Girl A

by Abigail Dean

Mother’s little life.

We were never more precious than when we were inside of her; when she had us in the tight confines of her body, and we were quiet.

She smelt grisly, of insides. She leaked. The contents of her body were determined to reach the surface.

to me it seemed that he had traversed the world, and returned each evening

Many of the cases were solved, and he doesn’t think about them so much. Others hang open, like a door in the winter, and he can feel their draught.

An artefact of the last good day, and much harder to look at for that.

The poverty crept into our lives like ivy on a window, slow enough that you don’t notice it moving, and then, in no time, so dense that we couldn’t see outside.

You can endure an awful lot when you know that you’ll be fed at the end of it.

‘Oh, come on, Lex. How could we have been anything else?’

They collided on nights which fast became their own folklore.

A village station on a Sunday evening: it was the loneliest place in the world.

The palace was orange and pink beneath the evening sky.

When I looked at my siblings, frailer around the table, it seemed like they’d taken a little flesh from each of us, and made something new.

Love, she had decided, might be a different matter. I was hot beneath the bedding, and aware that I couldn’t kick it away without her thinking that I was embarrassed. ‘The key thing,’ she said, ‘is that you never lose your self-respect.’

Despite the showers and the CK One, I stank of somebody who might need saving, and men liked that best of all.

Each time we met, it was as if we started again:

His words spread under my skin and into the tissue, so that later, when he watched me undress, I was surprised that he couldn’t see the mark of them. That to him, I was unchanged.

‘You look after yourself, Lex. I won’t be able to do it for you.’

Men like your Father are odd, delicate things. Easily cracked – just a hairline fracture in the porcelain.’ She turned back to me, smiled. ‘You don’t realize that you’ve broken them until the shit floods out.’

there was no reason to our whereabouts other than people’s willingness to take us.

Even when the baby stopped, I could hear his cries, living between the walls.

Autumn again, and the kind of weather which never commits to daylight.

That was the problem with coming home: you also had to come home to the self which resided there.

Weren’t those the things that aged people, more than the fact of time?

Above us, the Downs were patched green and gold, stitched with hedgerows and chalk paths.

In the destitution of those early hospital days, you offered me a lie, and I staggered inside it and closed the door behind me. By the time you told me the truth, I was already living there. I had unpacked, and changed the locks.

Who didn’t tell themselves stories, to get up in the morning?

She would wait for me. I knew exactly how she would smile. We made it here, she would say. After all of this time.