I was still in our flat in Muntaner but not long from having to leave it. By then I had closed almost all of the hatches – or so I believed – and my state of mind was as tight as I could manage. As I’ve told you before, those last couple of months in the flat I kept the place obsessively neat and clean. On the one hand my state of denial considered that she might relent and come home at some point and I wanted her to find the place spotless. On the other hand I can only suppose that somewhere inside of me I was looking to scrub something clean with my efforts. I must have believed that this “smudge” could be got rid of if only I went over it enough with the mop. And so I cleaned and dusted and mopped…time and again.

Right up until that fateful Monday in late May, our home had functioned as such and the vacuum she left that day was horrifically amplified by traces of a life departed that seemed to spit me in the face everywhere I turned to look. She might as well have been hit by a bus and have vanished from the face of the earth. In our bedroom there were some of her clothes on the floor and other things of hers hung awkwardly from the chair at the foot of her side of the bed. The dirty-linen basket was three-quarters full with a mix and match of “his and hers” and the clothesline outside flapped lazily with her dark cotton underwear next to a T-shirt or two of mine. And that loud pink cardigan my mother had given her; hanging at an odd angle – as she had last left it – on the chair in her studio. In the hall her various jackets, crumpled one on top of another, still tried to make the best of not enough hooks. I can see those bits and bobs of hers everywhere around the house like so many bits of discarded paper…and I can hear that awful silence that took possession of the place.

I soon started cleaning and tidying the house with all the mindless energy of a maniac. I dusted and vacuumed and mopped…continually. Anything textile that could be washed was thrown in the machine and, once dried, folded neatly and put away in its appropriate place. Everything was rapidly returned to where it should be and those items of no fixed abode that up to then had drifted around the house were assigned somewhere permanent; a corner, a shelf, a drawer…a position in this showroom of utter pathos. The last thing I touched was that pink cotton cardigan, for some reason. It hung at an angle from the chair in her studio until right up to my penultimate day in the house. One thing I found myself unable to touch was that lemon yellow nightgown that hung from a hook in the bathroom. I’d walk past it, to my left as I came in, several times a day as I went in for a shower or to brush my teeth. It was short and light and skimpy; I’d seen her wear it many times and to see it hang there, unattended, day after day, was a torturous reminder of what I felt she was intentionally drowning.

My last day in that house was a whirlwind of frantic activity. Right before I left the place for good I felt compelled to take something of hers with me, I’m still not quite sure why. My hand dived into the top drawer and by chance it came back with some black satin panties of hers. This was quite by chance and certainly not engineered by me in a conscious way; I really don’t think there was anything cryptically sexual about it. I stuffed them into my back pocket and soon after left Muntaner 88 for good. In my new flat I buried them at the back of a drawer full of my boxers and forgot about them for almost two years. Later on, in a fit of rage at her, I dug them out and threw them in the bin with the cat shit. How I came to loath her and her cold, indifferent bovine gaze.

I was in my local supermarket just the other day, faffing around picking fruit and vedge and milk, as you do, to the sound of their usual mixed tunes of naff Catalan soft rock. Then Tina Turner came on with a cover of Tom Wait’s “Missing You” from 1984, I think. I seem to remember that track on that “Now 4 or 6” double cassette I was given for Christmas that year. His version is sentimental and limp-wristed but her cover is, that soft sentimental rock posture notwithstanding, quite a bit better and full of all that frothing, gut-felt afro energy of hers. I suddenly had a vision of that sweet Dominican girl with a deep voice that works one of the tills blaring her lungs out to that song in bittersweet melancholy. Yes I succumbed to a moment of utter “cheese”; and so what! I had not felt this for a long time but I felt overwhelmed by a rush of warmth; as if things might yet work out for the best.