Read Online The Telling by Jo Baker - Free Book Online

cupped palms, cracked and hardened by disuse. It all needed sorting, dealing with, finishing. But first I had to claw my way back towards the beginning, to find a place to start.
    I remembered that Saturday morning, in Waterstone’s. I was pushing Cate through towards the Children’s section. The woman was standing in Crime Fiction, her quarter-profile to me as I came up the central aisle. Her hair was dark and curly and salted with grey and she was slim as a hound, dressed in navy blue, a brown leather bag hanging at her hip, and she was looking down at a book, reading the blurb on the back cover. It was a moment of brilliant instinctive happiness. Mum. I wheeled the pushchair around, headed straight for her. I was going to grab her arm, shake her, scold her. Look, I was going to say, Look at your granddaughter. Look how beautiful she is. But when I touched her, and she turned and looked at me, her face was strange, birdlike , blue-eyed, nothing like Mum: it winded me. I stammered an apology, wheeled the pushchair away; I had to get out of her curious gaze, away from anyone who might have seen. At the back, near the Children’s section, I stopped the pushchair abruptly; I ducked down to kiss Cate, and told her she was my lovely girl, and we wheeled off towards the picture books and I bought her more than we could really afford.
    Mum had been dead just over a year by then. She died on the fourteenth of December. In the days between her death and her funeral, I carried my belly like a medicine ball around the Christmas-rush shops, trying on coats. I didn’t have a decent one to wear to the funeral; my parka was the only thing that would fit over the bump. Nothing fitted, nothing seemed right, anything that was nearly okay was also vastly expensive. I’d come home heavy and sore, my feet and ankles swollen, and Mark would put my feet up on the sofa, and stroke them, and tell me to give up on it. People understood, no one would think twice about it, I should wear whatever felt comfortable. I’ll go in tracky bottoms then, I said, and slippers, would that make him happy? Better that than make myself ill, he said. Better that than harm the baby. I told him to fuck off. He said that my mum wouldn’t have minded what I wore anyway, and certainly wouldn’t have wanted me unhappy over it. I cried. He held me, and after a while I felt better. It worked, him doing that. He must have forgotten how easy it was.
    The day before the funeral, Dad brought me the coat, still wrapped in its wardrobe polythene. Empire line, double-breasted, slate-grey wool. There’s a photograph somewhere of her wearing it; she can’t be more than twenty-four. It’s snowing; she’s laughing; shoulders up, hands raised to cup the falling flakes. Dad handed it to me and waited for me to put it on, so I put it on, and his face crumpled and I put my arms around him in the slate-grey sleeves and his face rested on the collar. It was an uneasy moment. She got it when she was pregnant with you, he said. I let go of him, and slid it off my shoulders. It was a little tight, with the extra pregnancy-flesh. I said I didn’t want to spoil it.
    We drove Lucy to the crematorium, via the airport to pick up her boyfriend from the Paris flight. They’d be heading back together on the Sunday; she’d been back and forth almost every week during Mum’s final illness. We’d left too much time and got to the crematorium early. Outside, I shifted and swayed in my good boots as my heels sank into the gravel. The smell of the coat was neutral, dry cleaning and wardrobe lavender, and I felt dragged to the earth by the weight of the baby inside me. Dad arrived with Aunty Val and Uncle Peter. Val squeezed me, saying that she didn’t know what to say. I kept saying, it’s okay, it’s okay, it’s okay, my hand pressed to her back, feeling the padded nylon of her coat, the painful press of her breasts against mine. There was the smell of someone else’s burning in the