The Red of my Blood by Clover Stroud

Author:Clover Stroud [Stroud, Clover]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781473589711
Publisher: Transworld
Published: 2022-01-19T00:00:00+00:00

Don’t say what you’re thinking, because I know exactly what the sentence is that’s about to come out of your mouth and I do not want to hear it.

DON’T SAY IT.

But she couldn’t hear the voice and so she went on: ‘I can’t begin to imagine how you must feel. I can’t imagine what your loss must feel like. There’s nothing like the bond between sisters, is there? I really couldn’t manage life without my sister. We’re so close. I really could not cope without her.’

She smiled a little and I heard Dash shouting at Lester in another room, ‘That’s not FAIR!’ as I concentrated on the slice of pink and yellow cake on the chipped plate. I wanted to take a knife and mash the piece of cake into the plate and then smash the plate against the wall of my house where the sun hit the cracks. I wanted to slap this woman so hard in the face, but because I couldn’t, instead I thought hard about bright pink to contain the rage in front of me.

She didn’t stay long after that and I was pleased I wasn’t able to hug her when she left. Instead, I just waved weakly like a stupid clown from the other side of the garden. Afterwards I gathered the plates and cups up from the table outside, stubbing my toe on the edge of a chair, dropping a knife on to the lawn and dumping the china in the sink with such ferocity a mug smashed. I pressed my hands against the edge of the sink and thought about the physical pain that the therapist had asked me to identify in my body, and I felt it now pressing in my throat. It came rushing down into my body even though I tried to stop it. I carried on clearing the table and as I picked up the pink and yellow cake I felt sobs racking through me, tears streaming on top of the cake, ruining the coloured icing.

When I stopped crying, and after the children were in bed, I walked out into the garden, looking for signs, for something to hang on to. There was nothing, just the empty garden and the sound of a child shouting in an upstairs bedroom. I kicked the end of my trainer into the gravel, angry that I’d wasted eggs and sugar and butter on a cake. When I looked down, there was a pebble, shaped like a perfect heart, lying directly beside the tip of my trainer. It was sandy-coloured and fitted right into the centre of my hand. I squeezed it and turned it over, feeling the warmth of it where it had just been sitting there, amongst thousands and thousands of other very old stones in the drive, waiting for me to find it. At that moment I remembered standing outside my house, two years before, when I had been feeling very sad and overwhelmed. I had called my sister while standing barefoot on the stones in the drive.

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