The Telling

clock stood alone, unchallengeable, eccentric as it liked. Ticking away the minutes, the hours and the days. It seemed just minutes ago that my daughter was this starfish thing, her eyes wide, wrenched from the wound, her arms and legs flung out, shocked by existence. Just moments before that, my mother’s pulse was fading, her eyes moving under thin eyelids, dreaming morphine dreams.
    The clock’s hand jolted forwards.
    Suddenly, an express train punched through the space behind me. I turned to follow its rush. It thundered on and on, heading north, and was gone, dragging its pocket of dust and noise with it, leaving a tear in the day.
    A couple climbed the slope from the underpass together. They stood, in matching anoraks, unusually close. The minute hand jumped again. A young woman came up out of the shadows, pushing a pushchair in which a toddler slept, his head flung back, his eyes squeezed tight, as if making a serious and well-considered wish. Cate: I could only see her in fragments; the luminescence of her cheek, a red bulge in a wet gum, a dimpled hand. The smell of her: milk and apple and ammonia and skin. The minute hand clicked. The woman pushed the sleeping child across the platform and stood in a square of sunlight. She took her mobile phone from her bag and cupped it in her palm, tapping buttons with a thumb. A hooped earring caught the light. Her head, bent to peer at the phone, was beautiful. The child slept on. I wanted to go over to them, to crouch at the pushchair’s side and run the back of a finger over the child’s cheek, just for the memory of how it felt, for the sheer wonder of the reality of a new being.
    We were sitting at the traffic lights when I told Mark. I’d just picked him up from the station. He said, You’re very quiet, and I said, I’m sorry, and he said, How’s your mum, and I said, I’m pregnant. He laughed. A big, happy, laugh. I turned to look at him, pleased, almost puzzled, and he kissed me, his hand on my hand on the gear stick. Then a horn beeped behind us, and I glanced ahead: the light was green, swimming with the dampness of my eyes. We drove home, the atmosphere odd. Mark kept starting little streams of talk, to which I tried to contribute. He was conscious of my quietness, conscious of the reasons for it, but unable to quite contain his happiness.
    The rumble of a train’s approach. The tannoy crackled, an announcement began and was overwhelmed by the judder and clank of the train, the screech of its brakes. The pushchair was swivelled towards the noise, the young woman’s face serious with calculation: deceleration, distance between doors, distance across the platform to be covered. A slight adjustment between the middle-aged couple; only one of them was travelling. The woman kissed the man, the coloured panels of their jackets pressing briefly together and parting. The young woman dipped the pushchair back on to its rear wheels, and I got up from the bench, and walked over to the slowing train.
    *
     
    The train ripped past backyard washing-line views. The brief grace of rivers and the slow panning shot of wide silver mudflats and the sea. At times, a canal flanked the railway; a barge moved at retirement’s leisurely pace. It was such ordinary beauty; I should not have been there to see it. I should have been on the M6, past Birmingham by now.
    How long before Mark started to wonder? He’d have tried the mobile and been unsuccessful; he’d think I had the phone on silent while I was driving.
    The carriage was half-empty. The anorak woman was sitting across the aisle from me, reading a soft fat paperback, its cover folded back upon itself. Her jacket was off and bundled onto the luggage rack. Outside, the flat spread of a valley floor, and then moors rising ink-blue to the clouds, sunlight shafting down through cloud gaps to patch the turf with yellow. Then mills; red-brick, monumental, their windows reflecting back the sky. We came into the station. The light was dim. People stood on the platform, some scanning windows for a familiar face, others turning to move towards the carriage doors. I got up.
    The wind blew sharp outside the station. Crisp packets and swirling paper coffee cups and fag ends in the gutter. Taxis lined up patiently, their engines burbling fumes out into the air. I was dazed by the travel, by the strangeness of being elsewhere, of being somewhere entirely unforeseen, like when the car broke down on the motorway and Lucy and Mum