They took up room, so much space, all the space between us in our bed, space that had never been there in the days when he would sleep curled around my body like a second skin. Now there was no peace for him in snatches of sleep, no comfort in the touch of my hands on his back. Was he awake or asleep when he pulled away from me? Was it me or the world he did not want?

But there were other times when the dark things in him surfaced and I did not recognise the glass in his eyes, the rage in his body as it laboured over me. Was he awake or asleep then? I didn’t know that, either.

I canna write more of these things to you, lambsie. I can write of love, but not that.

But I’ll tell you this: nothing is for nothing.

~

For five months I denied it: the sickness, the gentle rounding of my body, the fluttering of wings that were not mine. I was never one to know when the bleeding would or wouldn’t come, so I held to the notion it was late, was all, just late, and would be upon me still. Finally Clementina, who knew what she was looking at, had had enough. She took my face in her hands and would not let me look away. Ye’re pregnant, quinie, she said, an’ the time for sayin’ otherwise is gone!

Dr Hamilton confirmed it. Twenty-nine and married fourteen years! A miracle baby, this little one, Mrs Tulloch, because no prevention method is that reliable, believe you me. Just ask the mothers of the hundreds of little accidents walking around!

I don’t know. It’s true there were many girls on the farlins whose measures ran aground, in spite of their canny efforts to plan which years they would be in a certain way and when they would leave the season. But I think back now on what the mission ladies used to say about the work and what it did to us, the toll on our bodies. Maybe the miracle was that any of us fell pregnant at all.

I didn’t tell Mills & Ware for a long time. The girls had already guessed, but Management was surprised as I was still slight, little changed beneath the enormous apron. I looked at myself in the mirror and saw Kitta there—her body had barely shown, either.

I walked from the factory on my last day with a bunch of agapanthus and a large tin of Family Assorted and my two aprons under my arm. The end, I told myself. My factory life done.

~