Grace in PB

(Update on that shortlisting I had reported a couple of posts earlier: turns out it became a second place winner in the competition. I had thought a shortlisting was a good result... this is much better. I was second in the same comp last year, and this year the number of entries was up fourfold, so I must be doing something right.)

GRACE AND THE BABY FEED BOTTLE

She hadn’t told him. Not everything. Not the important stuff. Not yet. She wanted it to be as it was before, just for that first night, even though she knew it could not really be the same. Not once he knew.

‘It’s been a year,’ she’d said.

It felt like a reproof. Even in her ears it did. Even remembering it the morning after if felt wrong what she had said.

‘A lot can happen in a year,’ she’d added.

‘You look just the same,’ he’d said. ‘Just as pretty.’

They’d held hands and just walked. Out across the sand. In the dark. Sometimes he just said her name. Whispered it like he could not believe she was there. That’s what she thought when he said it.

‘A lot can happen in a year,’ she’d said again, like she was making room to tell him. She should have told him then. There was a space so she could. Instead she said nothing. And when he spoke the moment passed. There’d be others, she thought.

He told her about the circles he'd been going round in and how he wanted to do it different from now on. He was tired of always moving and never getting anywhere. And being always dirty and his clothes smelling of smoke and oil and fast food cooking. ‘I want it different,’ he said.

‘How different?’ she’d asked. She’d held her breath for his reply. Hoping for something more than he gave her then

‘Just different,’ he said, and he shrugged. She drew breath and gave him time to elaborate. He just wanted not to feel trapped anymore and being with Berlie’s made him feel trapped. That’s what he said. The same words, or as near as the same.

Grace couldn’t tell him then.

She got up to see to the baby. Her yellow dress was folded neatly across the back of a chair in her room and her yellow cardigan laid on top and her white shoes set heel to heel and toe to toe on the floor. Everything flat, like balloons when the air has leaked away or dreams when the sunlight falls on them.

‘I like you in yellow,’ he’d said. ‘Like sunlight.’

She wasn’t sure now that she would ever tell him. She’d kept it a secret from everyone else. She could keep it a secret from him too. Maybe that would be best. In two weeks he’d be gone again. Not trapped, maybe.

There was bottled baby milk in the fridge. Her mother always prepared it the night before. All Grace had to do was to shake the bottle and reheat it; then test it with a squirt-drop on her elbow and it was ready. She sat with the television turned on and the sound off. The baby sucked at the teat of the bottle and lifted its arms into the air, reaching for something and not finding anything in its small hands. Grace thought she knew what that felt like.