As she neared the flat, the familiarity of everything struck her. The crack in the pavement where the tree roots from the garden of a block of flats had pushed through still hadn't been fixed by the council. The odd little dog-leg junction with traffic lights, where no one really knew who had right of way, was still congested with cars. The screech of an ambulance a few streets away wailed in her ears.
A few minutes later, Nina was at the front door of the flats, keying in the code on the pad. She walked slowly up the steps to the top landing she shared with Mrs Gilbert. She could hearRadio 4 blaring from Mrs Gilbert's flat, as it always did, and she closed her eyes for a second, hoping Mrs Gilbert wouldn’t come out. While she was nice enough, since moving out and on, Nina hadn't really missed her. Everything seemed to be a drama with her and Nina wasn’t really up for that.
Intending not to be seen, Nina hurried to open her front door, stood at the entrance, slipped off her shoes, and inhaled. The air was musty, and for a second, she paused and wondered what the smell was. Of course she knew what it was. Andrew. His smell hit her between the eyes. Was she going mad? Was she smelling someone who had been dead for a long time? Of course, it wasn’tactuallyAndrew, but what she smelt was the life that had been hers and his. A smell from a place long since dead. It put her in a spin.
She stood for a second, inhaling with her hand on the ball atop the bannister, and wiggled it as she always did, and as ever, was surprised when it moved. Then, crossing the tight wool carpet she’d put in not long after Andrew had died, she took the first small step up, then the next two steps down, and stepped up again, and turned. She got to the top of the stairs by the dresser where she kept her keys, her phone charger, and various other paraphernalia and continued to smell the scent of her old life as it wafted around her saying hello.
She looked past the dresser to the two small low doors built into the wall that went under the eaves. Nina knew exactly what was in there, all of it labelled, all meticulously organised things from her old life. Photos, suitcases, holiday things, keepsakes, her wedding dress in the box from the dry cleaners, and her wedding memorabilia, all sorted into tubs. Half of her wondered why she’d kept many of the things she had.
Deciding that she needed a bit of time before delving into the depths of the eaves, she made a cup of peppermint tea and sat at the tiny kitchen table, looking out over what she had once calledher balcony garden. Now, she saw it with very different eyes; it was just a ledge. The pots she’d at one time focused a lot of her energy on were still there doing their thing. The last time she’d come, she’d weeded them fully and pulled out anything that hadn’t survived, and some of them were still doing okay. She let her gaze drift across the rooftops, lost in thought for a while, thinking about how different the grey sky and urban scene were from Lovely Bay. How her new life was nothing like the one in the flat where she’d been locked in a circle of grief and pain and not a lot else.
Once she’d finished her peppermint tea, she strolled into the bedroom and opened the wardrobe where Andrew’s clothes still hung. For a long time, she just stared at the row of shirts and things, not really sure what to do. What sort of memento was she looking for? Unlike her wardrobe, not that there was much in there now, which was colour-coded to within an inch of its life, Andrew’s side had always been messier and it still was. His shirts were together on the right, a couple of suit jackets in the middle. A hanging organiser that wasn’t really organising much but a jumble of jumpers hung on the left, and a tie rack was messily piled with ties. The shelf underneath the hanging section held more piles of clothes, a big, old-fashioned plastic file he had carried around with him since university days, and his leather satchel he’d always used when he went to work was stuffed in on the left. Drawer springs twanged as she pulled open the heavy top section on the left and a black eye mask from a business trip fell onto the carpet. She picked it up, put it to her face, and inhaled. She shook her head, unlike what she’d felt when she’d first walked in, Andrew wasn’t there. His smell was no longer on a face mask from a business trip on a plane.
She shut the wardrobe doors, letting them bang back into place, went back into the kitchen, made another cup of peppermint tea, and then, as she drank it, she sat in front ofthe doors in the hallway, looking at them for a long time. About fifteen minutes later, she got down on her hands and knees, pulled open the doors, grimaced at the hot, musty feel under the eaves, and crawled in. Apart from the fact that it was a bit dustier than the last time she’d been into it, the storage area was organised, and everything was in the right place. Her wedding stuff was exactly where she remembered, with her wedding dress on the far left, near the pipes. Crawling over, she spied the gold logo from the dry cleaners and dragged the box towards her, doing the same with the huge plastic storage tubs packed full of wedding things. Before she knew it, she was perched on the landing, unclipping the blue latches on top of the storage tubs and diving in.
She sat in a strange world as she opened card after card and read word after word. So many messages from so many people offering their congratulations and good luck for a future that had never turned out to be. Shaking her head, she felt bad at the fact that she had lost touch with a lot of the people in the cards since Andrew passed away, especially Andrew's family and his friends. Initially, it had just been too much for her to keep up with anyone. Then, people got on with their lives and slowly but surely they’d drifted away. She’d never really liked his family anyway, so there hadn't been too much incentive for her to keep the relationship going there and his and their friends had dropped off one by one.
A few minutes later, she opened the wedding dress box. Inside, reams and reams of tissue paper confronted her. It crinkled as she peeled off the first few layers, finally arriving at the dress, which was wrapped in a different stiffer paper, some sort of preservation paper, she assumed. She lifted up the paper and stared at the bodice of the dress for ages. It was just as she remembered it – a plain, very simple white dress with small sleeves and a princess-line top. Suddenly, she was back in thechurch, walking up the aisle, Andrew smiling at her from the top. She could hear the music and smell her perfume, Sophie was behind her, and her mum beamed from the left. Flowers everywhere. A beautiful old church. Smiley happy people. Music. Life. Hope.
She pulled the dress, struggling with its weight to stand up and look at it fully. The skirt hung in a few creases, but overall, it seemed to be fine. Turning it around, she heaved it over the bannister and fiddled with the poppers on the big bow that held the train onto the dress at the back. Then, taking it into the sitting room, she hung it on a hook, hoping the weight of it wouldn’t pull the hook out of the wall, and carefully unclipped the gigantic train. She was left with a plain white skirt with a pretty top that clipped together to appear like a dress. Standing with her fingers scrunching her top lip back and forth, she stared at the dress for ages. Sophie’s words went through her head about having something to do with Andrew at the wedding. She pulled at the waist of the dress, wondering whether or not it might fit. She perhaps would just about be able to squeeze herself into it if she was lucky.
A few minutes later, she was chuckling to herself as she stood in the middle of the sitting room. After stripping down to her underwear and letting the dress fall down to the floor, she unzipped the back of the bodice and skirt and stepped in, yanking and pulling the fabric over her hips. Then she held onto both sides and pulled the bodice up over her bra. Struggling, her arms behind her, she found the zip and tried to pull it up. About halfway up her back, she gave up.
Pulling up the bottom of the skirt, she walked into her bedroom and stared in the mirror. As when she’d first opened the box in the hallway, a mix of emotions flooded through her veins. But standing in her socks with the bodice half open at the back, something about it simply felt right. The more she lookedat it turning this way and that, the more she knew that she wanted the dress to be part of her day.
If she could work out a way to get the dress altered, she’d be wearing it. Still part of her, still part of the Andrew and Nina story. Only now, Andrew was no longer there, but he would have loved to know that she was happy. He would’ve loved that she had found someone who loved her just as much as he had done back in the day. All those moons ago, she’d worn the dress with hope and anticipation in her heart to marry someone she’d loved the bones of. Now the dress was going to take her on a journey to do the same thing again. Just as nice bones. Even better straps.
26
Nina hung the dress back on the same hook in the sitting room, went down the stairs, slipped her shoes on, hurried across the landing to avoid Mrs Gilbert, and made her way out onto the street. A few minutes later, she was in a café not far from her flat. She ordered herself a cheese and salad sandwich with beetroot and a Coke Zero, took it to a table in the corner where she’d often sat when she’d lived in the area, and ate her sandwich, lost in thought.
Was it peculiar to wear the same wedding dress you wore to your first wedding the second time around?she asked herself.Would it be strange to be wearing a dress she married someone else in when she married Robby? Would Robby be okay with it? What would her mum think? Would her mum have some little quip to say about it?She wondered what Sophie would think and pressed Sophie’s number on her phone.
'Hey, how are you?' Nina asked. ‘Everything good?’
'Yeah, good, thanks. Just busy, got a lot on.’
‘You sound tired. Is Nick away?' Nina asked.
'Yes, of course, Nick is away. When there's lots going on, Nick goes away. That’s pretty much how it goes,' Sophie replied with a teeny bit of sarcasm in her voice.
Nina rolled her eyes. As she’d suspected many times before, Nick was often away for work to get him out of doing things at home, not that it was any of her business. She didn’t say anything about Nick in case she couldn’t stop. 'Do you need me to come over and give you a hand?'
Sophie did not sound her usual upbeat self at all. 'No, I'm fine. I just need to get my act together and put my feet up later on. I’m just exhausted, to be quite honest. I underestimated how hard it is with three. It’s a whole different ball game altogether.'
‘It must be and you do most of it on your own. Honestly, just let me know if you want me to pop over.’
'Will do. Anyway, what's up with you?' Sophie asked.
'Well, let me tell you one thing; I think I might have found a dress.'
'What? Oh right, excellent news! I didn't know you were going shopping. Where have you been? Has to be better than that place we went to with your mum. I thought you’d decided to go with the best one out of that lot you ordered online. I know you didn’t love it but…’
'Ihaven'tbeen shopping. I did what you said. I came up to the flat to have a look through the wedding stuff to see if there was anything of Andrew's here that I could use on the day.'
'Right and you found something in a shop on the way there, did you?’
‘No. I did find something, but I'm not sure if it's weird or not.'
