I’ve known Stu for 18 years. We’ve had that kind of friendship that can see twelve months pass without so much as an hello. Not a phone call, not a text, not an email, but we always eventually get back together and pick up where we left off, as though no time has passed at all. These gaps in our seeing one another are filled with so many fond memories… none of which, sadly, are the stuff of witty and riveting anecdote. Nevertheless, I will endeavour to pick apart a few of them.

For as long as I’ve known Stu, he has been organised and set in his ways. We lived together for six or seven years, and there were many things over that time which testified to this need of his for order and routine. There are the crisps he would neatly empty from his packet onto the side of his dinner plate. Almost every dinner plate, and almost regardless of what food was there next to it. This memory I’m particularly fond of, because even my daughter managed to outgrow a penchant for crisps at the side of her dinner plate by the age of four. Stu used to pour Vimto into a tall glass to accompany every meal. He bloody loved Vimto. I never once saw Stu drink anything other than Vimto, water or milk. And his regulation two pints of beer which saw him under the table each Saturday night. These are little pieces that remind me of someone who always seemed so young at heart and who enjoyed his comforts around him. I always found them entirely endearing.

I remember Monday evenings, returning home from work with new music releases which we listened to whilst playing Actua Soccer or Touring Car Racing Championship on the Playstation. We played the new CDs on his stack of separates, the separates that he’d saved up for month after dedicated month to buy. I loved listening to music with Stu and it was almost always the same music.

He would retire to his basement bedroom before 11pm every night. The dink of toothbrush and toilet lid through the wall was as dependably clockwork as night turning to day. I would roll into bed in the AM hours when Stu was almost always two or three hours of sleep to the good. And he would always greet me with the most annoyingly refreshed ‘MORNING MATTHEW!’ when we next passed again at around 8am. Stu liked his routine. And Stu likes things as they should be.

I remember Stu once reeling in horror at seeing a cigarette in my non-smoker’s hand at the nightclub in Bath we used to go to most weekends. Stu took my hand to the floor to demand it to be stubbed out for me, bashing knuckles and nails before he got anywhere near glowing embers. I have worn a prosthetic thumb to this day. Stu didn’t want me to smoke. He wanted his harmony and order and the world he loved to be just right around him. You see, Stu was all about order and routine and things in the right place, done at the right time, in the right way.

I recall the curveball I threw him when I fell seriously ill with glandular fever for a couple of pretty horrible weeks. I commandeered the lounge and the sofa for most of that time and Stu was bereft. He would pop his head around the door with a quiet, anxious ‘…alright Matthew?’ I would nod and smile, expending an hour’s worth of stored energy in the process and then his little head would be gone. I think he missed the sofa, but I know he missed his friend too, his order: his world had been thrown slightly out of kilter.

So, Aelia, there can be no higher confirmation of this man’s love for you other than the fact that he is deciding to share that world and be exposed to his sofa being occupied without pre-booking.

This is something of a lopsided speech, because whereas I’ve known Stu for 18 years, I’ve known Aelia for a little over 18 hours. Except I have really known Aelia for longer, for perhaps 12 or 18 months, albeit once removed. I’ve come to know Aelia, because I’ve gradually come to hear of the love that Stu has for her. And more than that, over that time, I’ve begun to share stories with Stu about the love I have for my own wife and my two daughters. I remember a meal with him where he probed with simple questions about ‘the way you feel being married’, ‘the way you feel looking after someone’, ‘living with that person’, ‘having two young lives to take care of too’. And I realised that I was not so much telling Stu about my life, but learning about the life that Stu was looking to form with the woman he had fallen in love with.

For me, it was the dullest conversation of our friendship to date and I allowed a gap of 12 months to pass by before seeing him again. But that evening, Stu was noticeably educated, moved and enchanted by the complete crock of shit I had just sold him.

So again, Aelia, you can be sure of Stu’s love for you, because he’s been finding his way towards this moment for almost as long as I’ve known him: setting things in place, being certain, getting excited about it and then finally going out and getting the thing that he wanted more than anything else. Just like he waited and waited and finally got that Champagne-coloured stack of music-system separates.

Aelia, I really hope we come to know you so well over time, and love you like we do Stu. He is my beautiful friend and it’s a very genuine, genuine joy to see that he now has a beautiful wife to share his life with.

Posted: 10:47 12 May 2012      7 comments

When we fall short of the standards we set for ourselves we feel guilt; when we destroy something of that person that we have created for others, that person we wish to situate in the world, there is shame. We feel guilt when we regret our actions. Shame is the limit at which those actions become too painful for us, a point at which the self dares to stare back at itself; the inside judging us from the outside. Escaping the glare of others is not the real struggle of shame: it is the impossibility of avoiding our own withering stare. A knife that won’t stop cutting at the skin.

Mine is a shame fragmented over many decisions, over many years. Instances of action and inaction. A selfishness, a cowardliness, a refusal to yield. My ignorance. My resignation. Shame is a piece of me that died and came back to haunt.

And it haunts tonight. It took only these few photos, and began cutting again. The skin: it scars and it wiIl open again. It will pass. And it will return.

It will open again.

Posted: 21:40 28 April 2012      7 comments

It’s a giddiness that grabs me unawares, that comes and then goes almost as quickly. It finds me as I’m walking, takes me from being vaguely conscious of doing one thing and then completely immerses me in another: delivers a slap, a shock. It’s like a beauty that is there layered behind the levity of the day. It’s as though every single light is suddenly pitched to illuminate that beauty. Something that has been there, in front of me, all along. The sweetest of nauseas. I look down to her, at my side.

The diagonal, formed by two limbs. Hands which join to unify two lines. Two arms.

Down, over my shoulder, down the arm to those hands which connect. A sheath of her fingers around just two of mine. My thumb and two fingers around the outside of that grip, to caress, to move and constantly affirm a father’s attention.

This diagonal.

Down, down past that hand, my hand. Her hand, like soft fruit, as yet without protrusion of knuckle or plane of bone.

Down, past the pink fluted, elasticated grip of her coat, sealed at her wrist.

Down the blue sleeve, to her own shoulder, where the diagonal kinks, like a bend brings deformity to a wire coat hanger.

That bend, into her face, where I can’t see, not from up here. Here, where only the jut of her brow, nose and chin can be established. Underneath that, the flap of coat, the eager stab forward of two red wellies.

Her head, bobbing up and down, in rhythm with her feet. Her eyes, which I can’t see.

Her eyes.

Her eyes, which I know are watching her feet, mesmerising herself.

Those feet. Heels, slamming into the ground, exaggerated, proclaiming her love for those wellies.

That intensity.

She adores those red wellies.

Diagonals.

I look up, dizzy. It’s like falling without ever hitting the ground. Upwards, to the line of trees on the horizon, banking down to the right. The trees, too, falling, falling in on the road, which I can’t see.

Her head, lifting towards mine. This line between us humming. This simple line. This beautiful diagonal.

I squeeze at her hand.

And it suddenly all falls away.

That line still there, but that fever: gone.

All gone.

Still walking, but that beauty now gone.

Gone. That diagonal.

Posted: 12:27 27 April 2012      3 comments

Absence requires us to search for a part of ourselves, to rediscover something which is missing, something detached or lost within us, once connected to something outside. Absence is that state of something not being in the space to which it belongs. It is a tie that has been unfastened or cut away. Absence lurks and we’re not always aware of how susceptible we are: as precarious as a string knotted loosely to the neck of a balloon. Absence is the wretched creation of the head which can’t decide whether to console or torture the heart. It is a thing which replaces. Absence can plummet following a moment of carelessness, neglect or spite, as we watch the thing that we love leave our grasp. A balloon becoming smaller and smaller and smaller against the sky.

Posted: 13:31 16 April 2012      12 comments

It was my wife who first gave me reason to believe that I might become a father of some competence, almost six years ago and our first night together no longer as two people, but as three. Seventy-two hours old, my daughter’s cries that night were harrowing – the first realisation of how little we knew about so many things, not least of all love. Love: redefined, contorted and tested in ways we couldn’t have understood before. That night, I paced the length and width of the room and then repeated those steps with each foot finding the ghost of the step from the previous pass. I realised that I’d never before truly measured distance. I mapped the space between four walls, judged the proximity of bed and chair, knew precisely where the board had given out underneath the carpet, and at which point along the window wall the amber glow from the lamps outside would send an oblong of light across her face. That night, we learned to measure time too. The neon-blue numbers of the alarm clock revealed how tiny increments of time stacked so slowly. Numbers, superseded by more numbers. Large quantities being broken down into thousands and thousands of tiny particles. Hours, made of minutes, made of seconds. That night, we began in ignorance of tiredness, knowing nothing of exhaustion, or rather, that fear that convinces that exhaustion is close. That night, I carried my daughter, and then my wife carried her, each of us certain that our instincts were right: terrified by the possibility that they could be wrong. We continued to try to measure. I took her from my wife once more and carried her downstairs, past that point of secession that had informally been established between us. I shut out her cries and walked, measuring space and time anew, feeling all our tirednesses, finding shafts of that same orange light that had broken through upstairs, leaking through breaks in the fabric. I found flaws which prevented the curtains from joining, could see where hooks were missing and where the pleat tape at the top of the drape was in need of repair. I resolved to fix them soon. My gaze found her again, in my arms, her eyes closed. Silence: something else we would come to measure, more accurately than we had ever considered it before.

When my wife entered the room, she smiled and whispered, ‘You obviously have the knack.’ I smiled back, proudly accepting her words, reflecting that I knew the same to be true of her, acknowledging my first real contribution as we approached the fourth day of my daughter’s young life. For tiredness is that state which can disable an ability or truncate a desire to express ourselves more clearly, and this too was something we were already learning to gauge better: measuring what so few words could mean; what was there in a smile, a look; redefining noise and silence and so many things we thought we already knew.

Posted: 06:16 11 April 2012      7 comments

I brush her temple with the back of three fingers; a delicately clenched half-fist gliding down her forehead, over and under her brow and into the cushion of her cheek. Her lids close and this time stay closed. It’s like turning the slat of a blind shut in slow motion, and this torpid descent will repeat its fall several times yet, starting where wisps of brown hair kink and curl above her eyes and finishing only a couple of inches and six or seven seconds later at that round bulge of flesh. Earlier, fatigue had moved the same hand with less care, with greater speed, with not enough feeling. The slat had refused to remain shut. But at this rhythm, she can’t deny her own tiredness any longer.

Posted: 05:50 11 April 2012      2 comments

So often, the minuscule is overlooked, not seen to be important. A word or nuance is missed. An object or experience is seen but not comprehended: not truly taken in. Memory barely manages to redress the balance, but it responds to all kinds of triggers and can replay all number of forgotten, near-ignored details. When it does, the miniature is suddenly there in our consciousness. Seizing these small moments and grasping the tiny parts of something bigger can expand our thinking so much. You hold that one thing and everything else floods back or fills in, like the enabling of some kind of mnemonic device. The minuscule is all around us, but is easily missed and neglected.

And so I rediscover an image of Charlotte. A sequence of intricate images, to be exact: frames recorded long ago to be relived again later, perhaps only then to be fully savoured. It’s the moment at which her gaze moves away from mine, unlocking from its tightrope stare, her head dipping ever so faintly. There is that yet more gentle press and rub of the triangles of her neck, where jaw, collarbone, shoulder and vertebrae all dictate the push and pull of flesh. She looks down to the floor and a shutter of thin skin falls down over the grey, blue, ink-blot-brown of her eyes. Then her gaze lifts again, but this time not to be fastened once more with mine. This time to journey somewhere else, knowing it will be followed. And I do follow it, for a few seconds more, and then I disconnect too.

In recapturing the moment, in this flowering from the miniature, I experience the chest-pounding, cold-air shock of what was unspoken, yet manifest and reciprocated in that look: this is the friend I love most, the partner I still desire, the mother of my children; the life that is wrapped around my own. And it was there, in those five or six seconds of a day.

Posted: 11:18 04 April 2012      5 comments

We spread the flattened cardboard boxes out onto the floor only when the last of the day’s light had almost gone. We lay down, Pete and me first, keen to sleep but also to prove that sleep was possible, and to signal that the day could end. Dave settled down near to us at some point later. And Mum just sat there, on the stairs.

When the light had begun to fail, and the heat from the day had gone with it, we had not really known what to do, not thought how best to prepare for the night; the dark and the increasing cold. That morning, the door to the house that had been ours had been locked by somebody else’s hand. A new key turned to engage the mechanism of a new lock and our home had gone. Our things still inside. Dave had mentioned something about coming back for them soon.

I can’t visually recall a look back; no wistful final glance, but I remember the confusion and anxiety, partnered always by that shame, that shame which had begun snuffing at our naivety many years previous. I can see again the men who came, the locks they brought, a piece of paper with an address printed on it, the first bus and I think a second bus, then the walk to the office. All merely splinters lodged underneath the skin, which time would eventually tweeze out, perhaps even the sorest of them, perhaps even those glances back to Mum, looking back to her as we walked, and that most painful glance as she sat on those stairs.

The bus got us to within a quarter of a mile of the office. It pulled away revealing the pub opposite – The Fox and Goose – a place which would become the first new landmark in our lives in the years to come; the first pin dropped onto a large new map, with folds still clean and sharp. It should have been a ten-minute walk, but it took us at least thirty, slowing often and stopping occasionally for Mum to catch her breath. The sun was right over us as we walked: no cloud nor cover to obstruct, just the sun and our squashed black shadows beneath us. At such a languid pace, the heat oppressed us all, but was by far cruelest upon Mum. Each of us felt a measure of her lassitude like it was our own, and we all saw her torment, her guilt, her regret. Those feelings had long been interwoven, blurred, soaked up: accepted. Yet never spoken about. Just one more blow which we all absorbed the impact of together. Kept hidden, kept inside. She wore that worried half-smile which told us she was as scared and uncertain as we were. I’d seen that smile so often, we all had. Those smiles betrayed each of us in a way that words would not.

At the office, I remember the Polyprop chairs, bolted into rows of four or six; the same chairs we had in our classrooms, blue and brown, rubber feet missing from the legs, cuts and scars across their moulded form. The wait at the office was agonisingly slow. Like the men who had asked us to leave our home that morning, here were more new people to determine the next part of our day and the onward course of our lives. The fear and anxiety returned, but the wait brought Mum something of the respite she needed. It might have been that two or three hours passed before a set of keys were handed to her – the second set of new keys we had seen that day. I didn’t understand how one house could be taken from us, only for another to become ours so quickly. There were directions to the new house, names of roads for us to remember, and then another walk, a walk longer than the one which had brought us to the office.

Mum’s pace had slowed considerably; the day punishing her so fiercely. The half-smiles of apology that came earlier with each pause had now disappeared. The sun was still on us, that orange colour that comes late in the day, sloping to some bottom corner above the rooftops of houses on roads that we had never seen before. Progress was painful; each stop tormenting me and my brothers every bit as much as each restarting step tormented Mum. We took turns at her side. We walked forward, we tracked back, walking twice what we needed to, aspiring to some sort of fluidity. We turned a corner, only for it to reveal the next long road, the arithmetic scarring instantly, as we calculated what it would take for Mum to get to that place on the horizon, that place to which each of us could have run within five minutes. And Highfield Road became another pin on that new map.

A crippling feeling began to sink in, starting to long for what was behind us and now lost, but also enfeebled by the thought of what lay ahead. We had been transplanted into a place that was nothing like an idea of home that we knew. The street and houses unlike what had been ours. The grass verges had disappeared. Heaps of fly-tipped rubbish crowned patches of wasteland. On one such plot: a house with a smoke-blackened ground storey and pine-panel boards covering every single window recess. Further and closer. That which was gone and that which we still must face. We turned right into the darkest and most unwelcoming street yet, and then a final right turn. A street sign on the wall of the corner building confirmed our long journey was all but over. Across the road, a corner shop was the first in a row of about forty mostly new-build houses. Two or three faces looked out as we looked in. It would have been Mum who smiled our first hello, words still failing her; words always failing us. We made our way to the top of the cul-de-sac, past patchworks of concrete and grass, past the hills of soil and rubble opposite, our walk almost over, but no less scared, no less lost. We found the green door. Six and eight. Two numbers; a street sign; an address: a new home.

In that next hour, that last hour of light, came real moments of joy. I remember Pete and I tearing around the house, exploring the magnolia-fresh walls in all the rooms, and the shiny white gloss skin which coated every door and window frame. Unblemished linoleum floor tiles ran from one wall right across to the other. A gas fire had been fitted in both downstairs rooms, so new that the box and polythene sleeves they had arrived in were still there, discarded on the floor next to them. At our old house, there wasn’t a single wall not covered in flaking paint or peeling paper; every floor had been decked in torn vinyl or mismatched, worn carpet; every space revealed dirt and neglect. This was our new home. This was a new start, a canvas so uniquely white. Pete and I chose the big double room at the front. Once we had our things, we would make that room just right. These thoughts made us intensely happy, but they shone like only a few small lights in the dark, blinking on and off at the end of the day.

Our happiness greyed over. The light finally failed. The front rooms were lit by the strong glow of the street lamps outside, but at the back there was very little to see by. The warmth had gone too. We brought the cardboard box from the front room into the back and lay it down next to the other one. They were about three feet square in size. Pete and I got down first. The cardboard brought no comfort, but was not the floor. The polythene sheets we pulled over us offered no warmth, but they were cover. We scrunched a top onto the floor, the same way we would for goalposts, and lay our heads down. We shuffled restlessly, scraping the cardboard each time with a sandpapering noise. We were cold and tired, but the one prevented us from yielding to the other. The cold eventually stopped our shuffling and brought a rigidity to our foetal forms that would lock in for the night. Not able to yet accept sleep, but no longer wanting to have to remain awake. Those minutes, which might have made an hour, were perhaps the longest of the day. We closed our eyes again and again, each time hoping that morning would be there when next they opened.

But sleep could not so quickly bury that day.

The door that led upstairs from that room where we lay remained ajar. Mum had perched herself on the stairs earlier and she was still there now. Our eyes, open again. What light there was had stray-printed across the wall and some of it fell across her face too. I saw her face and I know that Pete and Dave saw it too. I closed my eyes and saw it again and again. Her face.

Sleep came. I woke once and found Dave had settled near to us. At other times, I would wake to tuck the sheet more tightly in around my neck and chin in vain hope of finding warmth. I looked and found Mum each time, and each time she was still there on the stairs.

Awake again. No more and no less tired. I looked to the stairs. Her eyes were closed, her head dipped down, her bottom lip pushed out, her chin sunk back into a fold of skin draping down from her clavicle, her hand clasping the wrist of her other arm and resting against her stomach, her knees and ankles together. The soft light still across her face.

Posted: 01:18 28 March 2012      7 comments

So many things have made this day long; have stretched morning and night so very far apart from one another.

She waits for me to return downstairs. So patiently. She wears headphones, pink and white, which plug into her laptop DVD player. A half-finished bowl of cereal next to her, cushions gathered together to cover her bare feet, cereal spoon still in her hand. She’s absorbed in her film and hasn’t yet noticed me enter the room. It’s only when she is seesaw-lifted by my weight at the opposite end of the sofa that she raises her head and smiles. She removes her headphones. I kiss her and then get up to switch on the monitor, which confirms the subtle shifts of her young sister, now only minutes from finding sleep: three flashing circles of yellow light, then two, then one.

Earlier, I had promised her that we would bake jam tarts using the pastry we had rolled and refrigerated that afternoon. I look at the clock, but I already know the late hour won’t convince me to renege, so I tell her we will make tarts, but quickly. Thirty minutes later, I dip my little finger three times into the red centre of one of the dozen to ensure it is cool enough for her to eat. Like her cereal, she leaves half. I look to the clock again. I find her cushion – the half-blue, half-mauve one that she’s taken to bed with her every night for almost all of her life. It’s now so old, the velvet cover so threadbare, its square shape so hopelessly deformed. I can be alone with that cushion at times and my thoughts overwhelm me: it is with her every night – no doll or teddy has ever been loved more by any child.

I tell her to go on up ahead of me, and I turn to fill her water bottle at the kitchen tap. I return to find her waiting again, at the foot of the stairs. She climbs them slowly, without once looking to see where she is going, only back towards where she has come from; back, towards me. And she chatters as she walks. I stoop forward and swing ape-like arms over each step – a soliloquy, not aimed at mocking our slow progress or making her laugh, but one of those sanity-sparing manoeuvres that parents engage in when their energies are all but spent.

‘Teeth and weewees.’ I instruct, and I pat her on her bottom to speed her to the bathroom. As she brushes her teeth, I repair the order of her room, back to how I found it when I woke her this morning. I return books to shelves. I stand Lego figures into place on Lego lawns, then adjust them slightly, to set them in a more regimented line. I stand the third little figure and shake my head in disbelief at my own ridiculous compulsion: tidily rearranging that which will be disturbed or taken apart in just a few hours’ time. I throw the duvet up and let it parachute back down flat onto the bed. I pull and straighten it at each end and then turn over the nearest corner. I punch a pillow, then shake it, lay it down above the chin line of her duvet and pad it once more. I set her cushion on top of the pillow and smooth that too, despite knowing its appearance cannot be improved: I obsess, but reason that it merits the same respect. Finally, I lower the blind – one of those jobs that cannot be sped up or cut short – by taking the long length of white cord, which is less white and more grey each night, and unwind it carefully from its figure-of-8 embrace with the cleat. All is tidy, ready. We pass on the landing: she walks into the room I have just left and I go into the room where she has just been, and start the slow run of water for her mother’s bath. I rejoin her and find her copycat-plumping a pillow for me and standing it against the bedstead. ‘There you go,’ she says, grinning, and I smile back, never not amazed that she can thaw my tiredness, irritation, ennui, with such grace. I lie down next to her. My body aches, but it’s wonderful to get to this moment of the day, where our demands of one another are no longer a drain on body or mind.

I tell her it’s too late for one of her stories, something I had already forewarned when we set about making the tarts, yet she still lets out a whine, though only a playful one: a last-gasp petition to keep sleep just ten or so more minutes away. I sigh and pull my phone from my pocket. I look at the time and know these figures don’t yet have any significance for her. Her day begins when her eyes open and it ends when they close. My day is enslaved by these numbers: they dictate when, how and all that I do. But I decide to ignore them this once. I suggest that perhaps she would like it if I read her one of the stories that Daddy likes. I hold hope that the pitch and rhythm of my voice might be enough to secure sleep for her. The story is one I had bookmarked for reading at the beginning of the day, this day as yet still without an end. She nods to tell me she would like to hear me read it.

Via four separate presses of my thumb, I bring the first hundred or so words of a story called ‘Valentine’ into view on the small screen. She leans her head against the left side of my chest, tucks the arm on her underside into the cavern between us and brings her right arm over to rest against the right side of my chest, and it sits there as light as the duvet which floated down upon the mattress minutes earlier. She lowers her face into that same area and its weight against me is so joyous – a tenderness that lasts only a few seconds, which feels almost too beautiful to bear; that kind of sensation that must pass from ecstasy to commonplace pleasure so quickly, perhaps to keep us from being drowned by that which we desire most.

I start to read, but she interrupts me after only a few words.

‘Whose story is this?’

‘It’s written by a lady who writes lovely stories that Daddy likes to read.’

‘Do you know her?’

‘No, but sometimes I write to her.’

‘Even though you don’t know her?’

‘Yes.’

‘Why?’

‘I write to let her know I’ve enjoyed reading her stories.’

‘Does she write to you?’

‘Sometimes she does, yes.’

She nods, already suggesting that she understands something of this story that isn’t a picture book, that it is more than just an authorless creation to be consumed as mere bedtime ritual. She resettles her cheek into my chest and her silence is her consent for me to start again. And I read to her. I read to her a story that I had foremost wanted to read for my own pleasure, but am now able to read for hers too. A story that is simple in its telling and mundane in its subject matter, yet affecting in so many ways, and in ways which I don’t really expect her to understand, but which I ponder, and suspect that she might. I sense she already knows something of the words we use and the things we actually mean when we use those words. She knows something of their power, I am sure. The story is short, no longer than one of her own. No pages to turn, just a thumb to scroll a graphic representation on a screen no larger than the palm it rests against. Underneath the last words of the story, there is a photograph of three onions.

‘Those are nice onions.’ she says, yawning on the last word.

‘They are nice onions.’ I repeat, yawning back at her, on the same word.

One press of the thumb cancels the phone’s illuminated display. I reach down to find the switch for the pink lamp, and that too is extinguished. Only the night-light string around her wardrobe door and a plug-in pink disc that glows in the socket next to it allow for the definition of anything else. I find her hand again, still there, so delicate in its repose. She closes her eyes and yawns again, scrunching her nose. I can hear the water running still, and then I hear the closing of a car door, the whirring-shut of the central locking, the up-and-down clunk of the loose slate at the top of the path, the metal jangle of keys, the thud-creak palindrome of the door, and the instant frenzied scraping of the dog’s claws upon the floorboards of the room into which my wife will first enter. I hear all these things and it feels like the house is full again. And tiredness, relief and contentment begin to merrily overlap, cross-fading in and out. All around me, the concealing grey of the room begins to leak its true colour.

She is asleep so quickly. She can barely have let go of the image of the onions.

There is quiet, as the running water stops. My wife pops her head around the door, expecting, I know, to find me asleep too.

‘Oh!’ she says, surprised, and then, ‘Is she asleep?’

‘Yeah.’

‘You okay?’

‘Yeah. You?’

‘Yeah. Absolutely exhausted.’

I don’t reply. She smiles to acknowledge the end of the conversation, and to thank me for readying her bath. It is also a smile for that thank-you that is never spoken between us, the one that acknowledges the care given by one parent on behalf of both. She goes next door to undress.

I kiss the head resting on my chest. I let go of the phone, let go of her hand, let go of the day, and close my eyes too.

Posted: 13:54 16 February 2012      19 comments

Twenty quiet, near-black seconds before a fluorescent tube winks into life. One or two strobes of half-intense light flare the room into view, before everything suddenly becomes illuminated in stinging white light. | Loosening an unmarked postage stamp from a square of envelope and watching it cut clean through the water in the kitchen sink; not floating, but knifing through the water and then helicoptering down to the bottom. | Finding and retrieving a white plastic fork from where it had fell, behind the desk. | A pigeon limping around on the pavement a few feet in front of where I walk; a knot of scarred flesh at the base of its leg like a ball of wax around the end of a dying candle. | Blowing little scrapes of foil onto the floor. | Reading my name, written by someone else’s hand: the writing seems familiar but it is my own name that I almost don’t recognise.

Posted: 00:38 07 February 2012      8 comments