The Telling

understand.’
    The grey-haired man had come up to the counter. He was leaning in to catch her eye, smiling impatiently. Her attention flickered to him, back to me.
    ‘They needed to read, for the scriptures. Writing; that’s a different matter. Teach people to write, and before you know it, people are asking questions, constructing arguments, communicating with each other over distances. It wouldn’t do.’
    *
     
    I don’t quite know how I got back. I bought a coffee somewhere, drank it on the train, chewed through a scone as dry as lagging, watched the fields and roads unscroll, the houses flick by. At the station, I got into the car and followed the ribboning tarmac back to the village, to pull in in front of the cottage, switch off the lights and the ignition, and slump forward on to the steering wheel, and rest my head on my arms, as if it were just momentum that had kept me moving, had kept me upright all this time.
    I closed my eyes.
    I’d got what I had gone for, but I hadn’t reckoned on how bare the bones would be. A marriage, a birth, a death. This wasn’t a life. It was nothing like it. Life’s what happens in between. The tease of a flame at a dry twig. Snowflakes melting in upturned palms. The drip of chlorinated water from soaked curls, lips unsticking in a smile, outstretched arms with fingers crooked to coax a child into swimming. The dip of the tongue’s tip to the palm of the hand to lift a sweet blue pill from a skin-crease. These tiny things that change the world, minute by minute, and for ever. These perishable moments, that are gone completely, if we don’t take the trouble of their telling.

 
     
     
     
    WE WALKED OUT, THOMAS AND ME. DOWN TO THE WATER’S edge where he skipped stones and sent silk-ripples across the surface of the water. I sat on the bank and watched, and saw the swallows skim up and down the stretch of water, catching flies, and I wondered if they got their blue sheen from the flies they caught, all the little shiny insects that dart about the surface of the water, and how duck eggs are that fine pale blue, and mallards have the shot-silk heads, and the females flashes of blue amongst their wing-feathers, and how blue seems infused through all these things, all these manifestations, and I opened my mouth to say something, but didn’t, because it was Thomas. He sent a good throw out across the river, and watched it curl across the water all the way to the far bank, then turned to me, brushing his hands together, his face flushed with satisfaction.
    ‘Are you going to that meeting?’ I asked him.
    ‘What meeting?’
    ‘The one at Caton Moor.’
    His expression flickered. ‘How did you hear about it?’
    ‘Something Dad said.’
    ‘I might go,’ he said.
    We walked up the coffin lane towards the village; the rabbits were out in the low field, nibbling at the grass. We walked in such complete silence that the rabbits didn’t notice us, and continued to feed and lope about. It was getting dark, and the air had a nip in it.
    ‘Did you know,’ Thomas said out of nowhere, ‘that paper is made out of rags, and in cities men go about the streets, calling for old rags, and they are shredded and soaked and boiled and dried and pressed and turned into paper, and that in some places they can’t get sufficient rags and so are now making paper out of wood, turning whole trees, whole trees imagine, into paper.’
    I looked at him. I’d never thought about it. ‘Did Mr Moore tell you that?’
    Thomas shook his head, and was trying not to smile. ‘No, I read it for myself in the Penny Journal .’
    We walked back up the path to the church, the white gravel crunching underfoot. At the church side-gate, he took me by the hand, and stopped me, and turned me to him, and he grasped my arms, pinning them to my sides, and I didn’t really think that he would do it, but he kissed me.
    His lips were soft and fat and damp. He stopped, and moved away from me, still holding me by the arms. I couldn’t look at him; he sighed, and put his arms around me, drawing me close to him.
    ‘Ah, Lizzy,’ he said.
    I pulled away and ran from him. He caught up with me, and kept talking all the way, more than I’d ever heard him say in one go before: what had he done wrong, if I was going to the Harvest Dance with him, and walking out with him, then I should expect to be kissed, I should expect to be held, and if I didn’t like it then I shouldn’t go out walking with him.
    We’d