Standing in the long shadows of the birches that lined my street, I wondered if somewhere on the planet there was someone feeling the exact same thing at that precise same moment. Perhaps, somewhere in Mongolia, a man, returning home, was waiting outside his yurt, tired and hungry, yet despite the cold, despite the rain, was utterly terrified to enter.

Lights glowed from all the houses except one. It was not a surprise that my house was unlit, but the contrast made me hesitate, made me shake, made me want to cry. I turned up my collar against the wind

and forced my feet onward. I paused briefly, and then climbed the concrete steps to my door. I held the key, my hand shook, I almost turned and ran, but I knew I could not. The breakfast, that I had prepared that morning, was uneaten; the coffee untouched. I scraped the congealed eggs and sausages into the bin and washed the dishes, taking my time, not wanting to go upstairs.

The silence of the house was suffocating. It was hard to breathe. Voices, laughter, shouting, crying—all the sounds of life—were gone. A simple glance at a photograph, the smell of peanut butter, everything evoked a fragment of conversation, a feeling, a smell, the sound of laughter. I tried to reach out to them, those ghosts, to hold them, but I could not.

I felt nervous, as I always did now, when I climbed the stairs. Reaching the bedroom door, I paused. I was breathing heavy; my palms were clammy.

Susan was lying on the bed with her back to me. I could just make out the contours of her in the gloom. I reached over and touched her skin. It was warm; I felt her shoulders rise a little. I sat beside her. She was clutching the photo album, open to her breasts. She continued to stare at the wall. We watched, in silence, the shadows that crept over the wallpaper like probing fingers.

Too tired to take a shower I lay on the bed fully-clothed. I considered moving closer to my wife, holding her, but when I lay my hand on the bed, felt the place where my daughter had once slept between us, I closed my eyes and clenched my jaw tight until it ached. I would not cry.

#

The representatives of Hudson & Smith were already sitting around the table when I arrived. I offered my apologies and made my way to the front of the room. Nine faces sat expressionless before me. As I unpacked my laptop I ran my hand across my chin. I hadn't shaved again.

They waited for me to unveil their new head office, a 3D representation of how it would stand majestically over London. One of them coughed impatiently. I found the file on my laptop and opened it. Their eyes went to the large screen behind me. I searched their faces, as I always did, relishing the moment: eyes would widened, there would be an intake of air, and then they would smile.

Their eyes widened, but there was no intake of air; no smiles. They looked around at each other. A cold sweat ran down my spine. Someone laughed. I turned around and grasped the table. Looking down on me from the screen, smiling, her big blue eyes sparkling, was Lucy.

I couldn't breathe. Words were lost to me. Everyone stared and I gaped soundlessly.

I drove through the city and the sun sank low, reflected in the sky scrapers, the buildings that had enchanted me all my life, and then it disappeared entirely, and it was night. I drove through the streets with my window down. I caught sounds, snatches of conversations, a bar of music, but they were gone before I could interpret them.

Lucy had known she was dying; that the leukaemia had won. But still she smiled. Despite the tiredness, the fevers, despite the fear etched in her parents faces, even when the sparkle from her big blue eyes had gone, my daughter had smiled.

I pulled the car into the drive way. I was home again. But it no longer felt like home, home was no longer the right word to describe the house that loomed above me dark and cold.

I had no premonition, but for some reason I ignored the uneaten breakfast and went directly upstairs. I ran, two steps at a time. I'm not sure why I went directly to the bathroom, but I knew she would be there. I knew it beyond all doubt.

Susan lay in the empty tub wearing her silk dressing gown, a present that Lucy had wrapped herself in her hospital bed. But it was no longer lilac. It was a deep red. I took off my tie and wrapped it around her forearm, just above the gash in her wrist, and tied it off. I hoisted her out of the bath, down the stairs, and buckled her into the passenger seat of my car.

The waiting-room seats of the hospital greeted me with their worn fabric and grey plastic. The smell of bleach and urine felt comforting. I felt glad to be back; as if I were somehow nearer to Lucy; in the place where she had spent the last year of her life; in the place where she had died.

Patients somnambulated through the corridors, each footstep checking off another second until lunch, until visiting time, until their next dose of medicine.

Waiting in oncology, Susan and I had gotten pretty good at guessing their illnesses, the type of cancer: prostate, colon, renal, thyroid. Susan had an uncanny ability at diagnosing pancreatic cancer by the timbre of the face.

When we learned that the chemotherapy hadn't worked; that the leukaemia was not in remission, that our little girl would die, the game had ceased, and we sat in silence instead.

Now I sat again in silence, my clothes and hands red with my wife's blood. I should have felt something: scared, angry, sad. But I felt nothing. My wife had taken a kitchen knife and slit her wrist and I felt nothing. I had no words to offer her. Nothing to ease her pain: “It will get easier,” “time will heal,” “she is in heaven,” “she is happy.” I didn't believe any of those things.

Every fibre of my being wanted to cling to the idea that Lucy was in some other place, that she was happy, that some day I would meet my little girl again, hold her, kiss her cheek, hear her laugh. I wanted to bury my head in this dream but I could not. She was not there. She was lying under the mud in Grove Park Cemetery in a oak casket; a casket so tiny that the appalling sight of it had confirmed beyond all doubt, that there was no God.

I understood why Susan had done what she had done. I didn't blame her. That much I knew now. I had also considered taking my life but I had run away once before and I could not do it again.

I dreamt about Lucy. It was before she had gotten sick. We had left London and gone to Blackpool. I think it was the first time we had taken her to the beach. It was definitely the last—she was diagnosed with acute lymphoblastic leukaemia the following week.

She stood in her yellow bathing suit, her feet sinking in the wet sand, gasping as each wave approached. The cold water licked at her toes and she screamed and ran away. It was a child's scream. A scream that was both fear and joy, excitement and trepidation. And I had laughed.

I stood over the sink, splashing water on my face, unable to imagine that the man looking back at me from the mirror had ever laughed. But he had.

Susan had died. They hadn't gotten to her in time. She had lost too much blood. I changed into a spare suit that I always kept in the car. I bought a coffee from the vending machine and stood at the window, watching, until the coffee had gone cold.

Her arm was bandaged. Tubes were still attached to her other arm. Her face was pallid and there were dark circles under her eyes. I once again fought the urge to leave, to escape. But before I could turn, before I walked away, I placed my hand on hers and the feeling was gone. A smear of blood ran along her cheek. I wiped it away with my thumb. An act so insignificant in the weight of things that I felt ashamed.

I drove out of the car-park of Lewisham University Hospital, only vaguely aware of where I was going. As I turned into Marvels Lane, the entrance to Grove Park Cemetery loomed ahead. Wrought-iron gates stood brooding and dark. The driveway was flanked by wide grass verges, backed by specimen trees and shrubbery, veiling the burial areas that lay behind. I passed a lodge standing alone amid lawns and then the rustic chapel was before me with its dark ornamental timbers.

Many people had come to the funeral and cried. They had shed their tears and then continued on with their lives, perhaps appreciating them a little more. Susan and I had stood silently together in that chapel, tearless. We stood amid their crying, resolute, like the dark iron gates of the cemetery. For us there was no tomorrow.

I had not returned to the cemetery after the funeral. Lucy was not there. She would not hear any words that I uttered. But now, as I walked slowly toward her grave, the place where I had scattered earth on the tiny coffin in the shadow of the malus trees that were planted there, I was afraid.

I stood above her grave and placed my hand on the headstone as if it were my daughter's head. I could see her face turned up to me. Her eyes were big and blue again. She smiled and I imagined brushing her hair back from her forehead as I used to do.

“I'm sorry that I ran away,” I said.

She kissed my hand.

I had abandoned her, drowning myself in alcohol as she underwent two operations and began chemotherapy.

When I returned she had not been angry. As they pushed her gurney down the long corridor to the operating theatre, me jogging to keep pace, she had been afraid, afraid not of the operation, but that I, her father, would not be there when she woke up—that I would leave again. She had clutched at my hand, her eyes terrified and I had sworn to her that I would never run away again.

*****

I understand why Susan wanted to die. There is no meaning in anything anymore. The colour has gone from the world; drained away. Everything is black and white; a photocopy. I want to follow my family into the void. To escape my grief. I want to enter the abyss—a thing that has terrified me ever since I realised that heaven was not real. The idea of my non-existence was so appalling that I would lay awake as a child, too scared to sleep, to let myself go. But now I am not afraid. I welcome the nothingness. I desire it. But I can not leave. Not yet. I promised my little girl that I would not run away again. So I will live on, alone. Enduring the pain. The solitude. Waiting for absolution.