Dead Man's Grip

and other social events they’d been planning to go to in the months after Kes got back from his annual boys’ skiing trip. She still had not had the heart to remove them. It was like living in a time warp, she knew. One day she would move on. But not yet. She still wasn’t ready.
    And after the traumas of the past few days, she was less ready than ever.
    She looked up at Kes’s photograph on the mantelpiece amid the invitations. Standing next to her on the grass outside All Saints’ Church, Patcham, on their wedding day, in a black morning coat, striped trousers, holding his top hat in his hand.
    Tall and handsome, with slightly unruly jet-black hair, he had a certain air of arrogant insouciance about him. That was if you didn’t know him. Behind that façade, which he regularly used with devastating effect in courtroom appearances, was a kind and surprisingly insecure man.
    She drank some more wine and batted away a particularly dense and smelly fart from Otis, who was asleep at her feet. Then she increased the volume on the remote. Normally Tyler would come running into the room and curl up on the sofa beside her. This was his favourite programme, and one of the few times they sat and watched anything together. On this particularly gloomy, rain-lashed night, she felt more in need of his company than ever.
    ‘Tyler!’ she shouted. ‘ Top Gear ’s starting!’
    Her voice woke up Otis, who jumped to his feet, then suddenly pricked up his ears and ran out of the room, growling.
    Jeremy Clarkson, in a louder jacket and even baggier jeans than usual, was talking about a new Ferrari. She grabbed the remote again and froze the image, so that Tyler wouldn’t miss anything.
    He’d had been in a strange mood these past few days, since her accident. She was not sure why, but it was upsetting her. It was almost as if he was blaming her for what had happened. But as she
replayed those moments again, for the thousandth time since Wednesday morning, she still came to the same conclusion: that she was not to blame. Even if she had not been distracted by her phone, and had braked half a second earlier, the cyclist would still have swerved out and then been hit by the van.
    Wouldn’t he?
    Suddenly she heard the clack of the dog flap in the kitchen door, then the sound of Otis barking furiously out in the garden. What at, she wondered? Occasionally they had urban foxes, and she often worried that he might attack one and find he had met his match. She jumped up, but as she entered the kitchen, the dog came running back in, panting.
    ‘Tyler!’ she called out again, but still there was no answer from him.
    She went upstairs, hoping he wasn’t watching the programme on his own in his room. But to her surprise, he was sitting on his chair in front of his desk, going through the contents of his father’s memory box.
    Tyler had an unusual ambition for a twelve-year-old. He wanted to be a museum curator. Or more specifically the curator of a natural history museum. His ambition showed in his little bedroom, which was itself like a museum, reflecting his changing tastes as he had grown older. Even the colour scheme, which he had chosen himself, of powder-blue walls and pastel-green wood panelling, and the gaily coloured pennants criss-crossing the ceiling, gave the room an ecological feel.
    His bookshelves were covered in plastic vegetation and models of reptiles, and crammed with volumes of Tintin and Star Wars stories, natural history reference books, palaeontology books, and one, so typical of him, called Really Really Big Questions .
    The walls were covered with carefully selected and mounted photographs, wild life and fossil prints and some cartoon sketches of his own, all divided into sections. One of her favourites of his drawings was headed: Tyler’s Dream . It depicted himself looking like a mad professor, with a crude skeleton of a prehistoric monster to his left, labelled Tylersaurus , and rows of squiggly little objects to his right, labelled Fossils . At the bottom of the cartoon he had written, I want to be a fossil expert at the Natural History Museum … Have the biggest fossil collection in the world … Discover a dinosaur.
    There was also a Tintin section, on part of one wall, neatly plastered in cartoons. And his music section, where his drum kit was set up. A guitar hung from the wall, along with a solitary bongo, and his cornet lay on a shelf, with a book beside it entitled A New Tune a Day