The Telling

knuckles, curled upwards like coral.
    The boy was still swinging the vacuum cleaner back and forth. He smiled at me again, then saw my expression, and his smile collapsed.
    ‘Where’s the nurse?’ I asked.
    He gestured me on, towards the lobby.
    The staircase. The sweep of it like a waterfall, like birdsong, and somehow annoyingly, intangibly, important. A figure crossed the landing above; white tunic, navy trousers: the nurse. She came padding down the stairs, her mind elsewhere, her hand skimming the smooth curve of the banister. She noticed me; her smile went. She clattered down the final steps to join me.
    ‘Problem?’
    ‘She’s just –’ I tried.
    ‘Margaret?’
    ‘She just. Went blank.’
    She glanced down the corridor, glanced back at me. ‘I’ll check on her.’ She touched my arm, gave me a quick smile. ‘Don’t worry. It happens. It’s not your fault.’ She was gone, heading off down the corridor, breaking into a run. I turned, and left: I didn’t believe her.
    *
     
    I crunched down the driveway. Dark yew trees lined the way; overhead the branches of deciduous trees were heavy with buds. Crocuses sprouted underneath; celandines dotted the grass.
    You look like her.
    I came out on to the road, turned towards the village. Hands stuffed into pockets, shoulders up, hand throbbing and hot between the press of my leg, the restriction of denim. Just a narrow grass verge and a wire fence between me and fields. Lambs stood in gangs. No cars passed. A rabbit had been smeared into pulp and fluff on the tarmac. A stray hubcap lay on the grass verge. The road swept down towards the village. Beech trees spread fine branches overhead. I was thinking of her wet blue eyes, smudged with age.
    Those tricks of sunshine and voices .
    There was a bench on the green. I sat down, looked at my hands. At the backs; at the tracery of veins, the fan of tendons beneath the skin. I thought of Cate’s newborn rippling water-creature fingers, Mum’s darkening claws on white hospital sheets, Margaret Hutton’s tree-root swollen hands. The tricks of sun-shine and voices. The tricks the mind plays on itself. The misfirings of synapses as the nerves fail, as the neurones decay. The vacancy that settles, clouding the eyes, softening the expression, making speech falter into meaninglessness. Is that what Cate saw? When I’d gone, did her clear eyes watch the blankness of my face? What would that do to her, to see her mother leave like that?
    I wasn’t having it. I wouldn’t let it happen again. I couldn’t let it happen to Cate.
    *
     
    I stood on Jean Davies’ front step, sidelong to the door. Across the street, the windows of Reading Room Cottage looked at me blankly, catching no reflection.
    She opened the door. She looked at me. I smiled for her.
    ‘Jesus Christ,’ she said.
    She wanted to give me tea and biscuits; cake, a sandwich, soup, anything at all. I thanked her and shook my head. As she spoke, I was conscious that I was scraping my middle fingernail rapidly back and forth across my thumbnail; I couldn’t stop. I was conscious of the throb underneath the plaster in time with my pulse. I was conscious of the fragment of pain underneath my skull, where the hangover still lingered. I was conscious of time dripping away, that I should be doing seventy, my hands wrapped around the steering wheel, my right foot on the accelerator, my mind calculating niceties of speed, of movement in the cars in front and behind, their shifting relationship to my own frail metal box, its slight cargo of flesh. But I was standing in this almost-stranger’s hallway, on the blood-and-blue lino squares, just beside the dresser, trying not to glance too often or urgently at the old burgundy Trimphone, the thumb-index address book. I spoke very carefully.
    ‘That local history enthusiast. Could you remind me. What was her name?’
    ‘Pauline, Pauline Boyd.’
    ‘I’d love to have a chat with her.’
    ‘I’ll give you her number.’
    ‘Is there any chance you could call her for me? I seem to have lost my mobile.’
    She pressed a fingernail into the B section of her address book and lifted the receiver. She glanced over at me, smiling slightly. I could hear, through the receiver, the faint ring of the distant telephone . It stopped, answered. She dropped her gaze.
    ‘Hello Pauline, it’s Jean.’

    *
     
    Normal, I told myself. Be normal, normal, normal.
    The house was modern. It was down the street towards the church, with