The Telling

no.

    *
     
    Having seen Agnes in her throes, I thought I knew how bad it could be, and that I could get through it, but it is always different, and there is no way to know. Agnes was telling me it would be all right, that it would be all right, and she should have known that it was far beyond all right already, and could never be all right again. I wanted to say his name. I just wanted to say his name. I had to bite my lips from speaking it out loud, from shouting out his name with each dark hard squeeze of pain. I wanted him. But I could not say a word. The cowed, shambling, painful steps up to the room, where my mam had spread an old blanket on the floor, and the strange silence of the house, since Dad had died in the winter, and the boys were gone to their masters’. I knelt at the side of the bed, the bookcase looming dark and empty beside me, my brow pressed into the quilt, and I said it to myself, my lips moving where Mam and Agnes and Mrs Skelton couldn’t see them, pressed into the coverlet. Robert James. Robert James. Robert James Moore. Then there was the need to push, a need more overwhelming even than the pain, and the slow burning tear, and then the child was there.
    They wrapped him up, and gave him to me, and he was so odd-looking, his face purple-blue and his head squashed, and I looked at him, the poor ugly little scrap of humanity that he was, and thought, I am going to have to love you, little boy. I am going to have to love you so very much.

 
     
     
     
    T he photographs were all in one bag, wrapped loosely. Some of the frames were newly bought, and held pictures culled out of photograph albums. Most were old and familiar, had been lifted from Mum and Dad’s sideboard, dresser or bedroom wall. The images were etched deep into me from years’ exposure. Dad, Mum, Lucy and me in a rowing boat on a day out at the seaside; I’m about four, Lucy’s two, she’s in navy blue dungarees; Dad’s squinting in the sun, heavily moustached; Mum’s hair is dark as treacle, her skin still smooth and pale, she’s smiling carefully, waiting for the shutter’s click. Lucy and me in school photographs : disastrous fringes and adult teeth too big for the rest of our faces. Nana in the back garden at home, in the sunshine, her hair still salt-and-pepper grey, smiling a perfect false-teeth smile, holding a tiny baby in her liver-spotted arms. The photographs that Mum had selected, the moments of her life that she had wanted to keep, to return to, to experience again. I laid them out on the carpet around me, an array of family images. There were just two pictures left in the bag, their backs turned to me. The first was in an old battered frame, the cardboard backing stuck down with crystalline-brown Sellotape. I lifted it out, half-knowing what it would be. She can’t be more than twenty-four. She’s wearing the coat; the empire-line, double-breasted, slate-grey woollen coat. It’s snowing; she’s laughing; shoulders up, hands raised to cup the falling flakes. She’s beautiful. I found myself smiling back at her. I leaned the picture up against a box, was still smiling at it when I reached in for the last one. I took it out, glanced down at the back of a newish-looking clip frame, its brown hardboard and silver clips still unscuffed and shiny. I realized then that she must have brought the photos here quite recently, perhaps the last time that they came, in a break between treatments. She must have hoped, even then. She must have hoped there would be other times, that there could yet be years to come. I turned the clip frame around in my hands. I saw the picture. Black and white. A frail eggshell skull. Tiny translucent grey bones. The twelve-week scan. The scan of Cate.
    I crushed the picture to me, leaning forwards over it, cramming it into me; I couldn’t breathe. Winded, choking, my lungs heaved out all their air, till I was empty and perfectly still, as if for a moment my heart ceased to beat, my lungs stopped their fluttering . Then, somehow, I drew a breath, a deep ragged breath, full of the smell of old carpet and dust, and curled around upon myself, curled around on the hard-edged picture frame, I began to cry.
    *
     
    It may have been hours later, I don’t know. The day was brilliant, the sky hard blue. I carried the pewter jug out into the garden, blinking, set it down on the low stone wall. My eyes felt raw against the light. I was as exhausted as after labour, my limbs limp and soft as