Twelve Months and a Day

by Louisa Young

Genres: Paranormal; Contemporary Romance; Paranormal Romance

Synopsis

People die. Love doesn’t.

‘A bitter-sweet pang in my heart’ Monique Roffey

‘A beautiful book. Insanely romantic and utterly convincing’ Julie Myerson

‘A wonderful and inventive novel, sorrowful and hopeful in equal measure. It was a true pleasure to read’ Miranda Cowley Heller

‘Louisa Young is the great chronicler of romantic love and the pain of its loss’ Linda Grant

‘Heart-stoppingly romantic… A lovely, moving, ultimately hopeful read’ Mirror

‘What a writer… so beautifully earthed in the everyday. Terrific’ Elizabeth Buchan

‘A modern day Truly Madly Deeply… Rasmus and Roisin both lose their partners, but the ghosts of Nico and Jay stay, unable to leave their loved ones alone as the broken-hearted pair find comfort in each other. Beautifully written, this is a haunting love story – literally’ Best magazine, Must-Reads

‘A skilfully calibrated love-after-death tale, it’s a four course feast of hearts broken, hearts mended, of songs, laughter, old regrets and fresh desire, that demands a major film deal’ Patrick Gale

‘A wonderful novel, charming and surprising, filled with loss and its triumphant opposites’ Susie Boyt

‘Thoughtful, philosophical and clever, it is also funny, and full of poetry, and powered by an unflagging and irresistible belief in the redemptive power of love’ Perspectives magazine

Rasmus and Jay, Róisín and Nico – two beautiful, ordinary love stories, cut short by death. Jay and Nico don’t even believe in ghosts, yet they seem to be… still here. Still in love with Rasmus and Roísín. And maddeningly powerless.

Both are incapable of leaving the living alone: Jay plays matchmaker, convinced that Rasmus and Róisín can heal each other; Nico, plagued by jealousy, doesn’t agree.

Rasmus and Róisín are just trying to navigate their newly widowed lives.

But all four of them are thinking the same thing: what is love, after death? What is it for? And what are we to do with it?

Release date: January 31, 2023

Publisher: G.P. Putnam's Sons

Print pages: 384

Sample

Bloody Boats

FEBRUARY

London

róisín kennedy—thirty-three, observant, clever, a slight rockabilly look to her (blue-tipped hair, at the moment, and a little fringe)—was feeling good in the pale sunshine of the gastropub garden. She and her fiancé, Nico Triandafilides—thirty-six, nicely shaved, clean white shirt, quite the lad even on a Saturday lunchtime—hadn’t seen much of each other that week. He’d been working nights and she’d had a deadline in the editing suite. They hadn’t been getting on that well: for three months they’d been on a promise to discuss whether or not they wanted to have a child, though it was something neither of them actually wanted to talk about. They each thought that the other felt differently about it to them and was secretly upset. They were both wrong, and therefore they were both, secretly, upset. So this long-weekend morning of unexpectedly hot sex and breakfast out was bloody lovely.

It was the first sunny morning of springtime: too early for the crocuses, but the unmistakable secret sign had gone out. The light was a breath lighter; even London’s sooty black walls and spit-raddled gray curbstones had an air of imminence. When the breeze lifted your hair, the sun was almost warm on your skin. The swans in the park had started with the neck-coiling; there was mimosa on the flower stalls. She was having avocados and stuff; he was going the full English, with triple espressos and extra black pudding.

“Funniest thing this week?” she cued him, their old habit, a guaranteed mood-enhancer—mood-changer if need be—and that started up the run of stupid jokes. One of her many sisters, Nell, had pointed out that the term “Leider-hosen”—like Lederhosen, the well-known and arguably regrettable dungaree-style Alpine leather shorts, only with an extra i—meant, in German, literally, “regrettable trousers.” This alone provoked some hilarity. “Yeah, I’ve had a few pairs of them in my time,” Nico said, and they remembered one brown tweed suit that had made him look like a confused sheep farmer.

“Or an Irish intellectual,” Róisín had said kindly.

“Irish!” Nico squawked, which was fair enough as he really couldn’t have looked more Greek, from his brown eyes and hairy chest to his quizzical mouth and not-very-secret desire to have a mustache like his granddad’s.

“So does that make Lieder-hosen trousers for singing classic German folk songs in?” Nico said, and it went downhill.

Lido-hosen, she suggested, for urban swimming.

“You could wear them when you go to Crouch End,” he said. “With Lilo-hosen to change into, for wearing on your lilo. Inflatable, maybe.”

Lipo-hosen, she suggested, which make you thinner.

“We don’t need them,” he said. “Lager-hosen, for drinking beer in! Indistinguishable from the original Lederhosen.”

“Luger-hosen,” she said, “with a built-in holster.”

Wader-hosen, with long wellies attached for fishing. Yoda-hosen, Data-hosen, Gator-hosen, and make it snappy. Hater-hosen, for Twitter trolls; Mater- and Pater-hosen for Latin teenagers to address their parents; Straighter-hosen, if you’re going for the skinny-leg look. They were in such hysterics by then that people turned to look. All those couples with nothing to say to each other after fifteen years, glancing across at the couple in fits of giggles. It wasn’t because the jokes were that funny, because obviously they weren’t. It was just that they were having such a lovely time. He’d even rolled up his sleeves, pretending they were by some sunlit blue bay in Ithaca, at Frikes in the morning sun, with bitter coffee and baklava—God, summer, so far away—and then something in the sound of his laughter changed and she was calling out.

Twenty-one minutes while she and the barmaid took turns giving him CPR, till the ambulance came. Paramedics who didn’t know that he was one of them. But everybody knew that it was too long. Her eyes were still full of the tears of laughter he’d reduced her to. She didn’t feel it was right for him to die while her hair was this stupid blue. She wanted to kiss him but once the pros arrived, she couldn’t get near him for equipment. CPR, our last kiss.

After a while, alone and almost furtive by the trolley in A&E, she took her father’s wedding ring from her forefinger and put it on his finger, third finger, left hand. And she took his stupid rock ’n’ roll silver skull ring and put it on her own.

“I do,” she tried to say. “You do too.”

They’d been going to. He’d actually proposed the day they met: in the mudbath of a Glastonbury crowd bouncing around to the Fratellis. Nico had intervened when a drunk stranger was being difficult during “Chelsea Dagger” (“Listen,” he’d said. “Go away.”), and the resultant joshing ended up with him proposing to her. A year later he’d given her a diamond. No mud. But they’d never got round to the actual wedding. It seemed absurd, actually getting married. But a romantic revelation had crept up on them.

This was love. This every day. This supporting each other. Me supporting him, mostly, she often thought, but you know. The diamond fitted snugly now with the skull, like a tiny flower behind its ear. Holding it on.

---

◆ ◆ ◆

she stood on the deck of the launch in the black-and-white Dalmatian-print fake-fur coat she had decided was just the thing for the occasion. Well, what the hell do you wear? she thought. To denote courage, devil-may-care desperation, determination, I’m going to make it through today, I am, it’s required.

She’d cut her hair, because she didn’t know what to do: slaughtered the peroxide strands with the blue tips and the little tumbling fringe; sent it to the cancer charity for children. Her head now wore a soft fuzz of its natural dark brown and she’d a feeling she looked like Sinéad O’Connor back in the day. Sinéad was a lovely-looking woman, but it wasn’t what she wanted people to be thinking about when they were shouldering his coffin to the boat. Still, she’d done it now, so.

To the northeast she saw the red-and-white lighthouse of the Needles standing proud against blue sky. Southwest was the wide horizon down to the Atlantic. Behind her, a hundred people on a bright, terrible, unseasonably sunny morning out on the Solent in boats, all saying “I had no idea he wanted to be buried at sea!” But that’s the good thing about dying young. Lots of friends still around to come to your funeral. Look, darling, they all came! And they’re all in bloody boats!

Who knew!

She’d let his mum arrange it all. She was hardly going to make a fuss when Marina was ringing her wanting to know if she thought it would be all right, as there was no grave in the earth, to ask the sea-burial people if they could throw the grains of wheat into the sea, or should they just do it without saying anything? Róisín had no opinion about that.

Nobody knew where his will was.

Lots of his family were there, lighting candles in loaves of bread, and keening. Twenty-three of hers. Declan with the good voice sang “The Parting Glass”; Dmitri with the even better voice sang the one about how he gave her rosewater and she gave him poison . . . The works. He died. Damn you, you utter bastard, darling—Cavafy was recited, of course: “Ithaka.” Kind of compulsory. Don’t hurry the journey at all, better if it lasts for years . . . She hardly heard it; there was nothing in her to consider how inappropriate that was. And Tennyson: Sunset and evening star, And one clear call for me! And may there be no moaning of

the bar, When I put out to sea . . . The kind men in uniform put the lilies aside and flicked the flag away. Nico’s coffin—plain new wood, heavily weighted—had been drilled through with more holes than she had expected. It was so quick! The men tipped it into the sea, green and choppy here, mercury-silver in the distance, bloody sea, you can’t trust it, and it sank. She wasn’t crying, because she didn’t want to set people off, to raise the water level. She watched the bubbles swaying as they rose. Goodbye. Aντίο φίλε μου. Slán.

Everyone else cried anyway, friends and relations, throwing flowers on the water. Gulls appeared from nowhere and wheeled beautifully among them. The boat circled, and for a moment she thought she felt a hand on the back of her neck. She jumped—but there was nobody.

Someone put a glass of whiskey in her hand. She hurled it overboard, toward him.

Why did you die? But she knew why he died. Dying is what people do, who drink and smoke and argue and work all the hours God sends and, it turns out, have an undiagnosed heart condition. And anyway it was her fault. Making him laugh so much.

Even she realized that was stupid. It’s normal to think it’s your fault but that really is stupid.

---

◆ ◆ ◆

róisín lay in bed on her back. No position comfortable. Her body had knotted itself up in response to the absence of his. “Where are you?” she cried. “For God’s sake, Nico, where are you?”

She did the usual human things. She lit candles, so his spirit if it was wandering about would have a light to see by. She went to Mass! Which wasn’t like her, but there’s nothing like death to turn you to religion. The Hail Mary hadn’t looked so attractive for decades. Pray for us now and at the hour of our . . . She stood in the aisle of Sainsbury’s on Fortis Green Road, staring at the bottles of San Pellegrino she used to get for him when he was cutting down on booze, and at bottles of ketchup she needn’t buy anymore because it was him that liked ketchup. Supermarkets were comforting. She came out with three kinds of cream cheese and no washing-up liquid.

She went over to the Ladies’ Pond on Hampstead Heath for her usual Sunday swim, no Nico at the Men’s Pond, no coffee together afterwards, put on her little neoprene socks and gloves and her woolly hat, all so black against her white, white skin, and prepared to slip into the cold, forgiving water. But the ponds drain to the river which goes to the sea . . . She dived in off the

steps and thought about staying there, underwater, in the murk; the natural animal feeling of it, and the strange gleams of Old Testament light.

As she came up, a robin made a side-head special-face at her from the fence.

In the changing room she stared at herself in the mirror. Her face so round and pale, her eyes so round and blue, her little mouth. Everything was normal, except for everything.

Her friends were being fantastic. Her sister Nell rang five times a day. “You can’t live on alcohol and marzipan,” she said. “You’ve to eat vegetables. Vegetables. In soup or something.” Vegetable soup made Róisín cry.

“How are you doing?” Nell asked. “What’s going on?”

“Dame Helena Handcart has introduced Monsieur Shit to Madame Fan,” Róisín said.

“Ohhhh,” said Nell.

“I looked up what happens without the will and guess what it said? It said: ‘The following people have no right to inherit where someone dies without leaving a will: unmarried partners.’ ”

“It’ll turn up,” said Nell.

“Maybe,” Róisín said faintly.

She didn’t do anything about it. It was surprisingly easy. For a bit. Then at four in the morning she’d wake up terrified.

At work, her kind colleagues made sympathetic side-head at her like the robin. There’d been white envelopes on her desk, like for a birthday or when you leave. One card at home had a mauve iris on it, and glitter. At first she’d opened them, because she wanted to read the nice things people had to say about him. She’d laughed at how they’d found nice things to say even though he could be a difficult sod. “Nico was one of a kind”; “Such a character”; “I never knew anybody quite like him.” Just as well, in some ways, she’d thought.

It turned out lots of people had suffered heartbreaking loss. The most surprising people! The very nerdiest of the IT boys who worked downstairs came shyly to her with a small book of so-called poems to save your life, and told her about his boyfriend Anwar at school. She’d had no idea there was so much death around. You too, huh. Her boss, Ayesha, brought her a cup of tea and said, “You take your time.” Róisín remembered the cup of tea the nurse had brought her. She went home.

---

◆ ◆ ◆

“nell,” róisín said on the phone. “You know how he’d always text me, all day, whatever was going on, and now he doesn’t—so I think something’s happened to him, even though

something has happened to him, I know that perfectly well, but my thoughts are just . . . are just . . . so am I being an eejit?”

Nell said, “You’re in bits still. Have you had something to eat yet today?”

“Marzipan . . .” Róisín murmured. She felt she was boring her friends and her family with her grief; that they would like her to start getting over it. “Mam wants me to come home for a bit.”

“Do you want to?”

“NO!” Róisín yelped.

“Don’t, so.”

It wasn’t that she didn’t love them. But at least five of her siblings would talk in front of her about how terrible it was, their beloved Nico dying. She wanted peace. Nell would come up from Hastings at the drop of a hat. Already had done. Several times.

“What you need to do,” said Nell, “is—”

“I don’t want a counselor,” Róisín said.

“A counselor would be good for you,” said Nell. “But I won’t be dragging you. No, what you want is to meet people in the same boat as you. Have you looked up those bereavement support groups?”

“Fuck off, Nell,” she said. “Would you kindly.”

---

◆ ◆ ◆

she had a sense that he was looking over her shoulder, was just in the other room. There were dreams: one where he’d been putting a small child in the boot of a car. One where they had a glorious adventure running around in ruined cities, jumping off things on lianas, dancing, ending up in a dive bar with Johnny Cash; one where they were kissing on a shining cloud while tiny fish darted around like dragonflies over their heads, and just before she woke, he shrank, tiny, and ran toward her just at the level of her heart, and opened a door in her chest, and walked inside, waving up to her cheerily as he went.

She bunked off work one day because she heard, she swore she heard, his voice saying “Come here to me now, I want you,” so she’d jumped on a train and taken the ferry to the Isle of Wight with an armful of hyacinths, in the rain, and she’d thrown them overboard mid-Channel, thinking about him, waving in the weeds, those are pearls that were his eyes—they’d make terrible pearls, an awful color for a pearl, worse than those shiny purplish ones you’d see on stalls at a craft market that looked like blood blisters, or buboes from the plague. She wanted to think of him being dead because she couldn’t stop thinking about him and the aliveness of him in these thoughts was unbearable. So—physical. She’d smelled his jumper randomly on a bus—a waft of wool and vetiver and the way he had of always smelling of suntan oil. She’d found his T-shirt in her bed, when it had no business being there, though true, she hadn’t yet changed the sheets, and yes of course she knew she should, but he had slept in these sheets. One evening, dancing alone to the radio, drunk in the tiny kitchen they had shared in presumptuous ignorance of what fate had lined up for them, she felt so strongly that he had just slipped into her arms that she hugged him back. Cyndi Lauper was singing, time after time, and on some level—what level? It confused her even now—she was holding him and crying and he was holding her, his arms round her shoulders, the weight of them. She danced with him, a slow rock ’n’ roll, hands stretched out to invisible hands, to and fro, to and fro. Holding her arm up and out to be twirled, spinning lazily back into his nonexistent embrace, stars rolling round her head and a moonshine mood pervading her. Then she’d gone in to bed, muttering prayers from her childhood—Now I lay me down to sleep—If you’re lost—pray for us sinners now and at the hour—I will be there. She tripped over a shoe—one of his, a black Chelsea boot—what was it doing there?—stubbing her toe, and then again there he was, the weight of him on the side of the bed, lying down beside her. She felt his hand on her shoulder, and half asleep she reached up to hold it, a

nd that was so sweet but then she woke, shaking, and ran and hid in the bathroom, and cried. Knowing grief is going to be strange doesn’t stop it being strange.

The following night she sat up late watching YouTube clips of elephants. People were playing Debussy to them on a piano in Thailand. It was very nice, but she was concerned. One elephant was rocking and she wasn’t sure if it was really-digging-this-Debussy rocking, or I-am-going-mad-with-stress-would-you-get-this-piano-playing-twat-out-of-here-with-his-turn-of-the-century-melodic-noodlings rocking. She wasn’t sleeping anyway. She kept remembering the touch on her neck during his funeral, and telling herself she was imagining it, please, brain, could you not. She’d read a book about hallucination and ghosts once. Maybe it was her going mad with the stress. To be honest, her brain was floating on a string a lot of the time.

Elephants do grieve, don’t they? Rationalism’s just another -ism. Who died and made reason king? We’re animals.

This Is Natural

MARCH

Glasgow

rasmus, a musician; a mystery; long, scruffy, and running on empty, was asleep in the chair by his wife Justina’s hospital bed, at the moment she chose—did she choose?—to go. He’d hardly slept those last few days, wide-eyed, watching for it coming.

Chose! What kind of choice was it? She’s thirty-eight.

Was thirty-eight.

They had fought it with every power they had and some they didn’t; they’d spent most of their money and used up all their favors. Every time he and Jay made love they agreed it was probably the third-last time. To avoid the inevitable. Did hearing its hollow footsteps on the path make it any easier? Observing as slow-motion dying takes a young woman in installments; sharing the intense and astonishing closeness given them by the imminence of death. Every marriage needs a project, after all. Theirs: dying.

He would never know. There was nothing to compare it with.

You don’t get two deaths like this in your life. You don’t get two loves like this. Seventeen years together, from their youth; two kids who’d put themselves together out of trouble and loss, and in the course of it sacrificed for each other and saved each other. Life doesn’t allow that to come again. Time doesn’t allow it.

She must have chosen. He hoped she’d chosen. If she hadn’t, he’d let her down.

After all that, he thought, I let you down.

---

◆ ◆ ◆

he knew from experience that Ghanaians do funerals properly, and he knew he wasn’t capable of it. What, put Jay’s body on ice and fly her back to Accra? Coordinate the timing around when fifty different people could come from forty different parts of the world? Lay on what they’d done for her mum for three hundred people he hardly knew, who would all be talking about how he was getting it wrong? Of course he would get it wrong. It was part of his job as obroni husband to get things wrong, so the Aunties would have something to affectionately josh him about. Or, invite everybody here to the island, put the

Aunties in the youth hostel and the shielings and the bird hides, and give them fish and chips every day?

Here he was in their home of seven years, looking at the toaster and feeling puzzled. Before her illness, he’d spent his life in his head, in his studio, in music, whereas Jay had been the local GP. She’d been the one who knew what to do. She’d left instructions. Of course she had. But he was too paralyzed even to take them in—until her brother, Kwame, said: “Just do what you want and need. With Mum and Dad gone, don’t even think about trying to go the full Ashanti.”

Rasmus and Kwame and Efua and Jay had sat together side by side through both those funerals: days and days in gardens and receiving lines and churches. Rows and rows of chairs. Drummers and gifts and choirs and buffets and Jay surreptitiously pouring a bottle of ice-cold mineral water down her cleavage under a gazebo in the punishing heat. “Justina,” observed Auntie Dolores sternly, “can’t take it. She left home and moved to Scotland FOR THE WEATHER!” Kwame and Jay had got him out of wearing cloth like a son-in-law should, and looking a prat with his scrawny shoulders bare. They all knew there was no way he could wrap and wear and carry off a full length of woven kente cloth. There was technique involved, and Rasmus did not have it. “Kente waistcoat,” Kwame had said, and got the Aunties to agree. “Obroni privilege,” Jay had called it, ordering three from her tailor, in all the correct reds and blacks and whites for the different days of the commemorations.

Rasmus blinked as he remembered how Auntie Dolores had kissed her teeth and said: “You know you are obroni now?” and Jay had been hurt.

Seeing himself in the photos later, lined up with his glowing, muscular brothers-in-law, doctors and musicians and IT guys gathered back home from Ontario and Lagos and Bermuda and London, Rasmus kind of wished he’d been bolder, and just stood there white and nerdy, shoulder to shoulder.

She lived in the Outer Hebrides but she still had a tailor in Accra. She belonged everywhere. He—Danish and Argentine by blood, brought up in too many small English towns to count—had only ever belonged deep in music, and by her side.

Jay liked to do things right, and he would have liked to do that for her. But in reality the best he could do was to acknowledge the incompetence that came with grief. Loss was leaving him almost comatose. He knew a little cremation in a Glasgow suburb seemed so small, so cold, for a woman so alive, but he hadn’t even been able to do that himself, and if Kwame hadn’t taken over . . . well, he was grateful. More people came than he’d expected: friends, cousins, patients who came down from the

island. Kwame had found an Ashanti drummer in Edinburgh. Rasmus had agreed to stand, in the Ghanaian manner: let everybody queue up to look at him and shake his hand and share their loving strength. Auntie Dolores had sent prayer cards, with an out-of-focus oval photo of Jay in her graduation outfit. Someone laid them out individually on the seats. All day Rasmus had to turn his eyes away from the sweet smile. It was a radiantly sunny day, Scotland at its unpredictable loveliest, the sky wide, blue and magnificent. Everything he saw shimmered with rainbows refracting in half-shed tears.

The function room at the Victorian pub loomed grand with etched glass and paneling. There was singing, from the Scots, and fried crunchy plantain alongside the pints of heavy and glasses of Chardonnay. He’d worn one of the kente waistcoats—but which one would be correct? Without her to tell him, he didn’t know. Black for the sorrow, red for the red eyes of weeping, white for the clarity of spirit which comes after the burial . . . He chose the black and red.

On the little plane back to the island, his heart rhythm went wrong, because for the first time they weren’t on the same land mass. In Dougie’s car back down from Stornoway, he was unable to say a word. Then he was at home in their stone house by the sea, crying in the shower about the drums, and the cat was standing there looking at him like “What have you done with her, you bastard?”

So he lay in bed, curled up and knotted, gasping, weeping, calling her name. “Where are you?” he whispered. “Jay, where are you?”

For a moment he thought he heard her voice, and he slapped his own head in fury.

---

◆ ◆ ◆

her ashes came back from the crematorium in a cardboard tube as if she were a bottle of whiskey in a duty-free shop. It had a print of a sunset into the sea on it. When Rasmus turned it round, the horizon seemed to go on forever, round and round, a kind of infinity. He turned it upside down to see if it looked like a sunrise. It didn’t.

He couldn’t stand the fucking tube. A woman should not end up in a fucking tube. She shouldn’t end up in—well, she shouldn’t end. That was all.

Later, in their bedroom, he found the carved wooden box they’d bought together at the handicraft market in Accra. Perhaps a woman should end up in a box like this? He hadn’t taken it out

before. He’d looked at none of her things. Now he opened it. Earrings, hair clips, combs. He closed it again. The scent of her.

No, not in there.

You’re meant to scatter them, aren’t you?

She’d said, “Put me on the compost heap” but she hadn’t meant it. She’d meant just “don’t make a fuss.” But funerals are for the living, and the living wanted a fuss.

He went outside to stare at the compost heap, slung there low and overgrown, more of a nettle heap. Every job and chore had been flung down when the demon guest had settled in with them. He turned back to the vegetable patch, on the old lazy beds, where he should be planting things out and sowing seeds. Gruesome handfuls he would be sowing now. Perhaps warriors would spring up, like they did from the dragon’s teeth. Or tulips—or was that from drops of blood? Yes. Scarlet tulips.

What would spring up? Nothing. Nothing would spring up.

In the end he just walked out of the stone-walled yard and down the soft green field and the machair to the wide white beach. The tide was coming in. Near him the sea glowed like pale cold emeralds, further stripes of amethyst and blue streaked the horizon, the headlands were lapping each other in layers, and the sky was eternity. Only Taransay between him and Hudson Bay. But the tide should be going out. The ashes shouldn’t be coming back to him. So he returned to the house, until the water was high. It seemed as right as such a thing could ever be, i.e., extremely and deeply wrong. But Rasmus had had time to think about these things, and knew that however much he yelled her name, she was not coming back, and this was natural, and happened every day, and to everyone.

When he took himself out on the rocks again, the setting sun had thrown a dazzle on the sea. The tide was at its highest, circling listlessly on the sands like a restless dog, and about to decide on its retreat. He stood boldly to take the stupid lid off the stupid tube, ...