The Telling

comfortable. I’ll go in tracky bottoms then, I said, and slippers, would that make him happy? Better that than make myself ill, he said. Better that than harm the baby. I told him to fuck off. He said that my mum wouldn’t have minded what I wore anyway, and certainly wouldn’t have wanted me unhappy over it. I cried. He held me, and after a while I felt better. It worked, him doing that. He must have forgotten how easy it was.
    The day before the funeral, Dad brought me the coat, still wrapped in its wardrobe polythene. Empire line, double-breasted, slate-grey wool. There’s a photograph somewhere of her wearing it; she can’t be more than twenty-four. It’s snowing; she’s laughing; shoulders up, hands raised to cup the falling flakes. Dad handed it to me and waited for me to put it on, so I put it on, and his face crumpled and I put my arms around him in the slate-grey sleeves and his face rested on the collar. It was an uneasy moment. She got it when she was pregnant with you, he said. I let go of him, and slid it off my shoulders. It was a little tight, with the extra pregnancy-flesh. I said I didn’t want to spoil it.
    We drove Lucy to the crematorium, via the airport to pick up her boyfriend from the Paris flight. They’d be heading back together on the Sunday; she’d been back and forth almost every week during Mum’s final illness. We’d left too much time and got to the crematorium early. Outside, I shifted and swayed in my good boots as my heels sank into the gravel. The smell of the coat was neutral, dry cleaning and wardrobe lavender, and I felt dragged to the earth by the weight of the baby inside me. Dad arrived with Aunty Val and Uncle Peter. Val squeezed me, saying that she didn’t know what to say. I kept saying, it’s okay, it’s okay, it’s okay, my hand pressed to her back, feeling the padded nylon of her coat, the painful press of her breasts against mine. There was the smell of someone else’s burning in the air; hints of ashes catching in my throat. I saw Lucy, her face buried in Louis’s coat collar, her body slim and straight and dark against the grey of his coat. Dad’s face was bleached. Mark was standing silent nearby, his blue eyes the only colour I remember in that day. He stretched out a hand for me to grab, to pull me to him like a tired swimmer through resisting water. Then I was walking into the crematorium beside him, our hands clasped dry and cold together, the bulge of my belly making me feel grotesque and embarrassed. I was wearing Mum’s coat, unable to catch the scent of her, unable to feel anything at all. Her coffin lay at the top of the aisle, the lid screwed into place. We sat in the pew, and I felt pinned down by gravity, as if I might never get to my feet again. Dad got up to speak, his voice thin; Lucy choked on the poem she had chosen, and I just sat there, swollen and heavy, and didn’t say a word. They’d said that it was fine; no one minded if I didn’t want to speak. People understood. Later, when the coffin rolled off into the darkness and the flames, I remember feeling an uneasy kind of relief. That we were not burning my mother’s body, but burning the sickness out of her.
    Later, Dad had us share out Mum’s jewellery, me and Lucy. She lifted off the rosewood lid, and turn by turn we picked out the pieces from their cushions of pink baize. We laid them out on the counterpane: the charm bracelet that had fascinated us when we were little; the locket with a picture of her father in uniform; an embroidered bronze swimming badge that neither of us could remember winning; earrings and brooches; pendants and beads, dating from her grandmother to last Christmas. I looked up at Lucy, at her clear skin, her greyish eyes pink with tears. I can’t do this, I said, and she shook her head; me neither. We put everything back, neater than she left it. We sat on the counterpane and talked about Dad, and how Dad would cope, what we between us could do for Dad. And then Lucy went back to Paris, and Dad went back to work, and then Cate arrived, and I just got on with it.
    All the time I’d been scrubbing baby bottles clean, sterilizing them, washing my hands again and again till the skin cracked; all the time I’d been boiling kettles, letting them cool, filling the bottles, counting scoops of formula, one for every fluid ounce of water, and losing count, and staring down at the powdery surface of the liquid, and pouring the formula into the sink in a