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Chapters (86)
  1. Title Page
  2. CONTENTS
  3. Love
  4. Before
  5. One
  6. ONE
  7. Two
  8. TWO
  9. Three
  10. THREE
  11. Four
  12. FOUR
  13. Five
  14. FIVE
  15. Six
  16. SIX
  17. Seven
  18. SEVEN
  19. Eight
  20. EIGHT
  21. Nine
  22. NINE
  23. Ten
  24. TEN
  25. Eleven
  26. ELEVEN
  27. After
  28. One
  29. ONE
  30. Two
  31. TWO
  32. Three
  33. THREE
  34. Four
  35. FOUR
  36. Five
  37. FIVE
  38. Six
  39. SIX
  40. Seven
  41. SEVEN
  42. Eight
  43. EIGHT
  44. Nine
  45. NINE
  46. Ten
  47. TEN
  48. Eleven
  49. ELEVEN
  50. Twelve
  51. TWELVE
  52. Thirteen
  53. THIRTEEN
  54. Fourteen
  55. FOURTEEN
  56. Fifteen
  57. FIFTEEN
  58. Sixteen
  59. SIXTEEN
  60. Seventeen
  61. SEVENTEEN
  62. Eighteen
  63. EIGHTEEN
  64. Nineteen
  65. NINETEEN
  66. Twenty
  67. TWENTY
  68. Twenty-One
  69. TWENTY-ONE
  70. Twenty-Two
  71. TWENTY-TWO
  72. Twenty-Three
  73. TWENTY-THREE
  74. Twenty-Four
  75. TWENTY-FOUR
  76. Twenty-Five
  77. TWENTY-FIVE
  78. Twenty-Six
  79. TWENTY-SIX
  80. Twenty-Seven
  81. TWENTY-SEVEN
  82. Twenty-Eight
  83. TWENTY-EIGHT
  84. Eleven Months Later
  85. ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
  86. Copyright

It’s the only thing I do know for sure.

Twenty-Four

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TWENTY-FOUR

We decide to go to the café – our café – and just be still for a while, but as we’re walking there, we pass Snoopers Paradise and she pulls me in. The last time we were in here was last year when we were trying on hats for some costume party she was going to. It’s exactly as I remember – a mess – everything on top of each other, clustered together randomly. We pass a cream teapot with brown leaves perched on a stack of battered biscuit tins, next to a clowder of china cats, the tips of their ears chipped. Under them is an old leather suitcase full of other people’s photographs and I wonder who’d buy them. Someone else’s memories.

The aisles are so cluttered that only one of us can walk down them at a time. It’s much busier than the bookshop, which doesn’t help, a mix of tourists taking photos of the china plates propped on the Welsh dresser and locals flipping through old records, trying to find a classic Otis Redding 45. Poppy is somewhere between the two, her eyes wide as she opens rusting tobacco tins to see what’s inside and takes a scuffed Rolleiflex camera off one of the shelves, pretending to take my photo before putting it back. As she does, she almost knocks a glass box off the shelf and when I see that it contains a single doll’s leg, I grimace at her.

‘Do you think it’s cursed?’ she asks as I pull her away.

‘Let’s not find out, OK?’

She stops and points at another glass box, this one containing a taxidermy crow. ‘Look at this guy.’

‘I’d rather not.’

‘What’s his name, do you think?’

‘Edgar,’ I suggest.

‘As in Allan Poe?’ When I nod, she laughs. ‘I like it.’

We head around the corner and when she stops again, I wonder what she’s going to point out next, but she tells me to stay there. She promises she’ll only be a second, but I’d still rather not let her out of my sight. She’s so excited, though, so I let her go, watching her disappear as I calculate all the ways a person can die in a shop like this. Death by taxidermy crow.

What a way to go.

Mercifully, she returns a few moments later and reaches for my hand.

‘Come on,’ she says with a wicked smile.

‘Where are we going?’

‘You’ll see,’ she says, tugging me around the corner and there it is.

The Photomatic booth.

She remembered.

She remembered the list I made on New Year’s Eve.