The Telling

fatigue. I wiped my free hand across my face, wondered what he could see there. I’d rinsed my skin quickly with cold water, taken deep shaky breaths to calm myself, but my face still felt sore and exposed. I willed him not to notice.
    Because it all seemed different now. The air was softly thrumming , my head was swimming; everything seemed charged, every molecule of the place vibrating on a new frequency. I was thinking of the records reproduced on microfiche like tiny X-rays, the microfiche stuffed into envelopes and crowded into card-files. I was thinking what mine and Mark’s would come to show eventually , if someone encountered them in a hundred years; how it wouldn’t add up to anything like our lives. How we could have decades or a week or minutes left, but one day it would all be over, and irretrievable, all those moments unrecorded and gone for ever. And I knew there was just this. Just the moment, the fragile, vulnerable moment.
    I put my arms around him. I remember lifting my face to kiss him, and the way his face softened into tenderness. The feel of his cropped hair. Eyes closed on the darkness of tongue, and lip, and coursing blood.
    He broke away. ‘I missed you.’
    ‘I’m sorry.’
    ‘I missed you. Jesus, Rache; I’ve missed you.’
    The smell of him: coffee, Eau Par Kenzo , mint. The taking of hands and the climbing of the stairs, each tread marking a deepening conspiracy between us. The smile that he caught from me, and offered me back. The peeling off of clothes. Skin, and the press of his mouth on mine. I remember my stomach muscles contracting, my breath caught. The warm silk of his skin. It could have been before; before all of it, before Mum and before Cate, when there was just us. And now, for a moment, there was nothing else but us.
    Afterwards, I lay looking up through the uncurtained window, at the sky as it darkened to deep night, as the stars pricked out. I felt grateful for this. He lay next to me, his hand on my belly, just above the scar, his head on my arm. He slept. I watched him sleep. He was so beautiful.
    *
     
    In the morning I dressed without waking him, made coffee and brought it up to him. I put the tray on the floor and sat down on the edge of the bed. I skimmed my hand over his hair, kissed his cheek with dry lips. He stirred; I reached down and lifted his coffee cup. He leaned up on an elbow. The covers rumpled. He looked gorgeously soft with sleep. He took the cup, rubbed his face and smiled at me.
    ‘Thanks,’ he said.
    I got back into bed fully clothed. We drank coffee. The distant sounds of livestock, birds.
    ‘Odd,’ he said, ‘waking up without a radio.’
    ‘I like the quiet.’
    He was quiet for a moment, as if listening. ‘So,’ he said after a while, ‘what’s the plan?’
    ‘You go back today,’ I said carefully. ‘I’ll follow soon as I’m done.’
    ‘But –’ He sat up, slopped coffee over his hand and on to the sheets. ‘Shit. Shit.’
    I reached to take the cup from him, but he moved away, set it down on the windowsill.
    ‘You need to run that under the tap. It’ll hurt.’ I reached for his hand. He pulled it away.
    ‘I thought you were coming with me. I thought, last night –’
    I heard the certainty in my own voice. ‘Soon as I get this sorted out.’
    ‘What about Cate? Jesus Rache, what about your daughter? Don’t you think you’ve left her long enough?’
    My voice edged itself with guilt. ‘It won’t take much longer.’
    ‘She needs you.’
    ‘She doesn’t need me doped up on tranks.’
    ‘Do you think I want that?’
    I considered this for half a second too long: he narrowed his eyes at me.
    ‘Sometimes I think you just want me to be okay,’ I said.
    ‘ Just ?’
    ‘I mean –’
    ‘If that’s what you think –’
    He swung his legs out of bed and grabbed his T-shirt off the floor. He pulled it on, the fabric tensing drum-tight as he pushed his arms through, softening to ripples as he tugged it down over his belly.
    ‘I mean, it’s not something that can just be fixed,’ I said. ‘There’s no magic pill that’ll make it all better.’
    ‘I know,’ he said. He sat there, half-covered, half-naked, and rubbed a hand over his hair. He shook his head, and his speech came falteringly, as if he didn’t know what he thought, and was waiting for the words to tell him.
    ‘Sometimes I just feel that you’re disappearing,’ he said. ‘That you’re making yourself fainter and fainter and more and