Free A Habit of Dying by D J Wiseman Page A

Some very careful thought needed to do that and that needs a focus of energy. Which I may have tomorrow or the next day. A lens to focus energy is needed.
    It had taken Lydia nearly two weeks working most evenings and weekends to get this far. Only where she needed to refer back to compare a word with another version of it did she read back anything that she copied from the book. She was perhaps two-thirds of the way through. She needed a break and there was no reason not to take one, her rules were no more than a self-imposed discipline. The results puzzled, depressed and fascinated her. Gone completely was the feeling of intruding on a private grief, of looking through the keyhole. Whatever these words might be, their underlying meaning seemed clear. For her puzzle of anonymous faces she had swapped a greater mystery, and one that she was sure would haunt her until she could unravel it. And all the while that she was reading through her finished work, the words that ended it all, the words to which she was slowly moving, hovered over the pages, a mystery in their own right.
    Without any warning one fact about the book jumped into her mind. If this were fiction, carefully crafted by a writer, considered prose that might be a novel or used later in a story, then it would not have been physically written with such passion and aggression. It would not have so many changes of style from the barely legible to the clear; it would not be lightly scribbled in one section and practically gouged out of the paper in the next. It would be written so that it could be read. Here, in this oddly chosen book, the words of passion were written with passion, those of anger were written with anger, words of calm were written with clarity.
    Lydia let the idea sink in. A real person, a man, had written all these secret thoughts out on paper. A real man with a real wife. A real man with real demons in his head. A man who called for help or a man who found help through writing them out? He did not seem to be finding help, on the contrary he seemed more in need of it that ever. Although she knew the ending, knew that it would provide no ultimate answer or satisfaction, she had to follow the narrative through. But even before Lydia had the whole thing in front of her, a part of her mind began to consider how she might identify these people, date the events, discover hard facts. And that small part of her brain also realised the task might be impossible, something which would dwarf the difficulties she’d encountered with the Longlands family and Henry Myers.

    Evenings flew past, Lydia labouring with a growing intensity as the end came into sight. Words began to form themselves naturally in her mind as she copied the scribble, so much so that on a couple of occasions she had to stop and retrace her steps to feel sure that she had not invented anything of her own. The twenty-fourth entry had defeated her completely, extracting no more than a few words with any certainty. At length her task was completed. She knew the story, as far as it went. The Saturday evening after she had finished she printed out the remaining pages, settled to her favourite position in her favourite chair and read the whole thing straight through. Even though she was now intimately bound up in its contents, the anguish flowed undiminished from the pages. The twenty-second entry had been easy to interpret. It had been written with clarity, written slowly, Lydia thought.
    22 nd entry
    S can see my ideas and she does not think much of them, they are pathetic to her and inside she is laughing at them. She has her own plans now and they do not involve me, at least not as far as I can see. Her self-sufficiency is complete. I have less bearing on her life now than the smallestand most insignificant piece of chalk in her classroom. She does not talk to me any more and I do not listen. She nods sometimes and her smile once so open and beautiful, once lighting up her face, is reduced to a