If Nobody Speaks of Remarkable Things

And he raises his eyebrows, and there is a rolling of bodies, a rustling of tangled bedclothes, a creaking of old bedsprings.

And in a moment’s breathless pause, blinking at each other and already wiping sweat from a forehead, she thinks of their further surprise, a few short months after their doubled blessing, the unexpected planting of a third child they had not been ready for, and she knows they were right to seal off further possibility, to let the doctors take scissors and stitches to her husband and close the shutters on their fertile windows. There is not the money she’d said, my body is tired, and he had not been able to deny her that. We have been given more than we asked for she’d said, this is enough now, and he had agreed.

They had kept it a secret, they were not sure his parents would approve, but his mother had made no more comment about extra brothers and sisters for their children. Perhaps she thinks three is enough after all. Perhaps she thinks that they no longer move together in that way, now there is no need.

She draws her fingernails slowly down her husband’s back, she listens to the sounds she can draw from out of him, and she thinks well so at least she is wrong about that.

I woke up late this morning, I had to leave for work without having a shower and I felt sticky and straw-headed all day.

Before I left, I noticed that Michael had left the broken clay figure behind, it was still on the table, lying forlornly on its side.

I picked it up and looked at it again, resting the head on the shoulders, looking at the long thin ears, the tiny beads around the neck, the stillness of the expression.

I wondered how it had been broken.

I wondered if I could fix it, if that would be okay, if it was supposed to be like this.

I looked around for some superglue, I looked in the kitchen drawer with the elastic bands and the sellotape and the silver foil, and I found the leaflets from the clinic, the ones I’d stuffed away in there the other week.

I read the sections I’d started to highlight, I read the rest of them, and somehow it seemed a little less alien than it had before, I kept checking the clock and reading a little bit extra, stroking my belly and imagining the quiet bubbling miracle inside.

But in the end I had to put them back and run for the bus with my mouth crammed full of toast.

And I spent all day standing over a photocopier, getting tiny paper-cuts on my hands and thinking about yesterday afternoon.

I thought about how nice it had been to just spend the afternoon walking around, talking, not talking, thinking, telling each other what we were thinking.

We went to the park, and I saw the girl from the shop downstairs, I think she saw me but I didn’t know whether or not to say hello, I wasn’t sure that she’d recognise me.

I was sick behind some rhododendron bushes, and it barely interrupted the flow of the conversation.

We had lunch in a cafe by the lake, we sat by the window and looked out over the water, he told me about him and his brother learning to swim on a camping trip in the lake district, how they’d egged each other on to walk further and further out.

It was a hot day he said, but the water was still icy cold.

He told me how they stood there, shivering, calling each other chicken, a step further and a step more, until the water was tapping against their clenched teeth.

He was looking at the lake, at the people in rowing boats, and he said we stopped talking, we were looking at each other, wondering what to do next, and suddenly we grabbed each other and pulled each other forwards, out of our depth, face down into the water.

I said and what happened, he said I don’t know, I remember being under the water for a while, throwing my arms and legs around, and then somehow my head was in the air again and we were both swimming.

I told him I couldn’t swim and he pointed at my stomach and said so a birthing pool’s out then and he smiled and I laughed.

And after we’d talked some more we walked back through the park and across town to an art gallery.

There was a special exhibition on, it was only one piece of work but we were there for an hour, looking and looking and telling each other about it in hushed awestruck voices.

It was in one room, a large room with long skylights, and we stood by the doorway and looked in at it, at them, looking over them, thousands and thousands of six-inch red clay figures, as roughly made as playschool plasticine men, a pair of finger-sized sockets for eyes, heads tilted up from formless bodies.

Each one almost identical, each one unique.

We knelt there, looking at them looking up at us, the thousands of them, saying I wonder how long and I wonder if they all and I wonder what.

A small boy came running up behind us, shouting and then suddenly stilled into quietness, he said it’s like being on a stage.

I wanted to steal one, I wanted to put it on my bedside table and wake up to see it smiling kindly at me, but Michael said it wasn’t fair, he wouldn’t let me, he said it might get lonely.

I wanted to count them, give them all names, make up stories for each of them, but it seemed impossible to even begin.