The Telling

felt my own face redden. I looked away.
    ‘Do you remember,’ he said, ‘that day at school, I couldn’t say my lesson and I got a thrashing from Forster?’
    ‘That’s a long time ago now, that’s years ago.’ There was a tightness in my throat, making my voice strange, but Thomas didn’t notice anything.
    ‘He said I’d get another thrashing too if I didn’t know it by the next day, and I tried and tried but I couldn’t learn it, nothing was going in, and you met me at the hay barn after school, and the two of us sat there till it was dark, going over and over the lesson.’
    ‘I remember.’
    ‘You must have missed your tea that night; I’ll bet you got into trouble with your mam.’
    ‘No more than usual.’
    ‘The next day, when Forster had me stand up in front of the school and say the lesson, I could say the whole thing without stumbling once, because you’d helped me, and because I knew you were there, in the schoolroom, and were wishing me well.’
    ‘It’s so long ago now, I don’t really –’
    Thomas cut me short. ‘Not so long that I couldn’t tell you every word of that lesson now if you wanted me to, and that was more than Forster could ever do, he could hardly hammer anything into me at all. I’m not quick like you, nothing else has really stuck, but for that one lesson.’
    I walked on in silence at his side, and he said, ‘Lizzy?’ and I looked up at him, and he looked down at me, and he must have read the unhappiness on my face, because his expression changed, and it seemed as if for a moment all awkwardness was gone, and there was something else there, something sore and grown up and strong. A moment passed.
    ‘This isn’t one of your father’s baskets, is it?’ he asked, and I laughed, because my dad’s baskets were a byword in the village, thrown together in half an hour, looking like a jackdaw’s nest, and rarely lasting beyond the job that they’d been made for. This one was as neat as a lady’s braids.
    ‘I made it,’ I said.
    ‘It’s very good.’
    After that we walked on side by side in silence, and after a while he handed the empty basket back to me, and we went on like that, and then some of the lads came up and he fell into talk with them, and then joined them, striding long-legged back to the village, to the public house, and soon he was far ahead and out of sight among the crowd, and I walked on alone.

 
     
     
     
    T he last time it happened, I’d found myself standing in the canned goods aisle, holding a tin of chickpeas, my trolley already half-full of all the usual weekly stuff, Cate in the child-seat mouthing at a bit of baguette. Nothing led up to that moment, no intentions spooled out ahead of me. I just said something cheerful to Cate, and put the tin in the trolley, and pushed it on, around the end of the aisle, into the next: pasta, oils, and vinegars. I got on with the shopping. I paid, drove home, unpacked the groceries, fed Cate her lunch of avocado mush and all the time I was searching for one moment. One clear moment’s memory of before, before the chickpeas in Sainsbury’s and the doughy gummed bit of baguette, and Cate’s drooled-on fist and perfect thoughtful clear wet eyes. I found an image of me at the kitchen table, drinking coffee, staring out of the window at the squirrels as they raided downstairs’ bird table. But it was from the outside; I could see myself sitting there, hunched over one of our blue mugs, my head turned to look out of the window, and I don’t know if it was true. But while I was filling my trolley with the usual stuff, and turning up where I needed to be, and doing the things that needed doing, and finding my way home again – so long as Cate was happy and thriving – there seemed no need to talk about it, no need for anyone to know about the dark space. The blanks I couldn’t fill in.
    This time I surfaced looking at the bookcase, thinking how the wood grain seemed almost rippled, like sand where the tide has pulled away. I had no notion of what led up to that moment, or what should follow next. I was aware of the pressing need to pee, and grasping on to this sensation as if it were a rope that would haul me up, I was on my feet and heading for the bathroom, and pushing at the bathroom door.
    I sat, my head in my hands, and peed for ages. I washed my hands and the soap was veined with grey. I ran a bath. The tap coughed, spluttered, poured scalding water. I tipped Mum’s Radox into the