The Telling

everything will be fine, everything will be just fine. No more fear. No more dark spaces. I could soften at the edges, melt, ooze into the world.
    ‘And there’s no signal,’ I said. ‘No signal in the room.’
    ‘You must be nearly done.’
    ‘How’s Cate?’
    ‘She’s fine. Look, we’ll see you at the weekend.’
    I couldn’t grasp his meaning; he went on.
    ‘Whatever’s left, we’ll just get a houseclearer in. You must have gone through all the, you know, important stuff, by now. We’ll have you home by teatime Sunday.’
    A flood of panic. ‘When,’ I asked. ‘When are you getting here?’
    ‘I’ll come straight from work, pick up Cate. She’ll sleep in the car.’
    ‘Tomorrow?’ I guessed.
    ‘Yep,’ he said. ‘Friday.’
    Suddenly the days had names again, and ticked like bombs.
    *
     
    I picked my way through the box room, began to sort out the things. The aluminium clasps of the suitcase were stiff and oxidized. Inside were men’s jeans, sweaters, T-shirts, all well-worn and faded. Dad’s old holiday and weekend stuff: I couldn’t see him wanting it now. I set it to one side for the charity shop, then dragged a carrier bag towards me. It was full of photographs . Framed photographs, loose photographs, wallets straight from the developers, the contents still not sorted into albums. I crushed the bag closed, pushed it away. Couldn’t face it.
    I opened a box: Mum’s books. Austen, the Brontës, George Eliot, Dickens, Tolstoy: her comfort reading, books to sink into and disappear for days. My first instinct was to take the box through to the other room and unload the books onto the shelves, as she must have intended to, as she would have if she’d had the energy or time. I was supposed to be packing up, though, not unpacking: this was an ending, not the new beginning she’d anticipated. I folded the top of the box back together.
    Moments like those have me wishing for the pills. I take the pills, and I don’t find myself back there, climbing the worn linoleum stairs, the sunlight warm through high windows, conscious of the heaviness of my legs, the round hardness of my belly, the nausea. The pills close off the door to the ward, keep me away from her bed by the window, the freesias drooping on the locker, the drip’s quiet occasional mutter, the drain-tube snaking from inside her gown, streaked with dark fluids, with the body’s weeping. I forget the paleness of her smiling lips, the darkness of her eyes, the dry coolness of her drip-punctured hand as it held mine.
    You look a bit tired, she said. I said, So do you. I bent to kiss her, my face full and heavy with tears. I wanted to tell her about the two pink dots on the test-stick that morning, the final confirmation of what I had been suspecting for weeks. I wanted to give her the secret, hand it over like a gift, tiny and exquisite. Her delight would be a kind of prism: it would split this bald fact into an array of brilliant potentialities, make it seem at once wonderful and real. Instead, I drew up a chair, and sat down, and asked about the wound, the drip, the pain. She answered quietly. I peeled her an orange, the zest spurting up into the air like tiny fireworks, and fed it to her piece by piece. I watched the careful precision of her fingers’ grasp, the slow consumption of each segment, the way the flesh had fallen from her cheeks, and I knew without even thinking that this was not the time to tell. Once she was home and convalescing, when this thing was over and done with and the tests had come back clear: that would be the time to tell her, that would be the time to enjoy her delight in this. We’d hunt out old knitting patterns, hoarded angel tops and matinée jackets.
    With the blue pills, I can almost believe it had happened, that we had sat on their bed, the case pulled down from the top of the wardrobe, the thick dust wiped carefully off. Her dark hands lifting out baby blankets, bootees, bonnets trimmed with broderie anglaise, her eyes soft with memory, and with gentle wonder at the swift flight of time. Still, even now, that image seems almost a memory, almost more real than the reality.
    It’s too tempting. The blue softening of the pills is just too tempting. I could have a handful of them on Monday; all I had to do was make the appointment, ask.
    I heaved myself up off the floor and was out of the box room and downstairs, opening drawers, grabbing handfuls of utensils, cutlery, dropping them into a