Terrible Questions

I sat hunched and small, a fizzing bundle of self-hatred and yearning, a 22-year-old woman in the front passenger seat of a small muddy Peugeot. Dusk spring skies darkened quickly. A sole blackbird chanted dutifully, highlighting the yawning silences between our words.

He spoke softly. ‘But — do you not love me anymore?’

It had taken me months to get to this point. A slow process of noticing, feeling, knowing. Wishing otherwise. It would be years before I would experience my own trust, my own heart, broken. But somehow I sensed it: that this was the worse side of the deal. That doing the breaking is worse.

My heartbeat was doing strange things. Speeding and slowing. My neck ached from cowed posture. I gazed up at the empty terrace in front of the car, felt my thumb rubbing against the fabric of the seat, searching for familiarity, reassurance.

I inhaled slowly, silently, and considered his question.
And considered what was beneath it. What was really being asked, by both of us, was not of love but: Where do we go from here? Is this the end? Can we carry on, even if we want to?

I loved him, but that was beside the point, and I didn’t understand why. All I knew was the tight itch in the centre of my chest was whispering leave, go, stretch. This isn’t for you anymore.
So much about my life depended on what I said next. Oh, the vertiginous height of a binary decision. And right before I spoke I felt the weight of all that I knew I would eventually be brave enough to give up: the supportive family, the home to escape to, the friendship group. First love’s gentle adoration and sharp fierceness. Its history powerful, but not quite enough.

Rebecca Broad

Tell me what you’re afraid of.

How to push through the ache of fear that bridles my tongue? How to piece and police the tumble of raw emotions that shunt into my head at every, waking moment? How to know that, if spoken, the darkness in my mouth won’t pool, thick like tar and engulf everything I love with the same sticky filth that lives in me now?

How to believe that the words aren’t a spell of becoming? How do I say that I am sacrificing myself to save them from what I know and worse, what I don’t know but fear is true? How to trust that this person will know how to save me?

I don’t believe him. I don’t believe in him. He is just a ghost on the margins, while the things in my head are real, glossy and slick with fear, growing fat in the dark of my mouth. There is too much risk. Too much to lose.

My mouth is stitched shut. My teeth bite down on flesh. Blood wells.

I can’t say.

Katy Wheatley

Rhododendron walks

Under the rhodies, sound and light dark-damped. Fusty soil and rot and chlorophyll and—in May—flowers (but those were on the outside of the tunnels and we were within). Do you remember the tunnels, Daddy? Do you remember the smells?

Duckboards wrapped with non-slip chicken-wire. Their song so familiar: ti-clunk ti-clunk ti-clunk. Wellington boots on twisted metal on wood on boggy ground. Do you remember the sound of them, Daddy?

Out. Blinking onto the swan-guarded bank. Lakeside swan-avoidance smells emanate from the glaucous spikes. Minty, but not mint… but… rushes! A smell all of their own. Do you remember the rush-crush, Daddy?

Sweet chestnut stands beyond for prickly lime-green Yule-tide forages. Do you remember those, Daddy?

Furthest point: best bit. Magic sand. Particles of finest silt and clay. Alum Bay colours though it would be years before I’d bring back a bottle from there. Grief-stricken and homesick. Do you remember the sand, Daddy? Do you remember the feel of it under a scribing stick?

Do you remember the old weeping willow watching our lake walks from the far bank, Daddy?

Do you remember the snow on Christmas Day, Daddy? The fern by your desk?

Do you remember Mummy was out, my brother asleep, and I felt poorly so you lifted me

h
i
g
h

into your arms, Daddy? I think this is the only time.

Do you remember any of those moments, Daddy?
I remember them for us, Daddy. For you.

Kid x

PS I can’t remember if you held my hand, Daddy? Did you?

M Nivalis

The question was lost in the statement, and found later in the pleading explanation. ‘I want to die.’ The missing conjunction: and will you let me? The parts of this unfinished sentence as broken as she was, as separate as we were.

Forced apart by this illness, our communications, emotionally easy but physically impossible, had taken the form of long, intimate, soothing text messages. Today’s had simply said:

‘Can you speak?’
‘When?’
‘Now?’

Well enough to speak, for the first time in two years, this was progress. My heart started going. I didn’t know then that it wouldn’t stop until hers did. I had no time to figure out this feeling. Here was her voice, finally.

‘I want to die.’

All of a sudden, here we were, so close and so far apart. I gave her the response that no one else would give. The response her body refused, locked as they were in daily conflict. The response that went against the instinct and responsibility of any parent or doctor. The response that kept me close to her. I couldn’t have her rally against me as she did with all those hell-bent on keeping her alive. I couldn’t lose her before I had no say in the matter.

In giving her the permission to go, I hoped she might grasp to life. Having her pain and knowing acknowledged might be an act of empowerment, propelling her toward life, instead of away from it. I knew it was a gamble and I had more to lose.

I wonder now if the unsaid question was ‘Do you know me?’ or perhaps ‘Are you my friend?’

On the day she died, I felt special. We’d colluded to this end.

Laura

Tiny and momentous, it seemed to be the only real option to take. I still wonder what if though…

It was a hot summer that year.

From May to August, Marie Peters and I walked the canal in Tommy K’s that chafed our ankles, sometimes in Scholls, soon abandoned after too many times of hurt insteps and cramped toes from clinging to their unforgiving support.

The pathways turned dusty and brown; the canal – lower than I’d ever seen it – forged slowly onward. Choked in weed at parts, host to predatory pike in the bends, and cheerfully inappropriate fishermen on the banks.

Marie and I, friends from junior school separated by the 11+, found each other again during those weeks of limbo. With all our previous routines displaced by O Levels and CSEs, we met to journey together through free falling days. United by the AEB timetables, and a sense of something ending, something beginning.

We laughed about me being woken up by the Deputy Head and taken (in her powder blue jag) to sit my Physical Geography exam, a journey that both humiliated and exhilarated me. About Marie’s hatred of the Games Teacher, talented runner that she was, and her pleasure in infuriating them by her refusal to perform to the school’s glory.

We circled results day, orbiting planets in a moment of conjunction.

Failure of six O Levels for me; I discounted the CSEs – they were of no consequence. Reasonable results for her, but our mutual disaffection with school, with education, was already set.

We would not return. Marie had a job already as a telephonist receptionist, found by her father the caretaker at our local Catholic secondary school. I had been beguiled by an advert for GPO telephonist training – I would have skill! My parents celebrated, unaware of my abject failure.

Our destinies set, we parted.

Complicit in small horizons and limited choices.

Wendy Clifford

That deepest unspoken fear of mine haunted me: a seizure during sleep, and being found in the morning, dead in bed.

I’d been scared to think wild thoughts in case it tipped my mind into riotous colour. Seeing sounds, chewing lips. I’d known for years before I had a diagnosis that there was something unusual.

I asked my neurologist gingerly, unable to keep the wobble from my voice: ‘When it feels like I am dying, am I really dying?’

I’d voiced the question that had privately troubled me for 15 years.

He was young-ish, probably about my own age, and he looked at my notes instead of at me. He paused, put down his pen and swallowed awkwardly in that magnolia-coloured box of a room we were in together.

‘No,’ he said carefully. ‘You’re not dying. Your brain just thinks you are.’

I breathed out for the first time in years and nodded, unspeaking. He might have been feeding me a comforting lie.

But if he was, it worked.

Anxiety, which had been grabbing me and twisting me into hunched forms, lessened.

I took my fears and began weaving them into the tapestry of my life. Fear lifted for a couple of days or so at first, but then for weeks, until I realised it had been months.

No longer stuffed into a tightly closed box, my epilepsy became something I could speak about.

I let my wild mind untangle and stretch itself out, to create new things.

Ideas, long stifled – if I gave them room to breathe, I worried they would drag me in and damage my brain – were freed.

It left room.

And I grew into that space.

Alice Murphy-PYle

Did I say goodbye to you?

I don’t know, can’t remember. An unsaid moment, a memory unmade.

And yet something precious I needed to cling to and reassure myself about afterwards. Both as a child and now, fully grown with a daughter the same age as I was. Or perhaps not fully grown…still stuck rootless in the past.

I can picture getting up and getting ready for school. Brushing my teeth in the icy bathroom, sharp light filtering through the translucent glass. Stroking our sleepy cat, hastily throwing books into my bag, slurping my breakfast of soggy cereal. All the other ordinary, routine things that morning I remember in detail. But I can’t recall the one thing that really mattered, still matters. It’s haunted me for years.

Friends and family tried to help. You’d have said it automatically, they say to me, you probably wouldn’t have remembered because it’s something people almost always say without thinking.
But somehow I needed to know that I said it. Such a small word, but with so much significance. I wish I’d given some thought to it just that once. Because it was the last time I would ever see you.

You were standing back to hold the front door open, letting the sunlight in, letting me out. Still in your nightie and dressing gown, tired and careworn because you’d been up all night again. Keeping him company, talking calmly because he couldn’t sleep and the pills still weren’t working. You’d have had to get dressed and head to work soon after I left, ironically leaving him deep asleep on the settee.

I remember reaching the end of the path, stopping and waving back to you. You were smiling at me. I’ve held on to that smile for years.

‘Goodbye Mum.’

Davina Adamson

‘Do you have children?’

Just like that. Anywhere and everywhere.

People will ask me this question even before they ask me my name. Without any warning and without giving me the chance to avoid the subject. I brace myself for it almost every day, although the grief is settling into that familiar feeling I know will become part of me and I will just have to learn to live with. But I can still feel my heart tightening, my body tensing up, the mask setting and my face contorting into disarming ugliness (I caught sight of myself in a mirror once and I was shocked) because I am still smiling. Most people do not seem to notice or, if they do, it’s too late, we will have to run through the awkward motions and see the conversation through. I have considered making up answers and making it easier for me and the other person, and I am becoming bolder so maybe I will: ‘Yes, a little boy’; ‘Yes, yes, I do – five-year-old twin girls’; ‘Yes, three teenagers currently living with their father in Vietnam’. Instead, I wish I could tell them how not having children has heightened my fear of death for example. I do not want anyone’s pity or sympathy though, and I most certainly do not want my childness to define me. But I would prefer to continue to be honest and I do reserve myself the right to make it clear that, no, it has not been a choice I have been given the chance to make. Think twice before you ask the question next time, I always want to say. Give it time. Because the answer may very well be the same as mine:

‘No. Sadly not. And I find it heartbreaking to talk about it.’

Maria Simões 

We’re huddled under a blanket, by a fire. I am drunk.

My friend hugs me, strokes my hair. ‘You always ask me that when you’re drunk,’ she says. ‘Of course I will. Of course.’

My friend is a hairdresser. The thing I always ask her when I’m drunk is ‘Will you do my daughter’s hair for her wedding?’

My daughter is 8, is 12, is 15… I’ve been asking this for years.
Sometimes we have cried when I ask this question. Sometimes we’ve laughed as well. We cry because we don’t think I’ll make it to that wedding. We cry because what I’m really asking is ‘Will you be there for her? Will you have tissues in your bag in case she needs them? Will you hug her and tell her she looks beautiful? That she is beautiful? That she is loved?’

I am lucky. I’ve been here longer than anybody expected. My health rollercoasts a little, but my body never gets back to where it was.

The cancer is slow – so slow – but implacable.

I’m about to restart chemotherapy, so this is raw. It’s hard to write.
Of course, I’m not just asking about a wedding, I’m asking about mothering. Who will mother my children? I recruit friends, relatives. Now they’re old enough I try to help them mother themselves, and each other. Sometimes I think they’re better at it than I am.

Sarah Connor

Last words

‘Why are you so quiet Helen?’

A text message at 6.30am. ‘You need to come now’. A stomach-lurching awakening. Four hours to think about 49 years. To reflect on the unsaid, the hurt, the pain, the disappointment. A life. Foot to the floor, a reel of words and memories flashing by. How can I choose?

‘Don’t leave anything unsaid’ they told me. It’s all fucking unsaid. There’s no time now for any of this.

Where will they go, these unspoken words? I don’t want them anymore. I want them to leave with him, for him to own them in his skin but that seems cruel, unnecessary now. I’m driving too fast through a life long tunnel of duty and doing the right thing. It haunts me but it won’t stop the clock. We just aren’t that kind of family.

Death looks uncomfortable. Weird, out of sync. Chaotic sentences, arms twitching. Morphine soothes him but it doesn’t help us witness. His hands are freezing and his finger tips white. I hold his hand as I haven’t done in forty years. Sliding away. Where does it go, this force, this energy, all these words. Gone in one last long groaning breath then waxy yellow silence.

‘Why are you so quiet Helen?’ The last question he asked me. It has all stayed inside me until I can find a place to leave it behind.

Helen Louise

In the small hours of the night – my willpower expended and the animal heat of my son bundled safely in my arms – I petition Google with incoherent strings of keywords.

Poor eye contact ceiling fan hates clapping.

The words, which feel like a betrayal, form a kind of spell or instruction sending the search engine’s spiders crawling across the web for the gossamer threads which will link the terms. As I scroll through the results (returned too soon as if there was no doubt or reason to hesitate), my heart thumps towards a crescendo and then fades out leaving me feeling transparent; edgeless.

Classic sign of autism in early infancy
Red Flags That Warrant a Referral
Worried about Autism at early age

Autism? That word and its question mark echoed through my first year of motherhood. There were signs and I saw them. Undeniable and unequivocal. At first the question was silent. Trapped entirely in the black box of my mind. It felt dangerous to speak the word out loud, as if voicing it might create something where there was nothing.

In the light of day, as I folded my son’s small clothes or offered him spoonfuls of sweet potato purée, this superstitious thinking embarrassed me. Perhaps it was more helpful, more reasonable, to view the status of my son’s neurotype as less of a black cat and more of a Schrödinger’s cat.

By keeping the question in mind, unvoiced, I was keeping the lid on the box. My son was both autistic and not. But that too felt like a delusion. Surely cats and brains are either one thing or another? I see now that I was buying myself time. Time to mother in the present, without having to invite in the outside world and its questions.

anoushka yeoh

That autumn everything changed.

The summer had been strange, foreboding somehow. We’d been to Bournemouth to visit my grandparents – my mother, my sister and me. Mum was strange, unpredictable, her tongue lashed, her skin was grey, eyes dull. I didn’t think too much about any of this at the time. I was 14 and my teenage angst had little to do with Mum and her mood.

September came. Back to boarding school – the usual gut-wrenching punch of homesickness; existence made bearable by twice weekly letters from home. But now her writing sloped, words falling off the page, thoughts and pen dropping to the floor.

‘I’m having a little trouble with my arm and leg – nothing to worry about.’ And for a while I believed her. My mind was full of dreams, of plans, of boys and books.

I’m lying in my bed, in my dormitory. January 1972 – the miners are on strike, power cuts, gloom, and a growing chill – sensations of aloneness and foreboding I’m coming to know well. There’s frost on the windows. Christmas has been and gone. I’d been home for the holidays. Mum is wearing a caliper now and a wig. She can’t drive or walk more than a few steps. Her head hurts and nothing is said.
Her letters have stopped. I’m scared and full of dread. I write a letter to Dad. He’s coming to see me. ‘At last I’ll know,’ I say at first, but inwardly my body trembles.

I’m cold, freezing cold and my tummy churns. Dad is here now. His eyes fill with tears, and I know the answer. I squeeze my nails into my palms until it hurts. I must be brave. I must not cry. I must be good.

‘What’s the matter with Mum?’

carolyn dew

Terrible questions.

How terrible a question might ever be? It’s the intention and intensity that matters; that sweet spot between a medicine and a poison.

For me the gaps that are left by the unasked ones are much worse. The silence that is loaded with mistrust and misunderstanding.

Some of them are as big as crevasses high in the mountains and far too uncomfortable to stay around. Others are like sinkholes in a pretty manicured garden with uniformed lawns and perfectly shaped hedges. Dig a tad deeper and you are at risk of unearthing long forgotten lead mine from two centuries ago.

Terrible unasked questions will sentence you to a life of loneliness as deep as those unseen old mines. Small talk and polite manners keep one in one’s place. The place one doesn’t want to belong…

How are you?
I’m fine; kids are Fine; husband’s Fine
We are FINE! FINE! WE ARE ALL FINE…..

Elena Yates

It feels like lifetimes ago.

In many ways it was because I am older now, yet it is still so close, raw to the touch.

It was a sunny spring day; I was sitting in a college lecture hall with close to two hundred students. All in attendance taking a mandatory class, a graduation requirement. The topic was simple – health. And being a nutrition science major as well as a health nut, this subject felt like repetition. Looking out the window, my attention kept being drawn to the bright sun-rays outside…

…until the topic of rape came up. I froze, but why?

Paralysed, everything began to close in, like a tunnel getting smaller, narrower. Don’t look, turn away, my body said, tightening even more in an attempt to keep the memory deeply tucked and hidden away.

For a year it had done such a good job, but the flood gates could not hold back the truth that had just been laid on the table. The memory came rushing in. All I wanted to do was scream NO.

No to the remembrance.
No to the no that was not listened to.

I could feel the tentacles of denial crawling around this truth, wrapping its many arms around it to take it into the deep. I kept saying to myself, ‘No, not me.’ Defending the situation. I was not forced by knife point after all and I put myself in a vulnerable situation.

Meanwhile, as I was battling inside between wanting to know and wanting to forget, the lecturer continued talking about the various definitions and ways that this violation happens. The more she spoke, the more I wanted her to be quiet, to please enable my forgetting. But it was too late. The damage was done or in other words the healing began.

Beneath it all the question rose: ‘Was I raped?’
The answer was yes.

Julie Schmidt

‘Is there hope?’

‘Ya-hasss!’ Rajesh nodded his head as if he had just allowed a kid pudding after dinner. ‘Yes, it is treatable!’

I learned there was still much more to do in order to ascertain whether the cancer, which had already spread to the lymph nodes, had promenaded any further.

Just great!

I assumed the initial traumatic biopsy had already done the job, unaware that I was in for a treat: being injected with blue dye contrast solution at every possible opportunity that was going to make me feel as if I was peeing myself and turn into an X-woman with a vaginal rash.

Pat, a studious looking, chirpy kind of nurse was standing opposite me wearing a smart outfit. I kept thinking that I owned a similar blouse. Attached to it was a yellow tag with her name and the word “BREAST CARE NURSE” written in black capital letters on it.
I wondered whether they had left out the N and C in the word “CARE” and reversed the letters R and E?

How politically correct!

Pat’s glass-rimmed eyes were focusing on me like a librarian who was going to tell me off for the wrong choice of book.

My husband piped up with the words, ‘Right. Treatment!’ I wanted to slap him.

In the distance, I could hear Pat uttering the words chemotherapy and mastectomy. How dare they! I thought. I envied them painfully because they did not have cancer.

Moving on swiftly, Rajesh asked me to go to the examination bed and get half naked and so we got going.

The first examination as an official Breast cancer patient – yay!

‘A little bit of peau d’orange,’ Rajesh stated, positioning himself in front of my breast like a ball girl waiting for Boris Becker’s first serve at Wimbledon.

Alice Dvořák-Hughes

Sharon Blackie asks: If death came now, what would it look like?

Death would be a woman, kind, firm, ethereal, persistent in her longing to take me from the kitchen I longed to remain in. I would ask her for another day, time to cook another meal, load the fridge and freezer, the canning shelves, the crock pot and oven, cupboards stocked full. I would want a lifetime of food cooked for the kids, one more dish to let them know they are loved, soup for comfort, pies for joy, jams for the bread I won’t be there to bake. Death would be both gentle and fierce, this woman in white with full control, reminding me I had my time, it is over, perhaps placing her hand on my heart, telling me I did enough. I long to know I did enough.

SheiLa Knell

‘What do you want?’ Olivia asked me over a spontaneous FaceTime catchup.

We talked about our dreams. About how we could cultivate a life we wanted to live. It was beautiful. We are kindreds, but not by blood.

We spoke about contentment and how we’re still searching for it. We talked about success and how we’re reframing it. Something was waking up inside us both. Sparks of electricity flowing between us.

She told me about her idea, Olive Edit – a wardrobe edit for people.
She was tentative: ‘Friends first and see how it goes.’

I talked about failure and reasoned that maybe I hadn’t failed at all but that I was trying to meet other people’s expectations?

When we spoke, we were fully alive. Her eyes sparkled, mine did too.

‘I would love that!’ I said. ‘My 7-year-old niece, not so quietly mentioned to me that I wear the same light brown dungaree dress and striped back long sleeve top everyday!’

And it was true. ‘I could use a little help. And this is important work,’ I said. ‘This is about clothes but it’s also about our lives.’

She asked me to begin with three words that reflect my values and we would go from there. I knew the first one – ‘Simple,’ I said.

By the end of the process she said I would have a wardrobe and I would be happy with every item I have in there. She was confident and I believed her.

‘But my husband said that people wouldn’t pay for that kind of thing.’ I could feel her mood dampening.

‘I would pay for that! You’re coming over for a weekend this Summer!’

You have something beautiful to offer. That’s worth pursuing.
This isn’t a sales pitch, it’s about an awakening. Her awakening.
Kindreds.

I wish I could bottle it up.

Ellie Hobson

Did he become one of them?

That’s my burning question. My German grandfather, Albert, was a kind man, my mother tells us. At age four, both of his parents died, and he was placed in a strict Protestant orphanage, leaving him with a disgust for religion and a fervent desire to belong to a family. His future father-in-law, Otto, was a religion man, and Albert respected his wishes to wait five years till my grandmother turned 21 before marrying her. He and Otto grew close during frequent correspondence while Albert studied at the University of Tübingen.

Albert became the administrator of a school for ‘wayward’ boys, raising his family on its grounds of an ancient monastery. Albert didn’t believe in punishment, not closing the gates at night. If a boy wanted to escape, it was better to let him, rather than fall off the wall and hurt himself.

Stationed in Paris during WW II, Albert wrote postcards to my mother telling her little stories such as how Parisian women drew stocking seams on the backs of their legs and about a sparrow that flew into the office where he worked, dislodging papers and interrupting the work. He reminded my mother to study hard and to practice piano. He was fluent in French and English and fascinated by both cultures. But he worked at the German headquarters, mapping troop movements. He was there during the atrocities against the French Jews.

Did he become one of them?

We will never know. He died in a Russian camp. One of my mother’s friends said, ‘He probably starved to death. That is how many of these German soldiers died. He was in Berlin at the end. He was probably transported in a train like the Jewish refugees. So many people died in the war…’

Erika cleveland

Unspoken Question

Having found out I was pregnant so late, we knew there would be little time left to share the news before it began to announce itself. Still, we could have waited, given ourselves just a few days to… to do what?

I think I knew instinctively that there would be no coming to terms with this, at least not until long after my belly would betray me. Perhaps I also felt that other people’s reactions might buoy me up and teach me how this could be good news. Instead I simply learnt how to tell the right story and hide the wrong feelings, while my fears crept gently higher, like a rising, drowning tide.

First, I told some friends in a group chat. They were visiting that weekend, and the idea of them turning up with drinks and excitement for a long awaited party was too difficult. Later, one of them showed me the questions they had poured out into a frantic side chat before answering, each asking the others what their response should be:

What the fuck
Is she joking
What do we say?
Are we happy?
Is she happy?
I can’t tell
I don’t think I’ve breathed yet
I can’t believe she told us on the fucking group chat
Why do I feel tearful?
I can’t believe this
So I guess we are excited
We are going with that
Fuck

In those five minutes they had relived my feelings almost exactly, a chorus echoing my own shock. But when they replied to me it was calmer, lighter. The conversation ended with a final ‘So no to wine then’ and messages of congratulations.

No one asked me if I was happy, which was lucky because I wouldn’t have been able to bear the answer if they had.

Adela ryle

‘So have you decided whether you are going to…’

He didn’t finish his sentence but rather he let the unspoken words become the elephant in the room. The elephant stomped all over my heart and then settled in front of my sob-stained face, waiting to be acknowledged. I stood silent and still in the cold and clinical space and tried to look beyond the elephant to the snow-covered landscape barely visible through the window. Searching for solace or maybe it was for salvation.

The heavy warm weight in my arms stirred and sighed before settling back to sleep. I held him even closer, tighter, trying to keep the elephant at bay. I had been holding him for days which felt like forever, willing this moment never to arrive.

Eddie. Edward. Eduardo. He had answered them all over the years; always keen to come, to play and to love. Our paths had crossed some ten years since, both of us having new forks in the road to travel, new trust to try out. Everyone loved Eddie, he was that sort of soul, making friends wherever he went and leaving magical memories in his wake. I rescued him with my youngest child in mind however this wee malnourished and scarred little chap had other ideas. We seemed destined to walk together, Eddie and I, companions, conspirators and confidantes.

My head knew what was to be done, but my heart wouldn’t or couldn’t agree. Or was it the other way around? Options were limited but we tried them all bar one, and all to no avail. There was the hardest one left.

And now the elephant is looking at his watch and my head and heart agree… that it is time.

Tracey Mayor

The doorbell rings and he’s standing there, grinning. He asks if he can borrow a pen. It’s daytime. I never see him in the daytime, only at night, usually in the tiny nightclub down the steps in the Merrion Centre. I’m shocked. Delighted. Yes I’ve got a pen, I say. He makes no move to come in, so I run up the three flights of stairs to my attic flat to get it. When I come back, his dog is licking his face. I didn’t know he had a dog. I would like to lick his face. I would like to lick him all over. Upstairs I have checked how I look. It’s okay, I think.
He takes the pen, pulls a piece of paper out of his jeans, writes something, hands the pen back. The dog barks. He reaches down, ruffles its neck.

It’s October 1985. No mobiles. Neither of us has a landline. I never know when I’m going to see him again, feel him inside me. The longest gap has been six weeks. Today I am daring, and I ask if he wants to go to the pub. He says he has no money. I say I have, and run upstairs again to get what’s left of my giro. I need it for food. I need it for the meter. I get my coat.

The pub is packed. One of the rooms is shut off so we have to sit on the stairs, the dog at our feet. When someone pushes past us, his leg presses against mine. Desire is instant, like a flame. His brown eyes look at me as he offers me a cigarette. He is here, now.

There is only one question I would like to ask him, and it is this: did you ever think of me, in those years, when you weren’t fucking me?
I lie: there is another question. Have you ever thought of me ever, even once, in the years that have passed, like I think of you?

kerry whitley

MOTHER, I HAVE SOMETHING TO ASK

I am adopted.

At 41, no ancestors, no ethnic background, no medical histories. I was my oldest living relative. I had no stories of Salem witches, no ink-stained signers of the Declaration of Independence, no
blacksmiths, pirates, whores, or suffragettes. My only blood relatives were my three little children.

Couch adoption in all the legalese, call it chosen/saved/rescued, the truth is that the mother who bore me signed a legal contract in which she gave away her firstborn daughter because…

…it is the because and the why that came to haunt me. As the third-party in this legal transaction, I had no choice of the parents who bought me. Adoption has the flavour of slavery, life bought and sold, and whether the adoption is good or bad it does not change the fact that it genetically disconnects the child.

I was born with the femoral anteversion. My left leg was twisted backwards, and I wore braces and slept in shoes that were nailed to the end of my bed. I was strapped into them every night to keep that leg straight and every night I escaped, but the shoes had a second affect. They kept me connected to my original self, the way I was born. To this day I sleep with my right leg over my left, which is pointed back to the original position, back to my beginnings.

I was slow to speak, rejected shoes, hid in trees, slept blanketless in moon lit rooms.

In the Dreamtime a woman reached across and spoke my other name.

I’m not courageous, but I am curious. The time between the decisions and the implementation can take months or even years. Finally I took the first tenuous toddler steps and asked the mother who raised me, what she knew of the woman who bore me.

Susan Wuorinen

I had already forgotten Claire’s advice. She had explained to me what I’d need to say across a crisp white tablecloth that she’d just whipped onto Table 34, and as I followed her round the restaurant with the cruets, she guided me through the questions they would ask, the answers I should give. They would try to trip me up. They didn’t have the resources to help everyone, and had to filter out those who truly had nowhere to live.

When you have to memorise your own story for fear of getting it wrong, it begins to feel like a lie. As I walked through the city centre, glancing down at my phone screen for directions to the council buildings, the panic began. Don’t slip up.

In a dark and claustrophobic room, I tried to breathe as I answered questions from a woman whose straight face remained locked to the computer screen in front of her, and whose eyes rarely met mine through the reinforced glass screen which guarded her from me.

Does the father live locally?
Yes.

Could you stay with him?
No.

Do you have family or friends you could stay with?
No.

Simple questions, simple answers. Except they weren’t. They had long, complex answers, if I really thought about it. I learnt a long time ago that to ask for help you had to first defend why you needed it, and I never quite fit the criteria. Never quite good enough. Never quite bad enough. Never Enough.

The interview was over in less than half an hour. I had remembered the simple versions of the answers to these questions, the ones they needed to hear. Not lies, but truths which would get me the help I needed, the help we needed. The help which one day, I would remember I deserved.

jennifer carter

‘Why am I here? What’s happened to me?’

Powder-blue curtains, beeping sounds, and a clock whose hands say twenty minutes past two. Night or day? I’m in a wheelchair, wearing gym clothes and a dressing gown. A nurse opens the curtains.

‘You’re in hospital. We’re not sure yet,’ he replies. ‘The doctor’s on his way. We’re busy tonight.’ It’s night. The nurse asks my name. 
‘Thank you Ros, I’m Richard. I’ll fetch you tea.’

Have I followed my whole family and succumbed to a weak heart? Where is my husband? Is he dead? Is this Covid-related? What is the name of the prime minister? Didn’t he just resign? It’s something Indian. Oh god, have I had a stroke? What was the name of the nurse? Why is it twenty past four now?

The nurse, Richard, (I’ve remembered) wheels me through darkened corridors. I recognise the art on the walls. It’s the county hospital. I was on the committee that selected the paintings, I tell him. I am somebody important, then?

Scans and blood tests reveal nothing dangerous.
‘It’s a TGA. Trans Global Amnesia,’ pronounces the waistcoated consultant. ’Sounds like a nightclub,’ I giggle.

My pale husband arrives. ‘It was awful in the waiting room,’ he mutters. ‘You kept asking the same questions, getting upset, then asking again.’

Apparently, I’d known my name and where I lived, but not that my father, brother and dog were dead. I cried each time he told me.

(The consultant says I will never recall those lost eight hours.)
 
‘Your voice got louder and posher, and you started swearing. Especially when I told you we’d stopped working and you were writing.’

I can’t remember. It is more upsetting for my husband. He smiles. ‘You said: I’m writing a book. What the fuck are we living on then?‘

rosalyn huxley

Once upon a time a girl was born. She was beautiful in many ways but her hands and feet were that of a bird. This birdchild had a mystery woven into the cells of her body, which also branded her with a question that would one day need to be answered…

Would it be passed on?

One icy morning, in the geneticist’s office, he explained there was a 50/50 chance, but the presence of the condition could not been known until twenty weeks into the pregnancy. If she got pregnant, at 20 weeks she would be given a choice.

To continue with the pregnancy or to terminate? 

These two strange questions twisted together and hung, like a garland spell, around her neck.

So she lived a life without much regard for having children. The garland was placed in a drawer, too thorny to bare. It was easier to leave the questions unanswered.

But as time went by and the birdwoman grew older she wondered if she would regret her cowardice to face these questions. She would occasionally return to the drawer where the garland had been placed and notice how the roses weren’t so red as they had once been. She knew she had to somehow find the courage, before it was too late.
The next morning the birdwoman left the small cottage that she had lived in alone with plants and books and kitchen radio and set off into the unknown. 

Along the way she discovered that ‘right’ and ‘wrong’ paths didn’t exist, just choices and consequences. She met a wise old woman who gave her a powerful gift – the permission to put herself first. The birdwoman was emboldened by this new attitude. Slowly something started happening to her.

Life! And there was no turning back.

nicola reade

I slid into the green faux leather arm chair and held onto the wooden arms, a blue paper face mask covering my nose and mouth. To the left of me the sun blazed through the large window and warmed my cheek and the side of my forehead. We were on the top floor and I could see the waters of the Humber Estuary shimmering behind the tall and imposing flats on the housing estate.

Over towards the door stood an electric Yamaha keyboard on a black stand and behind it the remnants of Christmas parties stuffed into a cupboard. Red napkins and paper cups with holly on them sat in a pile along with some old jigsaws. I imagined the nurses putting on a jolly and festive gig for the elderly patients, but this was May and I questioned how long my grandad had left to live.

charlotte dawson

‘Do you think you could tell us what happened?’
 
Fuk da police. First sights in Interview Room A. Anger etched in to the desk. Or, perhaps desperately clawed in by nails trapped inside the four walls of peeling-paint, the distant whiff of fear and stale sweat lingering in the stuffy, close air. I’m aware of the detective’s kind eyes nudging me to speak and yet I’ve drifted off to the Realm of Denial again where I live in safety, albeit with delusion.
 
In the Realm of Denial I can float away from the wide-eyed world of pain each time my body is raided, frozen under the dead-weight Hulk that pummels and pounds my flesh, staining it the colour of confession. I can be numb to the invasion. To speak to this gentle man sitting across from me, who is so uncomfortable in this burdened silence, would mean stepping in to the Realm of Reality and unleashing the unimaginable. The unutterable. But if I stay silent, the Hulk wins. Another point to the Patriarchy. A delicate throat-clear shakes me back to the present. The police officer is sitting there with his pen-poised, head tilted to one side and he nods ever so subtly. A nod of understanding. A nod of validation. I take his face in. His world-weary eyes are searching mine for the truth and I think he must know because now his eyes are urging me, imploring me to release the horror. This is it. Speak now or forever hold my peace.

And just like that the Rage of Woman, centuries-old, rises up and solidifies like concrete in my gut. I won’t be silenced any more. My mouth, the gateway to freedom, opens with a shaky inhale, 
‘Yes, I can try…’

Jessica Carroll

Powder

I don’t want to ask him.

Instead, I find myself telling him about an August day somewhere in the heat-shimmer of my childhood memories, when the O’Riley girls made me touch a butterfly.

The younger sister demanded ‘Do it, or I’ll pull its legs off anyway!’

I remember my hand moving slowly towards it, as if she’d dared me to put my fingers in a fire. As it was, as soon as it felt my shadow, its pearlescent wings came together like mehndi-inked hands in prayer.

Tentatively, afraid to breathe, I reached out and plucked it from the thistle it was resting on, but immediately felt the thrum of its being like a static shock and instinctively let it go. To my delight, it fluttered away, high above us, and into the haze.

But the relief was short-lived when I noticed the glitter on my fingertips. It was tantalising, like the lustre of something holy, but this gold didn’t belong to me; such a Midas touch was meant for flowers and leaves, or whatever the butterfly brushed against as it meandered through its days.

I also felt ashamed because I’d made a promise to Mum I’d never go to the Black Bank with the O’Riley girls. There was guilt in that gilding. It was probably the first time I’d lied to her. Even now, I still wonder how long that butterfly lived after some of those precious scales so necessary for the finer details of flight became the fingerprints of a small child’s crime.

‘I’m sorry,’ I hear myself saying to my son, ‘I don’t know where that came from.’

‘It’s OK, Mum, I love hearing your stories.’

claire everett

We were driving in our car, just the two of us once, when you were four. You were looking out the window and up at the clouds, no doubt waiting for the traffic lights to turn red so I too can see the same shapes you see, the ones they make in the bright blue sky. You scrunched up your nose, your thoughts reeling, and you asked, ‘Mama, if God is everywhere, why can’t I see him?’, and I closed my eyes, just for a second, to gather mine. I remember seeing a man reciting prayers on the TV when I was a child, the same age you were then, his head a floating apparition made through special effects, with a glowing light that surrounded it exposing the editor’s amateurish skills. The arabic words he was reading scrolled underneath with the same glow. Light, ethereal, Godly. Maybe that was what the editor had wanted to achieve by his copying and pasting, we’ll never know. For years since then, whenever someone spoke about God, I would see with my mind’s eye this man’s floating head with the light, ethereal, Godly, and for years since then, I had thought him to be God. I knew I would get punished if I told anyone about it, so I kept it a secret all to myself. My own God that followed me everywhere with his glowing light. Could I finally share him with you now? Would it make me a better mother to have confidence in my own daughter or would it make me a worse one for allowing her to conjure her own image of God so she can understand herself, Him, better? I didn’t answer you then, but if I did, I now know what I would have said: God is nowhere.

lisha zulkepli