The Telling (14 page)

“You’ve got someone coming for the furniture?”

“Yep.” I stood up, walked past him, into the kitchen, started wiping up the crumbs. “There’s this great charity. It’s all under control.”

Cate woke us in the night, wailing at the unfamiliar dark. Mark had lunged out of bed before I’d even really surfaced. I could hear them from across the landing; his shush, shush, shush, her wet retreating gasps and sighs as she settled back to sleep.

I didn’t sleep again. The dark was pixellated, swimming, like a television screen when the sound’s turned down and the signal’s gone. On Sunday, with the car crammed with Mum and Dad’s stuff, I’d be following the rump of the silver Mazda down the M6, and the cottage would settle into bright dusty emptiness again. I lay watching the shadows in the bookcase shrink, its shape become definite as the room filled with morning light. The air
seemed to seethe, to swarm like bees. I turned to look at Mark, his face soft with sleep. How could he sleep, how could anyone sleep through this?

It was bright full day and I had been lying awake for hours when he stirred and reached for me. I huddled close, lay with my cheek pressed to the warm cotton of his T-shirt, my bare leg slipped between his legs. I felt him breathe. No alarm clock, no sound from Cate. No hurtling rush towards the day. The scent of his skin, warm and sleepy. He shifted onto his side, his arm laid loosely over me, and I looked at him, his long lashes, the grey shadows underneath his eyes, the still-faint lines at their corners. The slight fall of flesh towards the pillow, his skin loosening already with the years. He used to be such a boy. I leaned up and kissed him on the lips. I retreated, but his arm squeezed tighter and held me there. He kissed me back. We shifted together, pressed close, him waking into the kiss, me forgetting the static, forgetting the room, forgetting that Cate was just across the landing; I was lost in the tender wet of inner lip, the graze of a tooth that made me push harder against him, kiss him harder.

The way his nails grazed my ribs made me stretch. My hand cupped his hipbone, where it surfaces to press against the skin. His fingertips scraped across my belly, slid down to my underwear, then underneath. His fingertips dipped into me, and the kiss ended, and his face was pressed into my neck, and he was murmuring something I couldn’t hear. Then the heel of his hand pressed down onto my lower belly. It pushed against the scar. I went still and was back in it; beyond being touched. I was crouched at the side of the bed, gripping the cold metal frame, a strap around my belly just where the contractions are, and I’m
desperate to move it because if I move it it will hurt slightly less, but every time I touch it she shoves my hand away, resettles the strap back over the crushing pain. There’s a phrase from a poem I’ve half-forgotten, it’s going around and around in my head, and I know it’s not the right words but I can’t shake the real ones clear:

just the worst time of the year

for a baby, and such a cold baby

The baby’s heartbeat stutters on the monitor, it stammers almost to a halt, kicks up again. And the midwife, who I’ve never met before, says You have to let yourself give birth, you have to give yourself over to it, you have to give yourself completely, and I know what she means; she means, You won’t let this child be born. I want my mum, I really want my mum. And I am failing. Failing before I’ve even begun.

“Mark,” I said.

“Dad-ee!”

“Shit.”

“I’ll go.”

His hand slipped out from my underwear. I rolled out of bed.

“You make the coffee,” I said. “You’ll have to use the teapot.”

Cate was straining for the door, leaning against the side of the travel cot, her face pink, yelling for her daddy. Her face softened when she saw me and she reached her arms up for me to lift her. I swung her up and set her on my hip; she glued herself to me. I carried her through, her nappy damp against my arm.

We got back into bed. She settled into the dip between us,
made staccato observations, pointing at the bookcase, the window, tracing the blue mountains and valleys of the bedspread with her hands, tapping on my arm when she felt my attention was drifting. Her hand on my arm was pale, plump, almost luminous. Mark brought up two mugs of coffee, and Cate’s blue spouted cup half-filled with milk. We sat in bed, propped up against the headboard; me, Cate, and Mark, facing out across the room at the bookcase. Mark hadn’t commented on it, seemed hardly to have noticed it. Cate’s nose was squashed against the lid of her cup. I could hear her muffled breathing, her sucking and swallowing.

“So what’s the plan?” Mark said.

Sleep had crushed his hair on one side, pressed it upwards against his skull. He smiled, showing the lines around his slate-blue eyes. The T-shirt was loose and sagging at the throat, exposing an edge of collar bone, and honey-coloured skin. He’d had that T-shirt from before I’d known him. I remembered it when it was still day-wear; it was part of the happy acquisition of detail, part of coming to know the stuff that made up who he was. I remembered it from sex in the hallway, pulled up urgently so I could press myself against his skin.

“The plan?”

I reached over the side of the bed, put my coffee cup down on the floor; Cate clambered onto me, crushed my left breast with an elbow. I straightened up and shifted her to sit upright on my lap. Her toes looked cold. I cupped them in my hands to warm them.

“We should do something, go somewhere,” he said. “We don’t often get the chance, not as a family.”

“The Park,” Cate said grandly, and grinned up at me.

“There’s no park here, sweetheart.” My eyes unaccountably filled with tears. I ran my fingers up her ribs, digging gently, tickling. “No parks, just fields.”

“But there’s bound to be something,” Mark said.

Cate laughed at my touch. A big wet open-mouthed laugh. She wriggled and clamped her arms to her sides, but made no attempt to get away.

“Whatever you want to do,” I said. “We’ll do whatever you want to do.”

I stopped tickling her, ran my hands over her hair, brushing it off her face. Her curls were tangled, ratty at the ends; they’d never been cut. She leaned her head away, complained, climbed out of my arms and onto her daddy.

It was a cool grey day; no threat of rain or hint of sunshine. We drove to an open farm, about five miles from the village. Mark had spotted the brown tourist signs the previous night. We took his mother’s car. He drove and I looked out of the window. High hedges blurred inches from my face; a tattered white carrier bag whisked past; a sudden gateway gave onto a glimpse of green field, green-yellow moorland rising up towards the sky, scabs of exposed white stone. Then the blur of hedgerow again, a sliver hubcap, a crushed blue beer can.

The place was busy with parents and small children. They clotted at open barn doors, disappeared down alleyways and around the sides of buildings, lingered around the dog-pen, pressing up against the chicken wire to stare into the dark kennel at the back. There was a couple there with two young boys. The adults wore
light Gore-Tex jackets and all-terrain walking shoes; the father carried a neat little rucksack. Their children, two solid boys in clean wellingtons and matching blue anoraks, peered solemnly into the darkness of the kennel. I held Cate on one hip, her skirt riding up, her little patent shoes dangling mud onto my jeans. Mark was in his suit jacket, talking about the Arctic Monkeys. My Converse were worn so thin that I could feel every pit and pebble, every ridge in the concrete. We are children, I thought; we will never be grown up.

Cate struggled; I let her down. She ran ahead, her little legs fat in their stripy tights, and we followed her. Mark caught my hand, and held it.

Piglets skittered through the yard like women in high heels. A horse leaned its head over a stable door and blew through its nose. I scooped Cate up to show her the horse’s silky muzzle, grasping her with one arm around her belly, the other under her bottom. The warm comforting smell of stables, of ammonia and horse. Mark leaned beside us, arms folded across his chest, watching us.

“They’ve got pony rides,” he said. “Shetland ponies.”

“If you fancy it, love,” I said, “you go right ahead.”

Mark laughed. There was just a glance, but I caught it, saw its appraising edge. I set Cate down on her feet again, and we followed her along the rippled concrete pathways between the barns and sheds. Huddles formed at doorways, broke apart, families moving off along their separate trajectories. We leaned on a barrier to watch the piglets suckle, the sows like great fleshy feeding stations, lying on their sides, motionless but for the roll of an eyeball, the flap of an ear. A box of yellow chicks basked under
light bulbs. In a barn, lambs butted at their mothers’ udders, a calf stood uneasily on slender legs; the cow kept her head down, turned away. Blood and membrane and mucus hung from her back end. Cate pointed, frowned wisely, didn’t know what to say.

“Let’s see what else there is,” I suggested.

Back in the main yard, Cate tottered over to the kennels. The Gore-Tex family had gone. She hunkered down to peer in, her pinafore dress lifting up, her backside sticking out. We followed her, crouched at her side to look in through the wire mesh. In the darkness of the kennel, a collie lay on newspaper. Her belly was turned towards us; puppies squirmed over each other to get at her teats. The dog looked back at us, her eyes wide and wet with anxiety.

We bought Cate a Mini Milk in the café and coffee for ourselves. I forgot to get napkins; Mark went back for them, tucked one into Cate’s pinafore, mopped her chin with another. Afterwards, Mark swooped her out of the highchair, set her down on the floor, and hitched up her tights. They must have been sagging all morning, by now the crotch was down around her knees. He straightened up, didn’t look at me; I think he must have been waiting for me to do it.

Cate was sleeping in the next room. I sat on the floor, staring at the heap of my parents’ possessions, with an almost superstitious unwillingness to do anything, even to move. I could hear Mark downstairs, rattling around in the kitchen, opening and shutting drawers and cupboards, unable to find something. I felt a thin bright thread of resentment at his sending me up here. Dinner in
half an hour, he’d said maybe fifteen minutes ago. I mustered the will to lean forward and drag a shoebox towards me. I lifted the lid and took out one of the paper-wrapped bundles. I peeled away the paper. The things inside were slim, heavy for their size; they clinked together. Underneath the newspaper there was dark blue tissue paper, still sealed with shop-counter Sellotape. I picked at it; the paper tore and I pulled the rest away. A pair of blue-and-white ceramic candlesticks. I turned them over; the green Oxfam label was still stuck to the base of one of them; I had an image of her in the High Street, cheeks flushed, swinging into the Oxfam shop with a bleep of the bell, to buy ethically sourced candlesticks for her country cottage. Such small domestic victories made her disproportionately happy. The next package I unwrapped was lighter, but in the same deep blue tissue paper. A pair of creamy beeswax candles; I raised them to my nose, but they’d lost their scent with time. I brought them and the candlesticks downstairs. I set them on the mantelpiece.

Mark had his back to me, grating Parmesan. He didn’t seem to notice, didn’t comment on the candles. We ate pasta and tomato sauce. That night we slept curled on our sides, our backs to each other.

Their bags were packed, the travel cot folded; it had all been transferred out to the car. I had my clothes and books to pack up. I had to bundle up the crockery, the china, start bringing whatever we were keeping down from the box room and out to the cars. Start slinging the rest into the bin.

“I’ll get Cate out from under your feet,” he said. “We’ll go up
to the shop and buy a paper. Give you a chance for a last look around.”

He kissed me on the cheek, then he scooped her up, and they were gone.

I’d forgotten that there was a shop. I just stood in the living room, looking at the pewter jug of limp daffodils, the shiny patches on the sofa arms, the grey trails across the carpet, alert for a hint of static, but there was nothing. Birdsong. Cate’s high twittering voice as they walked away up the village street. Nothing more.

I brought down the brown suitcase and the shoebox. I put them in the boot of Mark’s car. I heaved the clothes out of the wardrobe and laid them on the bed. I threw the Radox and the soap into the bin. I sat down on the edge of the bath. I fished the soap out again, turned it over and over in my hands, looking at the crevasses and canyons, the grey streaks through the yellow, feeling the palm-smoothed shape. I set it back on the edge of the basin. I went downstairs and started on lunch.

They came back. Cate was all fresh air and smiles; Mark glanced around the room, taking it all in: the candlesticks, the jug, the nothing-very-much-achieved between his going and his coming back. He looked at me, an enquiring crease to his brows. I avoided it, focusing hard on making sandwiches.

Cate was pushing her toy car around on the living-room floor. It beeped and flashed as she scooted it across the carpet. She made a wet brumming sound with her lips. Suddenly the air was bubbling with electricity. My arms were rough with goose bumps.

“Don’t you feel that?” I asked Mark.

Mark was leaning thoughtfully against the breakfast bar; he watched me pluck the stalk from a tomato.

“What? Is it too noisy? Shall I get her a quieter toy?”

I shook my head. “It’s all right.”

“So,” he said carefully, “it’s not done, is it?”

I glanced up at him. I could feel the press of the tomato flesh between my fingers. It felt uneasy, faintly unclean.

“Not nearly,” he added.

“Mark—”

He shook his head and closed his eyes. He let a breath go.

“It’s not been easy,” I said.

“I don’t know why you even—no one asked you to.”

“Dad, though; he’s not great—”

“And you are?”