The Telling

happy to meet up and talk, I’m sure.’
    ‘I’ll do that, if I have the time.’ The words made me glance at my wrist. It was bare still. I had no idea what I’d done with my watch.
    Mrs Davies glanced at her narrow gold watch. ‘It’s a quarter past four,’ she said.
    ‘Thank you.’
    But I didn’t know what day of the week it was. I wanted to talk to Mark, urgently; the fear was like a grey worm in my chest; I could feel it moving, mouthing blindly; but I had to do normal, do cheerful for Mark. I knew what he would say if he caught a whiff of this. I should come home straight away. I should go and see the peeled man. And I couldn’t do that. Not again, not now.
    ‘Thank you,’ I said. ‘Thank you for the tea.’
    ‘Drop in again any time. And I’ll mention you to Pauline.’
    I heaved myself out of my seat, leaving my tea half-drunk.
    Back in the cottage, I grabbed my phone off the breakfast bar and turned it over in my hands. Could I call him? Could I get away with it? I saw the screen; it was blank: the phone was dead. Decision made, for the time being. I took it upstairs to where I’d left the charger, in the dressing-table drawer. I plugged it in at the socket between the dresser and the bookcase, and left it on a low shelf to charge.

 
     
     
     
    IT WAS ONE OF THOSE BRIGHT WINDY DAYS YOU SOMETIMES get even in late May, the kind that make you feel more awake than usual; a good drying day.
    I went straight from my morning’s work to help with the washing, passing home and Agnes’s house to go down the wash-house lane, my clogs clattering over the loose round stones as I went. The clotheslines, looped from post to post across the slope, were almost full; the white linen was brilliant against the green grass and blue sky; dark britches and jackets danced like drunkards. The breeze made sheets billow, shirts fill and flap, made chemises belly out like sails. At a glance, it looked like the Naval Fleet had run aground on our patch of green, and the village was having a party in its honour.
    Aunty Sue and Aunty Edith were outside the wash-house, at the mangles. They dipped and rose with the handles’ turn, muscles proud on their bare arms, sweat patching their bodices. Sue glanced up and saw me.
    ‘Your mam’s in there, she’ll know what’s most needed.’
    It was steamy and hot inside, full of the sour smells of soap and sweat and the bitter tang of lye. Mam was tired and flushed, standing at a tub and pounding something dark with her paddle. When she saw me she rested the paddle against the side of the tub, stepped down, wiped her face, and went outside, without saying a word. I got up on to the step, took up the hand-polished haft and stirred the clothes through the murky water, swirling them around and slapping at them, pressing them down and mashing them against the bottom. Considering them done, I heaved them out with tongs and slopped them into a basket, hefted the dripping basket up and carried it outside. My mam was sitting on the stone bench by the door flapping at her face, her top buttons undone and her shift stuck to her skin.
    ‘That’s the last of the washing,’ she said. ‘You’ll need to get the dry things down.’
    So I took an empty basket on my hip and made my way up the slope towards the lines. The drying laundry stirred in the breeze. I walked the billowing halls between the lines, and felt hidden from everything, and alone. I could see nothing but white linen, green grass below, blue sky above. I lifted shifts to touch the seams to my cheek for dampness, scooped up the trailing ends of sheets to test their coolness, breathed in the cold sweet smell of linen on the line. I unpinned what was dry, put the pins in my apron pocket, bundled up the washing and laid it in my basket. My hands felt dry and papery from the clean cold linen. I moved on through the white corridors, and into the dark, where britches and dresses danced around me, still wet from the tubs.
    Someone began to sing. Aunty Edith: I could hear her, faint but clear, a lovely voice, sweet and full. It was a song from a new ballad sheet that had been doing the rounds lately.
    In Liverpool town is my delight,
and in that lives many beauties bright,
     
    The other women joined her, swelling the sound.
    but the one I loved did me disdain,
so I fixed my mind on the raging main.
     
    I’d reached the top of the slope, the last clothesline. My basket was heaped and overflowing with linen, and the clothes