The Telling

and me sat on the fence at the top of the embankment among the long grass and teasels, and watched Dad on the hard shoulder, bent into the hot engine, his glasses steaming, unable to wait for the tow truck to arrive.
    I have to imagine her moment of knowing, years later, at the mirrored wardrobe door, her jumper and bra on the bed, her arm crooked back over her head, pressing with two fingers at a hard bead of flesh in the side of her breast. I wonder at the timing: whether her sickness had been slowly accumulating for years, a gradual accretion of mutation, or if it were quicker than that, if the cluster of madly splitting cells was the fault of some strange sympathy, as in the dark of my uterus, a faint speck of meticulously dividing cells drifted, settled and dug in, putting down its roots, beginning to grow. The thought always comes tainted with guilt: it was her death, after all, and unknowable as someone else’s love, and here I am like a typical child, trying to make it be about me.
    There was grit in the air, and the smell of petrol. I made my way through traffic cones and under scaffolding, across a patch of sad municipal grass. I had the instructions in my hand; the breeze caught the paper and ruffled it, pulling at the loose shreds along the top, where it had been torn from the spiral. I rounded a corner and there it was: a concrete cube held aloft by concrete pillars, sealed off and insulated from the grit and clatter of the town. A glass-walled stairwell dipped to touch the grey-slabbed ground below: the Public Record Office. I went up to the glass doors and pushed through, climbing the stairs into the concrete box.
    The archivist murmured instructions. I followed her, half a pace behind, past rows of desks where figures hunched over books or leaned in close to illuminated screens. At the end of the room stood a wooden card-file cabinet and beside it, a table. Ring-binders were laid out in rows, each with a label giving the census date. The assistant told me that parishes were listed alphabetically in the folders, and assigned a number. All I had to do was find this same number in the filing cabinet: it would be typed on to an envelope and the census records for the parish, reproduced on microfiche, would be inside. The Parish Records themselves; the baptisms, marriages, burials – she gestured over to the side of the room – were catalogued in much the same way over there. They rarely brought out the actual documents nowadays, she said; it saved on wear and tear. You must only take one at a time, she warned me, and shrugged in a self-deprecating way, tucking her loose blonde hair behind an ear. Otherwise, all hell breaks loose.
    ‘So, what’s first?’ she asked.
    ‘I’m trying to find out about the occupants of a particular house.’ I could feel my cheeks begin to flush. I gave her the name of the village. ‘This would be, I imagine, around the middle of the nineteenth century.’
    ‘What diocese?’
    ‘I have no idea. Sorry, is that important?’
    She shook her head, already flipping through the file: ‘It’s all right.’
    She ran a finger across a page, then turned to the cabinet, lifted out an envelope. She held it out to me.
    ‘Is that it?’
    ‘Census records for 1851. Slap bang in the middle of the century.’ She gestured for me to take it. My hand shook. My arm ached, all the way up to the shoulder, from the cut. ‘Have you used a microfiche-reader before?’
    I shook my head.
    She gestured me over to a nearby desk, on which stood one of the screens I’d seen other people using. She leaned over me; I caught her perfume, something fine and sweet and faintly woody. She showed me how the microfiche-reader worked. It was proportioned like an old TV, but simpler, lighter, and more elegant. She shook the envelope and a transparency fell out. About the size of a postcard, it was printed with rows of smaller black rectangles, like miniature X-rays. She slipped it between two sheets of glass, like a microscope slide, at the base of the device. She flicked a switch, a light went on underneath the slide, and the images were projected on to the screen in front of me. I watched her hands, the neat clear-painted nails, the diamond solitaire on her ring finger; I couldn’t bring myself look at the records with her there. She demonstrated how the slide could move in any direction on a plane, bringing different records into view. She showed how a lens could be adjusted to sharpen the focus of