Free The Kindest Thing by Cath Staincliffe

Neil’s follow-up appointment I drove out to the spa, near Knutsford, for a meeting and spent the morning with the manager and the architect. It was frustrating: the manager was
eager to shave off costs but not happy to compromise on quality, and the architect was dying to get away.
    I tried not to get too sharp even though I felt the manager was wasting our time. At one point I suggested he redraw his budgets and give me a new figure to work to, if he was having second
thoughts, which prompted the architect to complain about delays. The manager backtracked and blethered on. My husband might be dying, matey, I thought. I don’t give a flying fuck for your
yardage problems. But I smiled thinly and did my job. After all, if Neil was dying, I’d need all the work I could get.
    Of course, the proper jargon, as I learned on the Internet, is living with MND, not dying from it. Like AIDS. Adam had a T-shirt around that time, black and voluminous with a slogan in scratchy
white lettering: ‘ Life – a death sentence ’. That soon got lost in the wash.
    At the hospital, I saw Neil before he saw me in the waiting room (ghastly orange chairs designed to deaden the bum and weaken the spirit). He was reading, his head tilted to the side, legs
stretched out, ankles crossed. Beautiful. If I hadn’t known him, I’d have thought the same: the shape of his face, his frame, dark hair, inherently attractive. I didn’t need to
get close enough to smell his pheromones.
    He sensed me watching, looked up and smiled, closed his book. Unhooked his ankles and sat up straighter. I reached him, sat beside him, unbuttoning my coat, unwrapping my scarf: I was hot after
the frosty air outside.
    ‘They’re running late,’ he said.
    ‘Great – gives you a bit more time, then.’ I thought I’d gone too far but his eyes crinkled at the joke.
    ‘Good meeting?’ he asked.
    ‘Crap. He wants to cut corners without it showing. I told him we need to move forward by next week or he’ll lose the slot, another client waiting, bigger.’
    ‘Have you?’
    ‘Nope.’
    ‘Neil Draper,’ the nurse called.
    The consultant, Mr Saddah, was a really nice man. He took his time, answered all our questions, even if most of the answers started off with it’s hard to say or it varies a great
deal. He said eminently sensible things about support and resources and dealing with it as a family and how MND progressed.
    His words streamed past me, lapping around me like channels of water carving the sand. I gripped Neil’s hand and tried to stop time.
    The judge comes in and everybody stands. A wave of panic washes through me, blurring my vision. I blink hard. Jane is saying something to Adam. It’s lonely here, lonely
and exposed. Did Martin think of coming and decide against it? If my dad had lived would he have come to show support? I’m glad my mum’s not still around, not here today, anyway.
Because her reaction to all this, her eloquent unhappiness would give me more of a burden to carry. Happy birthday, Deborah. Happy bloody birthday.
     
Chapter Seven
    ‘C all Deborah Shelley.’
    I stand in the dock, beside me a guard from the court. The clerk asks, ‘Are you Deborah Shelley?’
    ‘Yes.’
    Do they ever get it wrong? No, not me, mate. Whoops, sorry, you should be next door with the traffic offences . . .
    ‘Deborah Shelley,’ she reads from a notepad, ‘you are charged that on the fifteenth of June 2009 you murdered Neil Draper at 14, Elmfield Drive, contrary to common law. Are you
guilty or not guilty?’
    ‘Not guilty.’ My voice sounds thin, swallowed by the space.
    The judge is exactly how you would imagine a judge to be: old, white, male. The only deviation from the stereotype, a northern accent. He has wild white eyebrows and a pleated face. He leans
forward slightly and asks the clerk to fetch the jury. They file into the court and make their way to the jury box. Here they are sworn in, each person putting their hands on the