George considers the ghost of Joseph briefly, then goes back to thinking about himself and how this news affects him. It explains why she’s never said sorry his wife died. If Betty pities him, she folds it into her cake batter, or the crisp lines of his linen, but she never says it out loud.

George and Ellen never managed to have children. They didn’t discuss the absence of noise around the table or the lack of tiny shoes lined up in the hall. George could talk for hours about cricket, or which wood was good for which project, but when it came to feelings, he was mute.

Ellen had cried about it secretly in the first few years of their marriage. George knew this because there were tissues everywhere at ‘that time of the month’, and because it was only then that she’d eat chocolate. Every four weeks, her pinny would be stuffed with Kleenex and Bournville wrappers, and she’d be unable to look George in the eye. A couple of days later, she’d be fine again, humming along to her classical music.

Once, the tissues didn’t appear after four weeks, and then eight. Ellen had beamed then, moving like she was in slow motion. She had sat with George in the evenings, feet up on the sofa. But then they were back, the tissues, like birds coming home to roost. The first day Ellen hadn’t moved at all, not even in slow motion. It was the only time George didn’t get a cooked dinner, just a cold Spam sandwich. Wet pink meat and claggy bread. Ellen’s tears.

George should have gone to her, but instead he had taken his radio down to his shed and shut the door. Ellen had her tissues and her chocolate. George had nothing else to give her. He had wanted to hold their child. Instead he gripped a tea-tray he was making, as he carved, curved and sanded. Tattooing his grief into the pale wood.

And so, because George has never been a father, has never lost a living child, he cannot conjure up a living Joseph, forever ten, or the man he might have been. He can only imagine tiny bones in dry soil, and it makes him think of graves, which makes him think of Ellen. Another person would have said, ‘Sorry for your loss,’ or some other trite platitude. George says nothing, just marches into the dining room and starts looking at the table, very closely, as if it’s about to sneak off somewhere.

He wonders how Betty can believe in God when all He’s ever done is shaft her. George has never had to question his faith. He never had any to start with.

Dan

(Any old iron)