The Impossible Truths of Love

by Hannah Beckerman

She has learnt the consequences of telling people what she knows, how she feels. She dare not say more.

Love. She knows what this child needs is love. But whatever love she once may have possessed seems to have leaked out of her, like heat from a poorly insulated window, and she does not know how to capture it, bring it back.

and much as she loves her mum and dad, she cannot shake the feeling, as she heads towards the front door, that she is shrinking herself to childhood size in order to fit through, like Alice, potion in hand, at the bottom of the rabbit hole.

It is such a wellrehearsed interchange, as if they are both reading from a script, and Nell wonders whether it is simply a habit they have got into – this perfunctory engagement with each other’s lives – or whether there is something more to it: some inability to share their true feelings with any degree of honesty, of openness.

It had been a childhood lived to a soundtrack of caution, as though the world was filled with dangers, and Nell was safe only if she stayed close to home.

but she dare not get too close to his grief. It is too much already to bear her own.

With every mourner’s expression of sympathy, every recollection of his thirtysix days of life, she feels they steal a little part of Danny away from her.

She does not wait to hear Bill’s reply, does not want to know what he says on her behalf, as though she is a ventriloquist’s dummy and he the puppeteer.