The Names

by Florence Knapp

And Cora realises her daughter has learnt what to do. How to soothe, to placate. That just through watching, the first time she’s stepped into this role, she is already accomplished. If it doesn’t stop, Cora thinks, this pattern will repeat unendingly, the destiny of each generation set on the same course.

Gordon once told her a butterfly’s average lifespan is twenty-nine days. She wonders, when she adds up these moments where she exists out in the world, if her lifespan will be any longer. And which would be better? To have those days boiled down into one intense burst of colour, or to have the pin removed from the thorax every now and then, dusty wings fluttering back to life, a little more time eked out before being locked away again?

She wants these things for him. But still, a part of her craves folding him back into herself, having his small, dimpled hand in hers again. In Maia’s. She suspects that, to be a good parent, she must pack away the mothering part of herself into a box and gently close the lid on it. She had not realised this is what would be required of her, had not seen it coming.

Later, Cian puts on his slippers and goes through to the kitchen. He brings back a pot of tea, a plate of toast and honey. Sílbhe rests back against his chest as they eat, and they laugh at the quiet decadence of covering the duvet in crumbs and the luxury of having found a home in one another.

She can hear the pulse of her own blood, her own self. And she is alive with fury.

He thinks of Lily’s boxes of keepsakes and realises these are the riches. What the hell has he been doing, he wonders, sifting through the earth on another continent, looking for the fragmented remains of someone else’s life from a thousand, or ten thousand, years ago? Looking for broken pieces of china, a chip of clay, as though they were precious. As though they had more importance than the foundations of his own life with Lily, which she has nurtured all this time.

That maybe freedom is just about choosing the life you want. Even if that life’s in one place, doing the food shop together. Arguing over who forgot to buy loo roll.’

Mehri has always treated parenting like she’s cooking a big warming pan of something: a pinch of that, a pinch of this, she’s sure it will turn out fine in the end. Cora’s own approach has always felt more like baking a cake: carefully measuring out ingredients and trying not to ruin everything. She admires Mehri’s way.

There’s been a surprising relief in losing everything, though. He always aspired to be someone, and now he’s nothing, he finds that somehow feels like more.

And in the quiet beauty of the world, they would coast down the centre of carless roads on their bikes, the silky smooth of the tarmac rushing beneath their wheels, Pearl sitting on Lily’s handlebars. ‘Faster, Mama, faster!’ she would shout, as Bear whooped alongside them, seagulls squawking overhead. Halcyon days. Days that, around the edges of fear, glistened with strange newness and freedom.

It is not, was not, enough. She wants to grow old with him. She wants to feel his arms around her. She wants to bury her face in the biscuit-scented warmth of his neck.

She catches snippets of what they’re saying: how dogs don’t need to live as long as humans, they’re simply so good at finding the joy in life. As if we are put on this earth to extract a certain amount of happiness and can leave once the job is done.

And later, Felix’s offer to walk Cora home, and her acceptance of it, is unthinking; they are already absorbed in a conversation that will continue to slowly unspool across all the years they have left.

He sits with her as the light fades, as the chill starts to creep in through the open door, as her cooling body sets in place. He sits with her through the night, not ready to move into the next phase he knows must come. One of phone calls and condolences. And her absence. For now, for just a little longer, it will be just the two of them.

A clarity exists amongst them, that they have shared their lives with someone quietly magnificent.

Films made it seem as though love was hidden in the petals of red roses and a view of the Eiffel Tower, but he’s relieved to find it sitting side by side in the trapped warmth of a glass potting shed in Willesden, nestled in the steeped scent of compost and the first green globes of fruit on the vine.