Tin Man

by Sarah Winman

I could never bring anyone into our three. I had no room to love anyone else.

I took off my clothes and put on a skirt first, then a blouse, a cardigan, and slowly I became her in miniature. She’d taken her good shoes, so I slipped on a pair of mid-height heels many sizes too big, of course, and placed a handbag on my arm. I stood in front of the mirror, and saw the infinite possibilities of play. I strutted, I pouted, the satin lining of the skirt clinging to my skin, electrifying the fine hairs on my legs. What the fuck d’you think you’re doing? said my father. I hadn’t heard him come in. He repeated the question. Playing, I said. Get that stuff off and go to your room. I began to undress, burning with shame and humiliation. And the skirt, said my father. The skirt slid to the floor, exposing my nakedness. My father looked away in disgust. I want to keep this, I said, holding up the handbag. No. Just to put my pencils in. If you ever take it out of this fucking house— I waited for the conclusion of this threat but it never came. My father disappeared downstairs and out of the front door, leaving me naked, bewildered, orphaned before time. I was too young, too confused to understand fully what happened in that room. That my father had said so little had been the wound, though. For him there was nothing to discuss because discussion would have made the moment real, just as my mother’s departure had been so real. Instead, I was swept under the carpet to join her. I see how decisions are made, in moments like that, that change the trajectory of one’s ...

As I grew older, I came to understand this woman was my mother’s freedom. We love who we love, don’t we? I hope she loved her.

You say, D’you remember . . . ? And you talk about the time you came here after Dora died, after your father forced you to punch the good out of your life. How you climbed the stairs to this room with bruised knuckles and swollen eyes, how I held the wrap of ice against your hand and told you that life would get better. And, I realize, the story’s not about Dora, or your father, or grief. But about us. D’you remember? you say at the end.

And I wonder what the sound of a heart breaking might be. And I think it might be quiet, unperceptively so, and not dramatic at all. Like the sound of an exhausted swallow falling gently to earth.

I watch two young men sitting opposite one another. Their legs are stretched out and occasionally they brush. A nudge with a foot on the other’s thigh. They are boys in the bodies of men, but still boys, still gauche, still unsure. I catch glimpses of my young self in the reflection, as the landscape changes from warmth to cool, from wild to manicured, with gray clouds gathering low around the high-most hills. I look at these young men, not in envy but in wonder. It is for them now, the beauty of discovery, that endless moonscape of life unfolding.

my loneliness masquerading as sexual desire. But it was my humanness that led me to seek, that’s all. Led us all to seek. A simple need to belong somewhere.

Mabel’s hand pressed firm to my back, holding me up. It’s got cold, she said. Let’s go home and get you warm. The gesture almost broke me. We settled silently in the back of a taxi, no talk of the beautiful day or who wore what or who said what. I could see her looking at me. She slipped her hand into mine. Waiting for me to crack. That’s how I knew she knew. Had always known. As if she, too, had seen another version of our future orbiting around us. Before its fall to earth on that real and perfect day.

I’ve missed you, he says. In my chest, the sound of an exhausted swallow falling gently to earth.

Hertbreak

The color of the sky brings back memories that are no longer painful.

he thinks about Michael’s loneliness, and he thinks about his own. And he thinks his own might be manageable now.

He walks out to the middle of the golden field and faces the sun, and he thinks, We did have time. We had so much more than many do. And he feels all right. And he knows he’ll be all right. And that is enough.

it wasn’t the woman, Annie, who held this small group together, but the man with scruffy dark hair. There was something in the way the other two looked at him, and that’s why he was in the middle, his arms tightly around them. As if he’d never let them go.