Cathy Phelan Watkins - On A White Horse

He walks away, the sun goes down

Amy Winehouse, Tears Dry On Their Own

Three in the morning and Im wide, wide awake. My head is spinning. Im anxious, panicking. I need to put it all together. To catch it before it all slips away again. I did try and sleep after a session with Ms Winehouse and Doctor Smirnoff but I have now accepted that sleep is not a possibility at this point.

I get out of bed. Its cold. Im wearing an oversized t-shirt, dressing gown and a pair of climbing socks. I switch on a lamp. I look down onto the street outside. The tarmac is wet and inky, no foxes tonight. All is still and silent. I am on a mission. They have got to be here somewhere. All twenty-three of them. One for every year we were together.

I pour myself a slug of vodka and fill the glass to the brim with orange juice and some ice cubes from the kitchenette off the lounge. Maybe in that box? I drag a chair into the corridor, still clutching my drink. I clamber up, socked feet slipping. Try not to kill myself. I cant quite reach. The box I want is on top of another box. My fingertips are just touching it. A few pushes to the side and I have it. The box of Danny stuff. Letters, postcards and yes, a small bundle tied up with red ribbon. The Valentines cards.

Guess who? I love you, Happy Valentines Day gorgeous. There are red hearts, pink hearts, red glitter, tiny hearts on strings. Some tasteful, some naff, maybe bought in a hurry from the corner shop. A Terry Frost painting. A yellow card with the words: to the world you may be one person but to me you are the world. And the last one in which he has written halfway to heaven and already an Angel. Strange. Its like reading them for the first time. Somehow I didnt appreciate the sweetness of his words before. It must be four oclock now. I lay the cards in a line on the carpet. Mission accomplished. I am utterly exhausted, but temporarily at peace. Order has been restored in some tiny but important way. Welcome to my world.

Grief gets you like this. Three in the morning or three in the afternoon. Any time of day or night. The storm clouds can come, the waves can suck you under. Since my husband Danny died of bowel cancer three months ago, it is almost as if I have become a person of the sea. I sail in a tiny boat, adrift in the ocean, no dry land in sight. I am a poor navigator. A queasy instability prevails, even when my boat is becalmed. That and a constant need to dig down, to retrieve and stick it all together again. This need to bring him back.

I had got into a similar state of agitation, perhaps a week or two earlier. On that occasion it had been a desperation to find a photograph of a holiday in Cornwall. It was in the middle of the night again. Id got up, and put Amy Winehouse on Back to Black, of course as I rifled through boxes and drawers. Id found the photo in the office upstairs. There we had been, sitting on a rock in the sunshine. Him in the Arran sweater with no elbows. Myself beaming. Happy times.

There can be relief in finding anything now. Nail clippers, half-used packets of Rennie in the pockets of winter coats or rucksacks. Sometimes I strike gold by finding a scrap of paper with his handwriting. Numbers, scribbles, his distinctive doodles, shopping lists and funny faces even a pack of pre-signed Christmas cards, ready to send. These scraps of paper have become as intimate to me as a touch or a warm breath. A previously unseen photograph assuming the power of a resurrection.

The next morning I am tired but okay. I am sitting in the blue stripy armchair from the British Heart Foundation shop in Brixton. The one I bought for Danny when he was ill, in a desperate attempt to find a piece of furniture that didnt offend his increasingly frail skeleton. It is placed in the very spot where he died. Where he left the planet. I experience a distinct and special charge when I sit here. Its not at all depressing, quite the opposite. I find it positive. Empowering. I have come to think of it as the beam me up chair perhaps one day, like Captain Kirk and Danny, I will find myself transported to another dimension.

Still in my dressing gown and t-shirt, I view the collection of Valentines cards on the carpet from this position, moving them about with my toes. I count them. Twenty-two. There should be twenty-three. Where is the other one? Could it have been the first one? Have I thrown it away? Had he forgotten one year? I am distracted by a small stack of postcards, mementoes of our most precious holidays. When did that happen? When did we go there and when did we do that? Its all getting rather jumbled and I am starting to feel distressed again. I need to sort it out before I start to forget. Before I lose it.

I start to pace up and down in the living room still looking at the irregular line of cards. What if I arranged them on a length of paper? Wallpaper, perhaps. Created a testament. A scroll. A visual timeline. For a moment I feel the familiar, affirming cogs, grind into life. Calibrations. Questions. For the first time in more than a year, proper artistic ones. Would it work as a piece? And if so, how? Against what background? On what scale? I feel part of me restoring itself. Switches within me, trip on. Is this how I am going to cope? How I am going to make sense of it all? Through art.

Two days to Christmas. The staff of the publishing company that Danny founded have left for their ten-day holiday, so the office is empty apart from the chief executive, Julian. Danny last set foot in this building more than a year and a half ago. Having spent twenty-five years building up the company, I can only imagine or perhaps I cant imagine how the dawning realisation of never returning to this, the engine room of his life, must have affected him.

I spent yesterday painting the boardroom, or to be precise the room we use for meetings. The damp patch on the wall had become depressing. The woodwork had started to look scuffed, careworn. I have given it all a fresh lease of life. Bright white. The paint has now dried and I am rearranging the furniture. I have decided to hang the black and white photo that we used at the memorial service here. It is a heavy object and possibly a little large for the room. I lift it into place and drill the appropriate holes for the screws. I want him to be here.

The portrait depicts Danny, resplendent in one of his pin-striped suits from Sidney Charles, his old tailor in Deptford High Street. The picture was taken some years ago. The suit is old-fashioned, with that high lapel favoured by Paul Smith in the early nineties. The stripe is more than a little too wide for now. Think Del-boy/Wall Street banker, then mix with something Irish and engagingly handsome, and you are probably there. He looks good but it doesnt make me feel as good as I had hoped.

I glance at the clock on the opposite wall. Its dark outside already, the wind is rattling the metal shutters. Better get going or Ill miss B&Q, I say to Julian.