The Telling

his wife
     
    The stone wore at the pad of my index finger, crumbled softly under pressure.

ELIZABETH
     
    No date, no space for anything more. I was held for a moment in stillness.
    Elizabeth.
    The beech leaves so new the sun shone right through them. The cool touch of linen to my cheek. The taste of liquorice.
    My heart was racing. I shook my head clear. It had been a young woman’s voice that I’d thought I’d heard, the sunshine slipping under the door. I had sensed the presence of a young woman in the room, just out of sight. I had thought to see a young woman standing at the pump, catching up on the day’s news, waiting her turn for the water. Elizabeth ?
    I was on my feet and stumbling back off the grave, my hand and arm stinging as if from an electric shock. I backed into a headstone. My hands fumbled behind me for the edge of the stone and caught it. I slipped past it, stumbling away. There was a strong smell of sweet rotting grass, of algae and moss and damp; it caught in my throat and dragged nausea up to meet it. I was weaving my way between the grave mounds, just trying to get away, trying not to throw up, dizzied by a vertiginous slide of images like laundry falling from a high shelf: the static in the air; sunshine streaming under the door on a dull day; a voice. A breath on my neck. Someone in the corner of my vision, waiting.
    I’d reached the wall and the wired-shut gate into the woods. I glanced back. The Williams grave: I couldn’t pick it out. But I felt something. On my skin; on the hollow where jaw and throat meet, just beneath the ear: a breath drawn. Someone about to whisper in my ear.
    I ducked away, desperate, scrambling up the gate. Wire sank into the ball of my thumb. I swore and lifted my hand free, the metal pulling from the flesh, the pain jarring all the way up to my shoulder. I dropped down on to the soft earth on the far side, pressing the cut to my mouth, digging in my pockets with my left hand in the hope of a tissue, stumbling on. The woods were dark.
    I slithered down the bank. Birds rose cawing overhead. Stumbling downhill, I grabbed one-handed at saplings and tree trunks, tongue hard against the raw metallic harshness of the cut. Brambles tore at my clothes. I was going too fast, almost blind, not thinking. My foot snagged on something and I went headlong . There was a moment before landing, a moment suspended in the fall, both hands flung out in front of me, the darkness blurring , and I was thinking, this could end really badly, this could end stupidly, my neck broken, my head staved in, blood drying in the leaf mould, and no one would know to look for me here, and Mark would be ringing and ringing my mobile, and it would be a really stupid way to die, and Cate would grow up and she wouldn’t have a mum, not on any birthday, not on the day her first baby was born, and that just can’t happen to her.
    My hands landed on the earth and sank into mulch. It was cold. My elbows buckled and my chest, cheek, the length of me hit the ground. I lay on the leaf mould. There was a smell of earth and garlic and sap. My hand was stinging. Something pricked my knee through my jeans. Blood thudded in my ears; beyond that, the woods were silent. I lay there, palms pressed onto the earth. I thought, I’m an idiot. I thought, I need help. I thought, I am going crazy here. Slowly, I picked myself up and brushed off wet flakes of leaf-flesh with my left hand. My right arm ached. I felt deeply shaken. My hand was trembling as I brushed away the dirt.
    *
     
    I set the shower going and stripped down to chicken-flesh. I stepped in, my skin flinching at the shift in temperature, at the battering of the spray, as if it were unwilling to believe in the possibility of warmth. I held my hand out to the falling water and let it scald the cut. It had gone pale and thick around the edges. I turned and let the water hurl itself against my back, and the room filled with steam. I breathed a long breath, and closed my eyes, and let my head hang, and watched the red darkness behind my eyes, and felt the gorgeousness of the water on my skin, and the throb of the cut, and the gentle sting of my scar, like a day-old nettle sting, and all of it felt good.
    Wrapped in a towel, my hair in wet tangles, I rummaged left-handed in my wash bag for the tea-tree oil that I usually used on spots, and dripped it into the cut. I found a plaster in the bottom of the bag, its paper-casing rubbed around the edges,