By Nick Granger, Creative Writing Group 3

Janet sat in the soft grey leather armchair, looking out of the window at the garden. She gave a smile of satisfaction at the huge hydrangea blooms. The special food Bill had put down in the spring had been well worth it. The house was quiet, and she still had difficulty getting used to that. Bill had never been a quiet man. His every movement, she recalled, seemed to have, as an integral part, thumps, bumps and scuffs and an accompanying undertone of grumbles and mild curses. Bill could never be accused of gliding across a room like Fred Astaire. He had more of the characteristics of a dodgem car at the fairground, progressing in a series of minor collisions through the house

There was only one piece of furniture in the house Bill had personally selected, and that was the chair in which Janet now sat. She had to steel herself to occupy it. Her first thought had been to move the chair to where hers was placed. But she decided that would be the wrong thing to do. She needed to take possession of the chair and of its location. She wriggled herself into a comfortable position, and it seemed to her that the chair responded, shifting its allegiance from Bill’s shape to hers. But it still smelt of him – that awful black pipe tobacco he smoked, and the aftershave he never managed to apply moderately. Instead of those smells being an irritant, as they were when he was alive, she now found them comforting, as she did the smoothed arm rests where he would drum his fingers to his favourite pieces of music.

In the weeks since his death (must clear this rubbish out of the garage, bloody mess, wire and bits of metal and wood, can’t imagine why it was kept, too easy to trip over this lot, bloody death trap) Janet had started to adjust to Bill not being there. She had always liked the Alexander McCall Smith novels about Botswana, where it was usual to talk of people as ‘late’. Still with them, but not running to the same timetable. Janet liked the Botswana mindset, and adopted it. She still looked round in the kitchen, expecting a noisy entrance through the back door at teatime. She still hesitated before turning on her favourite soap in the evening because Bill could not stand them.

Occupation of the armchair was, in her mind, a big step forward in placing Bill as what she thought of as ‘Botswana late’. She did not want to forget him, but she did want to restructure her life so he could be properly late – still with a place in her life but not determining what she could and could not do. Friends insisted on talking to her about closure, but she rejected that approach, well meaning though it was. There was nothing she wanted closed. She did not want Bill closed out. After all, he was only late.