(I see that a writer who has been loud against me for a year has removed from her blog a particularly unpleasant post with my name on it. I don't presume to know why she has done this. I'd like to think it had something to do with goodness; I certainly do not think she has changed her view of me. But I thank her nevertheless. It would be good if I could move on from this... if everyone could.)
(I am adding this here, because I read something today that made me see what has happened to me recently and how other people have made me into something I am not and something I do not like. What I read was the kind of cereal box philosophy that you also sometimes see on pretty landscape photographs made into inspiring posters, or pictures of bears up to their knees in white water and swiping their paws at leaping salmon, or eagles soaring in a blue blue sky. Nevertheless, I read something there that made me see, and made me want to be what I was, which is better than I have been recently. From here on in I want to be me again - gentler and more forgiving and good.)
GRACE’S NEW DRESS
Grace stands naked in front of the bathroom mirror. She has done her hair the way he likes it. The way he said he liked it. She can still hear his voice in her memory. ‘I like your hair all loose and as though the wind has been at your back.’
She is wearing make-up, too. A little colour to her face and some blue to her eyes and her lips all painted. She smiles at herself, uncertainly. Feels something she cannot name in the heart of her. Like something is missing. Like she feels when she has not eaten and the hours have used up her energy.
She says her own name, then. Whispers it. Says it like he said it in the dark of her room, a year back, quiet so no one would hear him saying it. She cups her right hand over her left breast. Closes her eyes and tries to imagine it is his hand there, as it was once. Says her name again, in his voice. Bends her neck as though he is behind her, kissing her there.
She wonders if there is a difference in her. Wonders if he will notice it.
‘Oh she is changed,’ said her mother to Athol Stuart. Grace was at the open door to the police station and she heard her mother talking. ‘She is quieter, of course. Still a little in shock, I think. But she is not a girl any more. She is a mother and that changes you.’ But Grace’s mother did not then go on to say how it was that Grace was altered.
In her bedroom the baby is sleeping. Just for a moment Grace can believe that she is not changed. That she is back before the birth. Back to the summer when she was still a girl and everything was new and bright and easy. Too easy, perhaps.
‘I love this part of you,’ he’d said. He’d stroked her hips then and ran the flat of his hand over her stomach. ‘It’s called the pelvic cradle.’ He’d laid his head there, looking up at her. ‘I could lie here forever,’ he’d said.
It is the sort of thing boys think girls want to hear. And the truth is she did want to hear it back then. Maybe in the moment he even meant what he said. She doesn’t now believe in forever. She is not the girl she was then. Maybe that is what is different. She wonders if he has changed, too.
She drops her hand from her breast and opens her eyes. In the mirror she looks the same. Thinks she does. A little thinner in the face perhaps, but the same girl looking back at her.
She stretches on her toes, leaning in close to the mirror, trying to see the pelvic cradle, the jut of her hips. She can’t. She drops down to the flat of her feet again.
‘It’s Grace,’ she says. Not in whisper now, not in his voice.
She puts her make-up away and dresses quickly. It is a new dress she wears. Not one he has seen before. But it is a colour she knows he likes.
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