Free A Habit of Dying by D J Wiseman Page B

twisted smirk. If I am careful I can avoid her nearly all the time now. She does not see me in the mornings when she goes to work, leaving me undisturbed on the sofa where I spend the nights drifting in and out of sleep with the world service. We have not spoken of this separation and I am sure we will not. It gives me time to think of the end game. It is at a critical stage, and the pattern appears to be coalescing into a uniform whole. I can’t see the shape or the details yet but I sense their formation. There is a flow and method just hidden beneath the churning surface. Resolution beckons but the direction is not yet determined. I may need more time to work it all out, it is getting harder to think in the office, too many interruptions and the thread is lost before I can hold it. If I spend more time at home and then go to work late and stay when the rest have gone home then there will be less distraction, give it a chance to become clear. And I must speed the process before it is all taken out of my hands. I must choose the weapon, the weapon of choice, before one is chosen for me. Choose the time and place, the hour and the minute, down to the second, before it happens without me. As each thought becomes ordered I will write it down so as not to have to keep it in my head. It will relieve the pressure, make room for analysis and focus the rest. Thought number 1 – find a calm point from which to order the thoughts. And number 2 – decide the order in which they must be written.
    23 rd entry
    Too much time is spent ordering the details of how to avoid her. It takes my energy so there is none left to work out the bigger picture. Anticipating a potential contact, [sidestepping] the chance of meeting, the dangers of having to speak. So tired tonight that I can hardly write. I could stop the writing that would give more time, but only a little, it is weeks since I had a thought that was finished and ready to write down. And now I have all this extra planning to do and each thought is getting [thinner] and [thinner] as they are all squeezed together. I can barely see one from another they are all packed in so tightly and now with so little room to move they are stuck in limbo. Would it be possible to do something without a plan, to act just randomly, step randomly off the kerb, eat random products from random cupboards in arandom house. Say random things that just happened to be there at the moment of speech. It would certainly be easier than this. She spoke to me this morning and I was so surprised that I did not recognise her voice, couldn’t determine what the sounds meant, hadn’t accounted for any meaning, couldn’t speak. Every angle was meant to be covered and one was missed. Sloppy thinking, sloppy planning. But I was reminded of her. I sneaked a look to be sure I would know her again. She seemed to be smiling. I am not sure whether she could see me or not. Probably she could and as I could see her then we were both certainly still here this morning.
    From the twenty-fourth entry Lydia saw that she had managed only the words
‘Xmas’, ‘mother’, ‘probably’, ‘vomit’, ‘black’,
and the initial
‘S’
appeared three times. Even then ‘vomit’ was almost purely guesswork. From some conversation she recalled once being told that Christmas was the worst of times for family tension. With more food, and more drink came unwanted relatives, and enforced togetherness. Lydia wondered if it could be a tipping point for someone already struggling to hold on to their sanity.
    25 th entry
    The first day of a new year and unfamiliar calm has settled on me. It is such a strange feeling, at once both liberating and suspicious. There seems no rational explanation as to why this should be. I have looked diligently and found nothing to explain it. I know she is out of the house and this book is opened for the amusement of writing the diary. I can sense a storm a little way off, but it does not concern me at