The warm heft of her on your chest. Those lines by Keats come into your head, the sonnet at the very end of the battered A-level textbook, which was also, maybe, the last poem he ever wrote. Pillowed forever upon my sweet love’s breast. No: that’s not quite it, but you can’t check now, so you let it pass. Nature’s sleepless eremite. You remember the volta of that poem. But what if eternity does not mean endless time, but an escape from it? What if, from the perspective of eternity, time is a droplet, held together by its own surface tension, everything that had happened, or ever would, taking place simultaneously, and already over?

You think, then, of the children who flickered only so 144briefly in your body and in your mind; never met, never kissed, never held; yet held somewhere in the unfathomable depths and reach of love.

The lives unlived; the loves yet not unloved.

We get to choose, in this life, what is most holy, and we must do our best to honour it.

The snow upon the mountains and the moors.

The baby’s breathing. This. This. This.

145

Intimacies

i

Imagine this. I am at an airport, flying somewhere with your brother – or trying to; for some reason flights are delayed and all is chaos. Your brother is not yet your brother, nor yet, in any tangible sense, are you you, though I sometimes seem to catch glimpses of you, at the edge of my mind as I’m falling asleep, or a moment before waking. The tannoy has just announced that our flight is, in fact, boarding now, at a gate a shuttle ride and fifteen minutes away. Your brother hasn’t napped and I haven’t eaten; I am attempting to hold him on my hip with one arm as he wriggles and cries, as I push the buggy precariously balanced with our bags, negotiating the queue in the sandwich bar. It’s finally our turn and the cashier calls me forward. As she starts to ask what coffee I want, a tanned, besuited businessman, all cufflinks and expensive watch, steps up and says, It was quite obviously my turn next and you pushed right in front of me.