I hate Sunday mornings. When I wake up today, my eyelids are stuck to my eyeballs and I have obviously eaten play-doh in my sleep judging by the unspeakable shit coating the inside of my mouth.

Despite this, like a switch flicking I am thinking about Manny again. The fact that she is not there any more is completely overwhelming and I can forget about drifting back to sleep. I get up to piss.

I stagger to the toilet, noting along the way that Lize is still curled up asleep on the sofa bed. I empty out what seems like about eight pints of unhealthy-looking urine into the toilet, which for a few seconds takes my mind off the yawning hole in my consciousness. I slouch back to the kitchen and drink a big glass of water, followed by one of fruit juice.

A groan from the sofa bed suggests Lize is now conscious. I decide to make breakfast, thinking about how I wish Manny was over there on the bed waking up with a hangover.

Sausages, bacon, eggs, fried tomatoes and toast, all done on autopilot. Lize stirs, gets up and does her own hangover stuff. When we finally sit down to breakfast we're both practically awake.

Halfway through the meal she pauses from hoovering up the food (she has an astonishing appetite for a small woman), and looks at me while gulping down fruit juice. She knows I'm miles away, but she asks anyway.

'So, are you going to go?'�


By the time the Angel of the North opens her rusty, magnificent arms to me on the outskirts of Gateshead I've been brooding for nearly 200 miles of road trip.

There's nothing like the thrum of wheels on tarmac to send the mind off a-wandering. I oscillate between looking forward to seeing some old friends and then dreading what I'm going to face. I don't know what to think or, to be honest, how to deal with any of this.

Manny and I drove along here many times, but I don't remember any of them. Just the fact that we did so together keeps me from settling my mind. There's an emptiness about what I'm seeing.And now I'm thinking about David as well. A man I have never met, but who has lurked like a wraith in my subconscious ever since...

'I've met someone,'� she had said. Those four sharp syllables had crippled me like spikes in the road.

That was then. And now'� David? Jesus, how would I deal with David now? And his kids? Kids that she and I had planned on having'� until she met David.

Jesus.

There's my exit, signposted for Hexham and Corbridge. The traffic is light for a Saturday afternoon, but I hardly register it really; some obscure lump of brain is doing the driving so the rest can try to juggle memories and unwanted feelings.She always said she wanted an eco-burial, her body returning to the earth and all that.

Northumberland is as good a place as any, but it holds a thousand brutally emotional memories for me. Me and Manny walking, talking, laughing, knowing the other cared.

I blink away the thoughts, feel that thick pressure in my cheekbones that tells me I need to cry. Later. Time enough for crying soon.

Heddon-on-the-Wall falls behind me, and the A69 lopes lazily over the hills, towards Carlisle and the west coast. Down to the left I catch occasional glimpses of the Tyne like shards of sheet metal plate shining in the sun.

I could have caught the train. I remember that first trip we took along this very valley on our first date, uncertain in each other's company as the train bore us into Newcastle from Hexham. And the return journey that night, coyly holding hands, talking about everything. No. Too much again; the way she looked that day comes hurtling at me. The precision of the memory makes my mouth go dry, like that doctor's finger finding the exact, agonising point of the break in my ankle when I was a teenager. I have to stop remembering or I can't survive this.

My phone bleeps and I check it. The coffee shop woman. Doesn't want to see me again. Good. I don't bother replying and delete the message.

Corbridge. Finally. Hexham would be too much at the moment. Tomorrow maybe. Tonight I will be with a friend.

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