What to Do When Someone Dies by Nicci French Page A

been at a particular moment.
    Within half an hour I was back from the stationer’s with two bulky carrier-bags. I tipped their contents on to the carpet. There was a large roll of poster-sized sheets of card, rulers, different-coloured pens and Magic Markers, highlighters, and sheets and sheets of little stickers – circles, squares and stars. It looked like the raw materials for a nursery-school art project.
    I spread four of the cards in a row on the floor, using heavy books to hold the corners down. Then, using a ruler and a fine architect’s pen, I started to rule grids across them, each representing a week in the last month of Greg’s life. I traced seven columns, then drew horizontal lines cutting them into halves, then quarters, then eighths and so on, until I had chopped each column into a hundred and twenty rectangles, each representing ten minutes in a day starting at eight and finishing at midnight. I didn’t bother about the nights because we hadn’t spent a night apart in the last month.
    Just from memory, I was able to cross out entire evenings I knew we had spent together. On the weekends there were whole days I eliminated with a bold stroke of black: the Saturday we had taken the train to Brighton, walked on the beach, eaten some awful fish and chips, bought a secondhand book of poetry and I’d fallen asleep on his shoulder on the journey back; the day we walked along the Regent’s Canal from Kentish Town all the way to the river. Those were two days when he hadn’t been having sex with Milena Livingstone.
    Then I started on the emails. At work, Greg had written twenty or thirty a day, sometimes more. Based on each one, I wrote ‘O’ for office in the appropriate slot on the card. Some were in clusters. He had a habit of sending a flurry of messages as soon as he arrived at work, another just before one o’clock and another at around five, but others were dotted through the day. It didn’t take me much more than an hour to work my way through the emails, and when I was done, I stood back and surveyed the result. The chart was already satisfyingly shaded in, and there was still so much to do.
    The next day I invited Gwen round. I said it was urgent but she was at work and didn’t reach me until almost six. When she arrived I hustled her through to the kitchen, boiled the kettle and made a pot of coffee.
    ‘Would you like a biscuit?’ I said. ‘Or a slice of ginger cake? I made both this afternoon. I’ve been busy.’
    Gwen looked amused and a bit alarmed. ‘Some cake,’ she said. ‘A tiny slice.’
    I poured the coffee and gave her the cake on a plate. I wasn’t hungry. I’d felt I needed to cook but not to eat.
    ‘So what’s up?’ said Gwen. ‘Did you summon me here to try the cake? It’s great, by the way.’
    ‘Good, have some more. No, it’s nothing to do with that. Drink your coffee and I’ll take you through.’
    ‘Take me through? What is this, a surprise party?’
    ‘Nothing like that,’ I said. ‘I’ve got something to show you. I think it’ll interest you.’
    Gwen took a few quick gulps of her coffee and said she was ready. I steered her along the hall and into the living room.
    ‘There,’ I said. ‘What do you think of that?’
    Gwen stared down at the four large pieces of card, now covered with marks and stickers, all different shapes and colours. ‘It looks lovely,’ she said. ‘What’s it meant to be?’
    ‘That’s Greg’s life in the month before he died,’ I said.
    ‘What do you mean?’
    I explained to Gwen how the charts represented days and sections of days. I told her about the timed emails and my own memories and how I’d even found receipts from the sandwich bars where Greg had bought his lunch. All the receipts, whether for food or petrol or stationery, gave not just a date but an exact time, to the minute, when the purchase was made. ‘So all these stickers, the yellow circles and the green squares, they show moments when I know exactly