The Telling

water, swirled it with a hand. There was a dead spider-plant on the windowsill. The papery transparency of the leaves was beautiful. I picked one off and rolled it between my fingertips. The room filled with steam, the window veiled itself in condensation. I sat down on the edge of the bath to take off my boots. I shivered; a deep muscular shiver, my teeth gritted together. There was a trail of dried mud across the bathroom floor. I remembered the drizzle. The scramble through the woods. Getting back. I looked down at my feet: same boots. Same jeans stuck with dry mud. Same jumper.
    ‘Jesus.’
    I’d not dealt with these basic, animal needs. I’d not noticed my own discomfort. Perched on the bath’s edge, steam rising around me, I bit at the skin beside a thumbnail, tearing away a tiny strip, leaving the flesh bright and oozing. My whole body was clenched tight with cold and fear. What was happening to me?
    The bath was so hot that my nerves misfired, and for a moment the water seemed cold, almost freezing. I eased myself warily into it, onto my knees, and my skin flushed up, almost scalded. I slid my legs out from underneath me to sit, wincing at the heat, and then slowly, carefully I lay down, sweat salty on my upper lip, and it was almost painful.
    My scar looked awful in the water. It flushed up bright pink, bulged at the right side, where the join is not quite right. The water cooled, and I lay on, till it was the temperature of blood. I could only feel its heat by stirring it, by bending a leg, by lifting a hand, by shifting myself higher and then sinking lower in the water. The air was colder than the water. I couldn’t bring myself to get out.
    If something’s broken, you fix it. If it’s torn, you stitch it up. But you always know the mend is there, ready to tear again. You can feel its rawness.
    *
     
    I dressed in clean dry clothes and sat down on the bed, my back against the wall, the street window to my side. I was looking at my hands. I felt too fatigued and apathetic to do much else. The skin was dry and cracked from housework and the weather and the bathwater and neglect. It had already thinned across the backs, tendons rising to the surface like rock through eroding soil. I pinched it; it didn’t spring, it seeped back into place. My hands have become my mother’s hands.
    The stack of bags and boxes in the next room. The daffodils fading in the pewter jug downstairs. The soap by the sink worn to a sliver by cupped palms, cracked and hardened by disuse. It all needed sorting, dealing with, finishing. But first I had to claw my way back towards the beginning, to find a place to start.
    I remembered that Saturday morning, in Waterstone’s. I was pushing Cate through towards the Children’s section. The woman was standing in Crime Fiction, her quarter-profile to me as I came up the central aisle. Her hair was dark and curly and salted with grey and she was slim as a hound, dressed in navy blue, a brown leather bag hanging at her hip, and she was looking down at a book, reading the blurb on the back cover. It was a moment of brilliant instinctive happiness. Mum. I wheeled the pushchair around, headed straight for her. I was going to grab her arm, shake her, scold her. Look, I was going to say, Look at your granddaughter. Look how beautiful she is. But when I touched her, and she turned and looked at me, her face was strange, birdlike , blue-eyed, nothing like Mum: it winded me. I stammered an apology, wheeled the pushchair away; I had to get out of her curious gaze, away from anyone who might have seen. At the back, near the Children’s section, I stopped the pushchair abruptly; I ducked down to kiss Cate, and told her she was my lovely girl, and we wheeled off towards the picture books and I bought her more than we could really afford.
    Mum had been dead just over a year by then. She died on the fourteenth of December. In the days between her death and her funeral, I carried my belly like a medicine ball around the Christmas-rush shops, trying on coats. I didn’t have a decent one to wear to the funeral; my parka was the only thing that would fit over the bump. Nothing fitted, nothing seemed right, anything that was nearly okay was also vastly expensive. I’d come home heavy and sore, my feet and ankles swollen, and Mark would put my feet up on the sofa, and stroke them, and tell me to give up on it. People understood, no one would think twice about it, I should wear whatever felt