‘How have you been?’
It is such an innocuous question and yet I know there are two possible answers: the platitudinal and the truthful.
I tell her all I have learnt over the past few days, watch the emotions shift across her face like clouds across the sky: shock, horror, sadness. It is reassuring, somehow, to see my own emotional journey reflected back at me.
‘I can’t imagine what you must be going through, finding that out after everything that’s happened. How are you feeling?’ Zahira rests a hand on my arm, her eyes flitting between my face and her son playing in the sandpit.
‘I’m not really sure. Numb, I think. And then I feel guilty because I think I ought to feel something, some sort of grief, but it’s like it’s out of reach somehow.’ I think about the past few days, about my fear that I cannot seem to mourn my parents’ death. There is only panic that perhaps I will never remember them.
‘I don’t think there’s any prescribed way to feel when you’ve been through what you have. You just have to be kind to yourself and get through each day as best you can.’
A phone rings and Zahira reaches into the pocket of her jeans, pulls out her mobile, turns to me apologetically. ‘Sorry, I need to take this.’ She steps up from the bench, walks a few paces away, eyes still tracking her son.
Elyas plays happily for a minute, clambering up the short wooden ramp to the top of the toddler slide and gliding down. But then he looks towards the bench and his face crumples at the empty space where his mother had been sitting. Fear clouds his expression and I can almost feel his panic thumping in my chest. I dash towards him, crouch down to his level. ‘Don’t worry, poppet, your mummy’s just over there, look.’ He follows the line of my finger to where Zahira is waving at him, just a few yards away, and I watch the anxiety melt from his eyes. ‘How about we go and sit on the bench, wait for Mummy to finish her call? She won’t be long.’
He stares at me with non-committal eyes, studying my face with concentrated intensity. Looking towards his mum, she nods encouragingly and it is reassurance enough. Placing his hand in mine, Elyas lets me lead him towards the bench. Settled on the wooden slats, he looks up at me expectantly as though, now I am here, I might at least entertain him.
‘Do you like poems?’
He eyes me suspiciously and I remind myself that he’s only three, he probably doesn’t know what a poem is. I wrack my brain, try to summon a remnant of children’s verse from deep in the recesses of my mind.
‘The Owl and the Pussycat went to sea,
In a beautiful pea-green boat.’
‘My granny has a cat. It’s called Pusskins.’ Elyas grins and I smile at him, continue.
‘They took some honey, and plenty of money,
Wrapped up in a five-pound note.’
The rhyming stanzas follow, one after another – the land of the Bong-Trees, the pig in the wood, the turkey on the hill – and I do not know where they have come from, why they have managed to appear now, when I need them. And yet here they are, every line, until the end.
‘They danced by the light of the moon,
The moon,
The moon,
They danced by the light of the moon.’
‘God, did you do all that from memory?’ I turn around, find Zahira standing behind the bench. ‘I must have read that poem a hundred times and I’d never be able to recite it like that.’ She sits down and pulls Elyas onto her lap. Pressing her face to his neck, he giggles as she covers his skin with kisses.
I watch them and something cramps in my chest.
‘Elyas loves rhymes, don’t you?’ She turns to me. ‘That’s very impressive, knowing it off by heart.’
She squeezes her son tightly, and I look away, the sight of their intimacy like a naked flame threatening to scorch me should I get too close.
‘I’m afraid, little bear, we have to get going.’ Elyas lets out a plaintive wail. ‘I know, I’m sorry – we haven’t been here nearly long enough.’ Zahira stands up from the bench, reaches for the pushchair. ‘Usually we’re here for hours, but I need to get some work done. So much for working part-time.’ She rolls her eyes, puts Elyas into his buggy, slips his arms through the straps.
‘What do you do?’
Zahira grapples with the clasp, clicks it into place. ‘I’m a portrait photographer, for magazines and newspapers mostly.’ She untwists one of the straps over Elyas’s shoulder.
I think about my own idle days, empty for months since being made redundant, and feel a stab of envy that Zahira has so much with which to fill hers. ‘That sounds really interesting. So do you photograph famous people?’
Zahira laughs. ‘Sometimes.’ She lowers her voice conspiratorially. ‘They’re rarely as interesting as you’d hope. But a lot of my work is human-interest stories – weekend supplements, women’s glossies, that kind of thing.’ Zahira reaches for the bag tucked beneath the pushchair, pulls out a banana. She peels it, hands it to Elyas before turning back to me. ‘We’re going to my parents’ this Friday, but why don’t you give me your mobile number and I can let you know when we’ll be here next week.’
I shake my head, knowing even before I speak that my answer doesn’t really make sense. ‘I don’t have a mobile.’
Zahira looks confused. ‘But everybody has a mobile.’
I know she is right: I may have lost my personal memories, but I haven’t forgotten the existence of modern technology. I feel foolish, suddenly, that I haven’t asked Stephen about it before. A phone would have all my contacts in it – friends, former colleagues, previous correspondence. ‘I’ll ask Stephen about it tonight.’
Zahira presses a foot down on the brake of the pushchair, turns it in the opposite direction. ‘Anyway, we’ll be here next Tuesday morning – about nine-ish – unless it’s pouring with rain. Maybe see you then?’
I tell her I’ll be here and watch them leave. Zahira leans forward over the handlebar, chatting to her son, and it is there again, that feeling twisting beneath my ribs, as it has been each time I’ve seen them together; something unnameable tugging deep inside me.
And then I realise what it is. In all the conversations Stephen and I have had over the past ten days, there has been no mention of children. We have been married twelve years and yet we are childless. As I watch Zahira and Elyas exit through the park gates and on to the street, the sensation billows inside me as though it has a life of its own. I know that this feeling – a yearning, painful and raw – is not a symptom of my head injury. It speaks to something deeper, and I feel sure that there are other things about my life Stephen has chosen not to tell me. What I don’t know yet is why.
LIVVY
BRISTOL
Livvy pulled armfuls of dirty washing from the linen basket and piled them onto the floor. She wondered how it was possible for three people to generate so much laundry. In the bedroom next door, Leo was having a mid-morning nap. The night had been restless, Livvy unable to soothe him back to sleep when he’d woken just after four a.m., both of them becoming increasingly fractious as the minutes had marched on. Eventually, a little after six-thirty, Livvy had given up, taken him downstairs, retrieved some toys from the chest beside the fireplace, and played with him in the sitting room, her eyes scratchy and dehydrated from lack of sleep. By ten-thirty, Leo could barely keep awake, and Livvy had put him back in his cot, closed the blackout blind and sung to him until he had fallen asleep.