The Telling

showing the lines around his slate-blue eyes. The T-shirt was loose and sagging at the throat, exposing an edge of collar bone, and honey-coloured skin. He’d had that T-shirt from before I’d known him. I remembered it when it was still day-wear; it was part of the happy acquisition of detail, part of coming to know the stuff that made up who he was. I remembered it from sex in the hallway, pulled up urgently so I could press myself against his skin.
    ‘The plan?’
    I reached over the side of the bed, put my coffee cup down on the floor; Cate clambered on to me, crushed my left breast with an elbow. I straightened up and shifted her to sit upright on my lap. Her toes looked cold. I cupped them in my hands to warm them.
    ‘We should do something, go somewhere,’ he said. ‘We don’t often get the chance, not as a family.’
    ‘The Park,’ Cate said grandly, and grinned up at me.
    ‘There’s no park here, sweetheart.’ My eyes unaccountably filled with tears. I ran my fingers up her ribs, digging gently, tickling . ‘No parks, just fields.’
    ‘But there’s bound to be something,’ Mark said.
    Cate laughed at my touch. A big wet open-mouthed laugh. She wriggled and clamped her arms to her sides, but made no attempt to get away.
    ‘Whatever you want to do,’ I said. ‘We’ll do whatever you want to do.’
    I stopped tickling her, ran my hands over her hair, brushing it off her face. Her curls were tangled, ratty at the ends; they’d never been cut. She leaned her head away, complained, climbed out of my arms and on to her daddy.
    *
     
    It was a cool grey day; no threat of rain or hint of sunshine. We drove to an open farm, about five miles from the village. Mark had spotted the brown tourist signs the previous night. We took his mother’s car. He drove and I looked out of the window. High hedges blurred inches from my face; a tattered white carrier bag whisked past; a sudden gateway gave on to a glimpse of green field, green-yellow moorland rising up towards the sky, scabs of exposed white stone. Then the blur of hedgerow again, a sliver hubcap, a crushed blue beer can.
    The place was busy with parents and small children. They clotted at open barn doors, disappeared down alleyways and around the sides of buildings, lingered around the dog-pen, pressing up against the chicken wire to stare into the dark kennel at the back. There was a couple there with two young boys. The adults wore light Gore-Tex jackets and all-terrain walking shoes; the father carried a neat little rucksack. Their children, two solid boys in clean wellingtons and matching blue anoraks, peered solemnly into the darkness of the kennel. I held Cate on one hip, her skirt riding up, her little patent shoes dangling mud onto my jeans. Mark was in his suit jacket, talking about the Arctic Monkeys. My Converse were worn so thin that I could feel every pit and pebble, every ridge in the concrete. We are children, I thought; we will never be grown up.
    Cate struggled; I let her down. She ran ahead, her little legs fat in their stripy tights, and we followed her. Mark caught my hand, and held it.
    Piglets skittered through the yard like women in high heels. A horse leaned its head over a stable door and blew through its nose. I scooped Cate up to show her the horse’s silky muzzle, grasping her with one arm around her belly, the other under her bottom. The warm comforting smell of stables, of ammonia and horse. Mark leaned beside us, arms folded across his chest, watching us.
    ‘They’ve got pony rides,’ he said. ‘Shetland ponies.’
    ‘If you fancy it, love,’ I said, ‘You go right ahead.’
    Mark laughed. There was just a glance, but I caught it, saw its appraising edge. I set Cate down on her feet again, and we followed her along the rippled concrete pathways between the barns and sheds. Huddles formed at doorways, broke apart, families moving off along their separate trajectories. We leaned on a barrier to watch the piglets suckle, the sows like great fleshy feeding stations, lying on their sides, motionless but for the roll of an eyeball, the flap of an ear. A box of yellow chicks basked under light bulbs. In a barn, lambs butted at their mothers’ udders, a calf stood uneasily on slender legs; the cow kept her head down, turned away. Blood and membrane and mucus hung from her back end. Cate pointed, frowned wisely, didn’t know what to say.
    ‘Let’s see what else there is,’ I suggested.
    Back in the main yard,