The Thin Place by C D Major

Author:C D Major [Major, C D]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Thomas & Mercer
Published: 2021-04-14T16:00:00+00:00

Chapter 30

MARION

I don’t tell Hamish any more, so the whiskery doctor doesn’t come. I know the sensation but I also know they won’t last.

Sometimes they cling on; sometimes my stomach swells with the promise of them so that, for a few weeks, I let myself imagine and it becomes almost unbearably true. I tentatively start to hope, start to believe. Sometimes there is a little blood; sometimes it pours out of me and I drip for days. Sometimes I am forced to cut the cord, take their tiny forms and bury them – sons . . . daughters. I bury them beneath the bridge, in a place hidden from sight of the house, that I can go to. My babies. I think of the first baby. I wonder where he is.

Hamish rarely comes home. I sit and lose the hours, my clothes hanging, hair grey at the roots, nails peeling, fine hairs covering my arms. Miss Kae fusses so I hide the food, remove it from the dining room, tip it into the soil outside.

I don’t roam the estate, walk up to the crags, stare out at Dumbarton Rock or across to Ben Nevis. It is all I can do to visit them, breathless by the time I have reached the spot beneath the bridge, kneeling in the grass that grows there. Above me the bridge casts its shadow, gargoyles leering out of the stone. Sometimes people walk across and through the estate; I see their faces peeking over, fingers pointing to the River Clyde in the distance on sunny days. I stay crouched on the bank in the shadows below until they leave, feeling my sadness absorbed by the soil.

Hamish has been forced to sell more things from the house: a portrait, a silver dining set, a wedding gift. The brown bear stays, scowling as the hallway is diminished in front of him. Pale spaces, dust piling up; he doesn’t employ more help from Dumbarton – I am to make do.

Susan has stopped writing, angry with my silence and the rescinding of a proposed visit. Mother tells me Father will not manage the journey. I stay in the house. I am not alone, though. I am with my babies, the solid stones of the estate holding us close.

Every now and again, on the rare occasions Hamish is home, we are invited to dinner parties but he says he is alarmed by my appearance. The excuses follow: she has a head cold, she has a fever, she is unwell. He goes without me and returns with bright lipstick on the stiff white collar of his frilled dress shirt.

Christmases and New Years come and go and she is always there. The border community is small and I have struggled to make friends, aware of the whispers behind a hand, bug-eyed women watching my husband. Her bob has grown out. Her husband is older, carries a stick, has been on breathing apparatus for something on his lungs. She twirls and touches his hands, throws back the blonde hair that hasn’t thinned like mine.

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