Free Unexploded by Alison MacLeod Page A

only responsible thing.
    And what had she done? Had she run up the stairs last night, clenching them in her palm, and shaken him from sleep? Had she accused him over breakfast and washed the vile things down the sink?
    No. She had tucked the flap of the Lloyds envelope back into place as if it were an RSVP for a dull party to which she had resigned herself. She’d laid the envelope flat at the bottom of the tin and covered it with the sheaf of twenty-pound notes. She’d pushed the tin back into its hollow, piled the earth into place, and flattened the surface with the back of the spade. Then she’d brushed herself down, returned the spade to the soil, stepped back into the kitchen and turned the key.
    The kitchen was strange, its edges moonlit and exaggerated, its surfaces bulging as if under some internal pressure of their own. The cutlery had flashed like spilled mercury in the tray on the sideboard. The coal in the scuttle had gleamed. She’d wiped her feet and slipped off her damp plimsolls.
    In their room Geoffrey slept deeply, on his back. She hooked his cardigan over the bed knob and eased herself back into bed. The raw smell of earth was on her hands; washing at the sink would have set the pipes of the house groaning. She clutched one goose-pimpled arm in the other and listened to the steadiness of her husband’s breath. As she lay, eyes open to the dark, she grew conscious of a wider, looser scent. Next to him – next to his smell of heat and hairoil and Imperial Leather – she smelled of the outdoors, of the night air. Hadn’t she taken something of the night, of its feral silence, inside with her? It was hers now, even more than it was his: the secret of that tin.
    Because she hadn’t been able to crush the things under the heel of her shoe. Because she couldn’t be sure that, some fearful day, she wouldn’t not be grateful for them.
    The world seemed to twist into a less physical, less solid, version of itself, as if any of its elements – the moon, the Park, the sturdy arc of the Crescent – could suddenly slip from its position, like a flimsy bit of scenery in a Sunday School tableau. If she slipped – and she was already slipping – if her grip on life was anything less than firm, how would she trust herself? And if Geoffrey were to leave, how could she be trusted to keep Philip safe? ( Do you show your children that you are calm and undisturbed? It isn’t enough to pretend to be calm – you must actually be so.)
    In her mind’s eye, she could see the white, uneven grin of his teeth and the red of his lips. His ears were pink, translucent, and the tiny hairs on his lobes caught the light. She could almost feel his childish hands in her own, the ink-stained fingers, the dimpled knuckles. She saw again the curving fringe of his lashes as he slept and the soft brown V of hair at the nape of his neck. His cheek was velvet against her palm; the sleepy warm smell of him delicious. Sometimes, as he nodded off, she traced the delicate blue veins at his temples. All of this I made , she thought. Yet would she swallow death one day? Would she feed it to her child on a spoon piled high with jam?
    She’d be no good, no good at all. Her brain always seized up; when she panicked, she froze. Who was she to stand up to any enemy person? Even her father’s rants and taunts used to strike her dumb. He’d never hit her or her mother, but the threat of violence hadpervaded the atmosphere of her childhood, and in her girlhood room, as the syllables of his rage burbled up through the air vents in the floor, she used to pray before sleep that it would stop, that everything would just stop.
    She doubted she was either canny or tough enough to manage on her own – the civilian reports out of Holland and Belgium had been so desperate – and again, the memory of those capsules flashed like foul treasure in her mind.
    In the spare room, she lay stiffly at the very edge of the bed.
    The flies continued to cast