Free The Hand That First Held Mine by Maggie O'Farrell Page A

the top of the table so that it felt as if her head might tip off the end.
     
    With the rim of the table pressing into her skull, with the female doctor calling for assistance, she felt herself almost go again, as if she was in a train that had swerved on to a new track, as if clouds had been blown across her brain. To go would be such a relief. She longed to loosen her grip, to release herself to that down-pulling force. But she knew she must not. So she screwed her eyes shut and popped them open again, she drove the nail of one hand into the fingertip of the other. Help me , she said to the anaesthetist, because he was the nearest person, please . But her voice came out as a whisper and, anyway, he was talking to a new man who’d appeared above her and this man was carrying small clear sacks filled with fluid of an incredible red.
     
    She turns from the mirror. Downstairs, the noise is starting up: ha-nggg, ha-nggg. Elina takes the stairs, clutching the banister for support, along the hall, where the noise has tipped into uhHggg uhHggg , and then she goes out through the front door.
     
    Outside, on the step, she feels curiously like two people. One is standing on the threshold and is feeling very light, as if she might take off in her pyjamas and sweatshirt, float up and up into the sky, disappearing into the clouds and beyond. The other is calmly watching her, thinking, so this is what it is to be mad. She sets off down the path, opening the gate and stepping on to the pavement in her bare feet. She is going, she is leaving, she is off. You’re leaving, the calm Elina observes. I see. The other Elina’s lungs inflate and her heart seems to answer them, tripping into a fast, fluttering pound.
     
    At the corner, she is pulled to a stop. The street, the pavement, the lampposts seethe and swing in front of her. She can go no further. It is as if she is tethered to the house, or to something in the house. Elina turns her head, first one way, then the other. She is interested in this. It is a curious feeling. She bobs there for a moment, like a tugboat at the end of its rope. Rain is soaking through the sweatshirt, gluing the pyjamas to her skin.
     
    Elina turns. She is, she feels, no longer two people, but one. This Elina goes back along the pavement, holding on to the wall, up the path and into the house. She leaves wet footprints on the floorboards as she walks.
     
    The baby is tussling with the blanket in his cot, fists clenched around wool, his face screwed up with effort, with need. Then he sees Elina and forgets all about his fight with the blanket, his hunger, his want for something he cannot express. His fingers uncurl like petals and he stares in amazement at his mother.
     
    ‘It’s all right,’ Elina tells him. And she believes herself, this time. She reaches to lift him and his arms shudder with the surprise of being airborne. She settles him against her body. She says it again: ‘It’s all right.’
     
    Elina and the baby walk together to the window. They don’t take their eyes off each other. He blinks a little in the bright light but stares up at her, as if the sight of her to him is like water to a plant. Elina leans against the windows to the garden. She raises the baby so that his forehead touches her cheek, as if anointing him or greeting him, as if they are starting all the way back at the beginning.
     

 
     
    H ere is Lexie, standing on a pavement at Marble Arch. She is adjusting the back of her shoe, smoothing her hair. It is a warm, hazy evening, just after six o’clock. Men in suits and women in heels and hats, pulling children by the hand, flow around her as if they were a river and she were a rock in their path.
     
    She has been at her new job two days. She is a lift attendant in a big department store. The labour exchange sent her there after a dismal result in the typing test, and she’s been saying, ‘Which floor, madam?’; ‘Going up, sir’; ‘Floor three, household goods,