Chapters (40)
- Cover
- About the Author
- PENGUIN BOOKS
- Dedication
- One
- Two
- Three
- Four
- Five
- Six
- Seven
- Eight
- Nine
- Ten
- Eleven
- Twelve
- Thirteen
- Fourteen
- Fifteen
- Sixteen
- Seventeen
- Eighteen
- Nineteen
- Twenty
- Twenty-one
- Twenty-two
- Twenty-three
- Twenty-four
- Twenty-five
- Twenty-six
- Twenty-seven
- Twenty-eight
- Twenty-nine
- Thirty
- Thirty-one
- Thirty-two
- Thirty-three
- Thirty-four
- Thirty-five
- THE BEGINNING
Irene picked up another stone and turned it over in her hand. It was smooth and round, like a gull’s egg, with a little vein of light grey running through it. There were words that she carried with her like stones – rolling around in her skull, lodged in her heart, embedded in the lining of her empty womb. Why were they so hard to speak? She took a deep breath.
‘After Aggie …’ she said. She was starting to feel cold now. Her skirt dragged down and dripped on her feet. Her wet hair stuck to her cheek. ‘After Aggie …’
After Aggie they hadn’t wanted another. They’d had enough of sleepless nights, nappies, tetchy quarrels, mounting debts, British holidays in the drizzle, dead-end jobs to make ends meet, doors slammed shut on plans they’d made. Of course she should have read the familiar signs and known earlier, early enough to have made a difference – and maybe she had known, keeping it quite secret and safe even from herself.
Not a grain of rice any more; not even a pea, a broad bean. No: a scrunched-up body, a prehistoric face, thready arms that stretched out and legs that kicked.
‘After Aggie there was Felix.’ She spoke the name to the little black waves that slapped on the shore, to the dark riffle of wind around them. ‘After my grandpa.’
There – she had said his name out loud. That secret word, hauled out of the icy cellar.
She heard Sasha’s high, clear voice: ‘I’m going to have a little boy and call him Felix. That means happy. He’s going to be big and strong and have blue eyes and live to a hundred.’
A little boy: the shock of seeing his swollen genitals. Hearing him give his quaint, reedy cry, like a curlew’s lonely call, and falling in love all over again, hurtling off that cliff: loose downy skin, hard gums against her nipple, almond eyes, thin grasping fingers that clutched at her and lost her all over again. She had gathered him to her as if she could take him back inside her and keep him safe for ever. If she closed her eyes she could feel the pouched shape at her breast, breathe his smell of sweet grass, mustard seed, sawdust, clean puke.
‘I used to lie there in the dead of night and listen to his breathing.’