Landing Page

iii

INTIMACIES

Eleven More Stories

LUCY CALDWELL

Dedication

v

for Orla Rose

and all the places we, you, will go

Epigraph

vii

And

always embrace things, people earth

sky stars, as I do, freely and with

the appropriate sense of space.

Frank O’Hara, ‘A True Account of
    Talking to the Sun at Fire Island’

Contents

1. Title Page
2. Dedication
3. Epigraph
4. Like This
5. Mayday
6. People Tell You Everything
7. Words for Things
8. Jars of Clay
9. Night Waking
10. The Children
11. Lady Moon
12. All the People Were Mean and Bad
13. Devotions
14. Intimacies
15. Acknowledgements
16. About the Author
17. By the Same Author
18. Copyright

xi

INTIMACIES

1

Like This

It happens like this.

It’s a Tuesday or Wednesday, one of those amorphous midweek days not quite the weekend, but at least not Monday. November. Grey rain coming down too vertically to pretend much longer, to yourself or anyone else, that it isn’t really raining; impossible to cadge a minute’s interest longer in the sad-mouthed, slightly ragged goldfish in the shallow ornamental pond. The pond is opposite a corporate law firm with a Dickensian name and persistent rumours of being built on Europe’s largest medieval charnel house. There is a Perspex floor that you can walk or crawl over, peering giddily down to where old Roman walls and bronze-cast statues lie. The layers beneath; the bones. The fish and the floor are usually enough to kill half an hour; there is sometimes a bus too, an old red double-decker, repurposed into a puppet theatre, but not today.

You’re running out of ideas.

The toddler is grizzling, the baby is grizzling. Any moment now one or both of them will go nuclear. You lift the flap on the rain hood and reach in to stroke the baby’s soft 2damp cheek and she turns her head and blindly rootles, trying to suck your fingers. You fed her before you left the house, less than an hour ago. She can’t be hungry. Unless she’s due a new growth spurt – how old is she again?

Poor second-born. You counted her brother’s age religiously, days, weeks, months, until the months flipped more pragmatically into years. But you’ve lost count already of how many weeks the baby is. Twelve, you think, or maybe thirteen? First time round you agonised, laughed in disbelief, joked grimly, about the tiredness. This time there isn’t the energy even for that.

‘You’re hungry,’ you say. ‘Poor wee thing, you’re hungry.’

‘And I,’ your toddler says indignantly. ‘I hungry too. Naughty Mummy,’ he adds, because you forgot to refill the snack box before leaving home. All it contained when you snapped it open was a long-suffering banana, blackened and bumped and rejected with affront, and some crumbs of rice cake currently disintegrating in the law firm’s pond.