The Telling

stained with eyeshadow dust. I peeled it, stuck it on, flexed my hand. It’d last till I got home.
    I bundled up my clothes to pack them. When I lifted my jeans, I knew by their weight, its evenness, that the phone wasn’t in the pocket. I rifled in all the pockets anyway, uselessly, knowing the phone was gone. It must have slipped out when I fell. It was lying in the woodland earth, beaded with rain; its screen-clock counting out the minutes till the battery ran down. I wasn’t going back for it.
    I left out underwear for the morning and threw the rest of the clothes into my bag. The house was not packed up; I’d even managed to add to the work with those new books. I switched the lights off as I came downstairs. I would be rational. I would do what needed to be done. In the morning, I would throw my stuff in the car. I would drive home. Five hours down the motorway to an empty flat. Cate and Mark would be back at teatime. The warm weight of her in my arms, the warm vice of his arms around me. The next day, I would go and talk to Dr Cowan; I’d meet the peeled man’s sympathetic gaze.
    *
     
    Outside, the breeze blew up into a full-on wind; rain was flung in handfuls at the window. The dark out there was massive, boiling. It had swallowed up the house.
    I switched on the TV for the noise. I opened kitchen cupboards and fumbled in an open packet of breadsticks. I crunched a breadstick down, squatting to rifle through the fridge, my stomach sore and tight with hunger: I couldn’t remember my last meal. I lifted tomatoes and an avocado from the salad drawer on to the counter above me and dropped a bag of mulching lettuce into the bin. I drew another breadstick from the open packet, crunching on it as I got out a knife and chopping board. The breadsticks were stale. I started on a third. I cut the tomatoes into slices, lifting the first shallow fleshy cup of seeds to my mouth; it was overripe, too sweet, the flesh melting unpleasantly. I peeled the avocado, pared away a slice, slipped it between my lips. The flesh was buttery and giving and smooth. Calories. The sheer instinctive pleasure of calories.
    I lifted out a bottle of wine. It had sat there, untouched and forgotten since Mark’s visit. It seemed like a last drink: no alcohol with those pills. I sloshed wine into a tumbler, took three quick swallows, sat down at the breakfast bar to eat.
    The news came on the television. Bodies lying on a dusty road; blackened, broken, uncovered; pools of dark blood in the dust, like oil dripped from a broken sump. Then a woman spoke urgently, her head cowled in dark cloth, the sky above white with dust and sun. A boy was crying and crushing himself into her dark-draped body. She stroked him, pressed him to her, cupping his head against her side, her other hand pushing tears away across her cheeks. As she spoke, a journalist translated. Her elder son, the market where he waited with others, looking for a day’s work; the van that pulled up, the driver who called them over, grinning, not knowing the truth of other people, the agony of martyred flesh. The explosion. The boy lifted his face from his mother’s side, and glanced at the camera, his eyes wide and horrified , his face streaked. Then the piece ended. Back to the studio. I switched off the TV and was left with the ache.
    Outside, the wind was blowing up against and buffeting the house. Inside, all was perfectly still, weirdly still, with the TV off. No hum. Nothing. I felt suspended, sealed up in a bubble. Far away, down streaming motorways and past dark fields and through cities and at the other end of the country, Mark and Cate were safe in the warm cocoon of our flat. The smell of milk and drying laundry. The smell of his skin, and her skin; the smell of us. And I could be there soon, dazed and floating in blue amniotic warmth. And I wanted to be there now.
    A sound. Directly overhead. A floorboard creaked; I lifted my head.
    The whooshing buffet of dark air against the house, like wet sheets slapped and snapped against the walls. I strained my ears for indoor noise. The slaty taste of wine in my mouth. A prickle in the air.
    Again. A floorboard creaked. Just above me. It must have been pretty much on the threshold to the Reading Room. And as I thought this, it seemed to me that there was an explosion of static: the house fizzing, brimming, overcharged. The wind hit the window. A great woof of air on the panes, pressing them, making them flex.
    An old house.