Free Wake: A Novel by Anna Hope

night before.
    She has hardly slept. All yesterday evening, she and Jack circled each other, and it seemed to her as though that boy were there still, in the room between them, as well as their son, Michael, his name echoing in the space, the first time it has been spoken in more than three years.
    But there is something about standing here, in this ordinary light.
    Perhaps she heard the boy wrong. Perhaps she heard only what she wanted to. It wouldn’t be the first time.
    Whatever the explanation, from the way he left, the boy isn’t likely to come back.
    She turns to the dresser, where there’s a photograph of her and Jack, taken twenty-five years ago today. The pair of them are staring straight at the camera and laughing. She picks it up and brings it closer. It had been her idea to have it taken. In giddy spirits, straight after the ceremony, she’d dragged him into the studio on the High Road, where a fussy young man showed them into his back room and held things up for them to look at: a stuffed teddy, a feather duster, a bicycle horn. When he honked it they laughed out loud, as the camera exploded in a burst of light.
    They look so young. She brushes the top of the dresser lightly with her sleeve and puts the photograph back. She remembers how she felt, walking up this street for the first time, toward their house: the future unrolling before them, waiting to be stepped into, sunlit, wide.
    Twenty-five years of marriage. Of learning to live with someone. Learning to love them. Learning to bury the things they cannot bear to face.
    It is Monday, and so, as she does every Monday, she strips the bed down. But today, before lifting the sheets, she stops, caught again by memory. They would spend whole mornings here, Sundays, when they should have been in church, his fingers twined in her hair, their legs wrapped around each other, speaking low. She gave birth in this bed, with a midwife from the next street. The shock of it. The astonishing, red-bawling jubilance of her son.
    She turns, catching herself in the mirror. The sideways light from the window is not kind. What does he think, her husband, when he looks at her now? She puts her hands to her face, pulling it so that the heavy skin around her jaw tightens, briefly, before she allows it to fall.
    What is wrong with her today? It is the anniversary, making her remember, keeping her from her work. She bundles the laundry into her arms and goes downstairs, filling the buckets at the pump in the yard, putting the sheets into the copper to boil. She makes up the starch, stirring it first with cold water, then hot, then rinsing the sheets, and turning them through the mangle. It’s hard work, and as she turns the handle, another sudden memory assails her: her son, as a small boy, standing beside her, helping her, holding the sheets as straight as he can, while she turns the roller, feeding the sodden cotton through.
    Michael.
    It winds her, this memory.
    After a moment, forcing herself to breathe again, she pushes it away.

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    The queue is a long one this morning. Evelyn can see it as she passes the entrance to the Underground, all the way around the corner and halfway down the street. She needs to cut through the line to reach the back door of the office, so she pulls the brim of her hat down and lifts up the collar of her coat. “Excuse me.”
    A fair-haired man makes room to let her through, and she squeezes past him, shoulders hunched. She’s relieved when she reaches the office door; sometimes some of the repeat visitors see her, and it doesn’t do to be recognized in the street. She takes off her hat and coat and hangs them in the hall, then goes through to the cramped little kitchen. Despite the chill of the day, she opens the sticky window that gives out onto the courtyard at the back. For a moment, in the quiet, she thinks she must be the first one in, until she hears the door from the office open and Robin moving down the corridor toward her.
    “Good