Smoky Blue Literary and Arts Magazine #7

but he said he couldn’t bear an immediately huge gap in her wardrobe. He believed it would be easier for him to give her things away in bits and pieces. I doubt it ever got easier.

It wasn’t easy for me to rifle through her clothes; it was traumatic, in fact. I took some, more to help him out than in the belief I could ever wear them. I simply could not take anything else – the whole house was filled with a sense of her: every book, every picture, every piece of precious collected junk, some of which I recognised from our past, but other things belonging to her more recent life with David still spoke of her character.

All the little treasures we had quarrelled over as children I would have given to her at that moment if I could. I took her leather motorbike jacket, which pleased David, as he’d tried to give it to one of her friends who had been horrified, not realising that her refusal to accept it was more distressing to David that a casual acceptance would have been.

Marion had nothing of value, but had been a hoarder. Some things I recalled buying with her, some things I made for her, some had memories or anecdotes attached to them.

It was a difficult time. David cried over the bits and pieces we were sorting through, and so did I. One item I took was a natural wool jumper she’d brought back from the Andes. When I got home I discovered a little brass broach attached to it, finely etched with a solitary tree. It seemed to stand for everything she held true: simplicity of design, the earth, sunshine, growth, continuity. This one item of hers I still have, as if by my choosing that tatty jumper she had reached out from the grave to give me this one, tiny, parting gift.

That night I was ill, with cramping pains in my stomach, and I could only attribute it to the black bin liners on my bedroom floor which contained the clothes I had brought home. It was many weeks before I opened them, and over the following year they all gradually went to charity shops.

I knew David worked for the Exeter Fire Department as a photographer, and it was during this time he told me that it was only circumstantial that he had not been sent out with the emergency staff to photograph the accident where his own girlfriend would still have been trapped in her car under the lorry. She’d driven a soft-topped Triumph Herald, so when the accident occurred the car had slipped under the lorry so far the people on site had been unable to extract her or disentangle the vehicles. I also learned that the press got hold of Marion’s name and blasted it over the news before it was officially released, so it’s a good thing Mum and Dad didn’t listen to local news or they might have heard of her