuff. I’m not up to it.”
    She glances around the room – the same gesture I have seen her do a hundred times. She always looks like she’s scanning the horizon for some hidden potential assailant, but this time, because of the context, I understand what she’s doing.
    â€œYou’re not comfortable staying in this house
at all
are you?” I ask.
    She shrugs. “It’s like you say … it’s just all the stuff. I keep checking to see that none of it has moved. And I keep being surprised that it hasn’t. Which is weird, I know. It’s like it’s all waiting for someone who’s not coming back.” Her eyes are misting and I see her force herself to stop and stand. “I have to go for my kip,” she says. “I feel shit.”
    And so it is that I take on this new task – the gut-wrenchingly sad job of trying to remove as many of Jenny’s mother’s personal possessions from around the house as discreetly as possible: a cardigan here, some knitting needles there, her underwear from the chest of drawers. As Jenny snoozes, I creep around binning a