jug if he’s desperate.
‘Hold my hand. Don’t let go.’
Every time I close my eyes, I fall. Endlessly falling.
Forty-two
All qualities are the same – the light through the curtains, the faraway hum of traffic, the
boiler rush of water. It could be groundhog day, except that my body is more tired, my skin more
transparent. I am less than yesterday.
And
Adam is in the camp bed.
I try to sit up, but can’t quite muster the energy. ‘Why did you sleep down there?’
He touches my hand. ‘You were in pain in the night.’
He opens the curtains just like he did yesterday. He stands at the window looking out. Beyond
him, the sky is pale and watery.
we made love twenty-seven times and we shared a bed for sixty-two nights and that’s a lot of
love
‘Breakfast?’ he says.
I don’t want to be dead.
I haven’t been loved this way for long enough.
Forty-three
My mum was in labour for fourteen hours with me. It was the hottest May on record. So hot I
didn’t wear any clothes for the first two weeks of my life.
‘I used to lay you on my tummy and we’d sleep for hours,’ she says. ‘It was too hot to do
anything but sleep.’
Like charades, this going over of memories.
‘I used to take you on the bus to meet Dad in his lunch break and you’d sit on my lap and
stare at people. You had such an intense look about you. Everyone used to comment on it.’
The light is very bright. A great slab of it falls through the window and la nds on the bed. I can
rest my hand in sunshine without even moving.
‘Do you remember when we went to Cromer and you lost your charm bracelet on the beach?’
She’s brought photos, holds them up one by one.
A green and white afternoon threading daisies.
The chalk light of winter at the city farm.
Yellow leaves, muddy boots and a proud black bucket.
‘What did you catch, do you remember?’
Philippa said my hearing
would be the last thing to go, but she didn’t say I’d
see colours when
people talk.
Whole sentences arc across the room like rainbows.
I get confused. I’m at the bedside and Mum’s dying instead of me. I pull back the sheets to
look at her and she’s naked, a wrinkled old woman with grey pubic hair.
I weep for a dog, hit by a car and buried. We never had a dog. This is not my memory.
I’m Mum on a pony trotting across town to visit Dad. He lives on a council estate, and me and
the pony get into the lift and go up to the eighth floor. The pony’s hooves clatter metallically. It
makes me laugh.
I’m twelve. I get home from school and Mum’s on the doorstep. She has her coat on and a
suitcase at her feet. She gives me an envelope. ‘Give this to your dad when he gets home.’
She says, ‘I could write a story for one of those true story magazines,
about how hard it was to
leave you. I don’t want you thinking it was easy.’
when I was twelve I looked Scotland up on a map and saw that beyond the Firth were the
Islands of Orkney and I knew they’d have boats that would take her even further away than that
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