Max's bedroom

We have three bedrooms in our house. Rachel had the back bedroom, the smallest and prettiest, overlooking the garden with a lot of original built-in wooden shelves and cupboards. Max had the front bedroom, the biggest, overlooking the street. Victoria and I had the middle bedroom, a not very large room with not much light.

After Max started at university Victoria started to get restless about this, and suggested to Max that we might swap bedrooms with him. He did like to look after his Mum and did recognise that it might not be fair that he still had the biggest bedroom. But still, it had been his room for as long as he could remember.

In early February Victoria decided to stage a putsch. We would swap bedrooms with him. We started redecorating his room. She rang Max and told him. He was a bit grumpy but couldn’t really complain. We moved his bed into the middle of the room, stacked all his things on it, covered it in sheets, and removed his table and shelving. I’d filled all the holes in the walls and woodwork and sugar-soaped it all, then Max died.

It was awful when Rosy got back from India, was told about Max by her mother, came round to our house, went up to his room to weep, found a decorator’s work site, and couldn’t even lie on the bed.

We can’t restore the room to how Max left it, and we don’t want to. We’ll have it as a sitting-room for a bit. We’ve put the shelves back and stacked boxes of his things on them. We moved the bed back to the wall. We shall put up some of his favourite pictures. The table is back in the bay window where he had it, and on it is his computer, which we brought back from Cadiz.

The computer contains masses of photos and video clips (camera and phone) of him and his friends, all full of laddish life and fun. We can sit at his table and see and hear them playing football and mucking about, in London, Newcastle, Cadiz, Brighton, wherever. That can be hard. If it can be done, we shall make some video clips accessible from the blog. In the meantime, his friends are welcome to come and look at what’s on his computer, and take copies.

When he was at home he’d sit at that table and keep an eye on the street and have the window open even in winter to clear the smoke. He’d ceased to accept that ours was a non-smoking household and I had ceased to row at him about it - I just irritated him from time to time by pathetically moaning that he knew he’d have to give it up some time, and better sooner rather than later. To stop the smell spreading to the rest of the house he would wedge his dressing-gown up against the rather big gap under his door. Didn’t really work. The smell still seeped out down the hall.

Not so long ago he admitted to us that another reason he kept his bedroom window open, or at least unlatched, was that he used to climb back into the house through the window when he’d been out too late and forgotten his keys.