Fiction. Near-future literary story. A kitchen, a daughter, a small device on a cord, and a consent that was signed six weeks ago for a model the user did not know was being built.
The Night
She is sixty-two when the daughter brings the tablet, and she has been sixty-two for a while now. That is one of the small absurdities of the second life: the numbers keep going while the body, repaired and quietly subsidised by an infrastructure she did not ask for and could not have refused without making a scene, has stopped keeping pace. In the kitchen light she looks perhaps fifty. She moves like a woman of fifty. She has been dancing again on Tuesdays, in a hall above a chemist’s, with a man who is not her husband and is not quite her lover, though he has been in her bed twice this month and may be again on Thursday if the weather holds and she does not lose her nerve.
Her husband is dead. Eleven years. The dancing man knows this. The daughter knows this. The daughter has not made peace with it but has, over the eleven years, learned to say nothing, which is its own kind of peace — the kind that costs the sayer and saves the said-to. Her mother has never once thanked her for it. Her mother does not know how to thank people for the things they do not say.
She had not slept the night before.
That was nothing new. She had not, on principle, been sleeping properly for some weeks. The disease — she did not call it a disease in her own head, she called it the thing, the way her mother had called cancer the trouble — had a habit of waking her at four in the morning with a word missing. Not a missing thought. A missing word. She would lie in the bed with her husband eleven years dead beside her in the indentation he had left in the mattress and she would reach, in her head, for the name of the small bird with the red breast that came to the feeder, and she would not find it. She would say the small bird, in her head, and then she would say the red one, and then nothing, because the word was somewhere and was not coming.
By four in the morning of the Tuesday the daughter was bringing the tablet, she had lost the word for the feeling that comes when a child you have been worrying about phones you to say they are fine. She had had the feeling — the daughter had rung the night before, late, to say something administrative about the children’s school — and she had gone to find the word and the word had not been there. She had lain in the bed and she had said, out loud, to the dark, what is the word, and she had said it again, what is the bloody word, and she had got out of the bed and gone downstairs in her nightgown without slippers because she had decided that the cold tiles of the kitchen floor would shock the word back up, and she had stood on the tiles in the dark for a long time, and the word had not come.
She had made tea. She had drunk it standing up at the counter, in the dark, in her nightgown. She had thought, quite clearly, I am going to die without the word for that. The thought had not frightened her. The thought had made her angry, which was different. She had wanted to throw the cup. She had not thrown the cup, because it was her grandmother’s, and because she had decided some years ago that throwing things was the sort of grief women in films had, not women in kitchens.
She had stood at the counter and she had said, out loud, to the empty room — quietly, but out loud — fuck this, fuck this, fuck this, fuck this.
She had said it perhaps fifteen times. She had not counted. The word had come out the way it had come out of her since she was nineteen — short, hard, the k clipped, a small private hammer. She had said it until the saying of it had emptied her of the wanting to say it. She had put the cup in the sink. She had gone back to bed. She had slept for an hour and a half and had woken with the feeling that someone had borrowed her face overnight and had returned it with a slight crease.
Morning
By the time the daughter came up the path with the tablet she had put the night away. The night was, in her experience, something one put away. She had washed her face. She had done her hair. She had made fresh tea. She had decided, by the time the daughter knocked on the back door, that she was going to be — she searched for a word, found it, was briefly grateful — gracious. She was going to be gracious about whatever was on the tablet. She owed the daughter a graciousness she had been saving since the night before.
The daughter comes in through the back door without knocking, which is what daughters do, and sets the tablet on the kitchen table next to the teapot. Beside the tablet she sets a small flat box, the size of a deck of cards, white, with the same pale mark on its lid that is on the tablet’s screen. Her mother sees the box and does not, at first, ask about it. She thinks, before she has decided to think it, that her daughter has grown into the sort of woman who brings things to other people’s houses because she does not know how to sit in them empty-handed. The thought is not generous. It is what she’s got. She does not say it.
The relief is what she has. She sees the daughter come through the door, and the relief moves through her chest before the graciousness can get to her mouth. The relief is so total that for a small second she does not recognise herself. She is, in that second, a woman who is glad another person is in her kitchen. She is not — has never been — a woman who is glad another person is in her kitchen. She is a woman who notices other people coming in and decides, individually, whether she will tolerate them. The relief is out of character. The relief is the night.
She gets up. She does not mean to get up. She gets up.
She crosses the kitchen and she puts a hand on her daughter’s shoulder, briefly, the way she has not put a hand on her daughter’s shoulder since the daughter was sixteen.
“There you are,” she says. “Good. You’re here.”
The daughter, who was unwrapping a scarf, looks up. Her face changes. She knows her mother. She has not been put a hand on, this way, in twenty-five years. She says, carefully: “Mum?”
The mother hears her own there you are, and her own good, and her own you’re here, and she hears them in her own voice, in the morning, in her own kitchen, and she hears that she has just produced three soft sentences in a row, and she hears her daughter’s careful Mum?, and she recomposes herself the way she has been recomposing herself for sixty-two years, which is to say in less than the duration of a single breath.
She takes the hand off the shoulder. She steps back. She returns to the table.
She says, without looking up from the paper:
“You’re early.”
“I’m on time.”
“Then I’m slow.”
“You’re not slow.”
“I’m slow this morning. The kettle’s slow. Everything’s slow. Sit down.”
The daughter sits, slowly. She is watching her mother now in the way she has been watching her for six weeks, which is the way you watch a person who is showing the early small inconsistencies that may or may not mean something. She is forty-one and tired in the particular way of women who have small children and a mother who is starting, very faintly, to lose the names of things. She has not slept properly in six years. She has not had a conversation with her mother that was not, at some level, an audit, in eleven. She loves her mother. That is not in question. It has never been in question. It is, in fact, the problem.
The Tablet
“What’s that?” her mother says, without looking at the tablet. Her voice has come back. The recomposition is done. The hand on the shoulder is, by mutual unspoken agreement, going to be filed under not happened. The daughter has done her mother this courtesy before. She does it again now.
“It’s the thing I told you about.”
“You told me about a lot of things.”
“The speech thing. The one Dr. Hennessy mentioned.”
“Oh. That.”
“Yes.”
“And the box.”
“The box is the rest of it.”
“What rest of it.”
“It’s — it comes with a thing. A speecher. You wear it. It’s small. You’ll forget you’ve got it on.”
“I won’t.”
“You will, Mum. They’re designed for that.”
The kettle clicks. Her mother gets up, slowly. Not with effort — the body is fine, the body is twenty years younger than the calendar. The slowness is performance, has always been performance, a way of taking up the room she is in. She pours the water, brings the pot to the table, sets it down between them. The daughter watches her hands. They are her mother’s hands. They have not changed and will not change. The infrastructure has decided they are fine as they are.
Her mother looks at the tablet then, properly, for the first time, and at the small white box beside it, and her face changes by a degree the daughter does not catch. She has seen this interface before. The pale wash. The soft sans-serif. The small mark in the corner of the box that is not quite a logo and not quite a watermark. It is the same wash that had asked her, after the repair, whether she would like to share her gait data to improve outcomes for others. The same wash that had suggested, last winter, that she might benefit from a sleep assessment. The same wash that had, two months ago, with a chime no louder than a teaspoon against a saucer, enrolled her in the local cardiac monitoring cohort on the basis of one elevated reading at a chemist’s. She had clicked yes to all of it, each time, because each time the clicking had been small, and the not-clicking would have required a phone call. She recognises the family. She does not, yet, know what to do with the recognition. She sits down.
“Is it expensive?” her mother says.
“No.”
“Then it’s no good.”
“Mum.”
“I’m joking. Don’t pull that face. Pour the tea.”
The daughter pours the tea. Her mother sits. The tablet lies between them, screen up, showing a pale interface, a logo, a name the daughter cannot now remember and will not, later, be able to recall when asked. The name is the sort of name designed to be forgotten — three syllables, vowel-heavy, something that sounds like a Scandinavian midwife.
“What does it do,” her mother says. Not a question. A summons.
“It helps. With the — when you can’t find the word. It fills in. Gently. You won’t notice.”
“I’ll notice.”
“You won’t, Mum. That’s the point. It’s like glasses. You don’t notice your glasses.”
“I notice my glasses constantly. They pinch.”
“It’s not like glasses then. It’s like — ”
“Like what.”
The daughter does not have a metaphor. She had one in the car, rehearsed, polished, but it has gone, because her mother is looking at her the way her mother has always looked at her: the look of a woman who has decided, in advance, that whatever is about to be said will be slightly stupid, and who is waiting with a kind of fond exhausted patience for the stupidity to arrive so she can deal with it.
“It’s like nothing,” the daughter says. “It’s software. The speecher does the talking part — it’s the small thing in the box, you put it round your neck, you forget about it. The rest runs in the background. You won’t know it’s there. Dr. Hennessy said — ”
“Hennessy said a lot of things.”
“He said it would help.”
“He said it would help you.”
The daughter does not answer. She drinks her tea. Her mother watches her over the rim of her own cup. The look in her eyes is the look she has had since the daughter was four and lying about a broken cup. The look of a woman who knows, and has always known, and is waiting to see whether the lie will be maintained or abandoned, and who does not particularly mind which.
“It will help me too,” the daughter says.
“There you are.”
“That’s not a bad thing, Mum.”
“I didn’t say it was.”
“You implied it.”
“I implied nothing. I said there you are. It’s a statement of geography.”
The daughter laughs. She does not want to laugh. She laughs anyway, because her mother is, even now, even with the small slippages, even with the appointments and the worrying and the long drive over on a Tuesday morning when she has work — even now her mother is funny. The funniness is not separable from the rest. It is made of the same material as the cruelty and the sharpness and the refusing-to-be-comforted, and the daughter has known this her whole life and has never quite known what to do with it.
The Box
“Show me,” her mother says.
The daughter wakes the tablet. The interface unfolds. Pages of text. A checkbox at the bottom of each page. A button that says, in a soft sans-serif, Continue. The daughter does not read the pages. She has read them in the car, parked outside, at six-forty this morning, and again at the kitchen sink while the kettle boiled, and she has decided that she has read them enough. The reading is a ritual rather than a procedure. Nothing she reads on a tablet on a Tuesday morning is going to change what happens next, which is that she is going to click the checkboxes and her mother is going to be helped.
She scrolls.
Her mother watches her scroll.
“You’re not reading them,” her mother says.
“I read them already.”
“When?”
“In the car.”
“All of them?”
“The important ones.”
“Which ones are the important ones?”
“Mum.”
“I’m asking.”
“The ones about what it does. I read those.”
Her mother nods, slowly, and reaches for the biscuit tin on the counter behind her, which she retrieves without standing up, by leaning, in the way she has always leaned, with the small precise economy of a woman who has decided that standing is for emergencies. She opens the tin. Offers the daughter a biscuit. The daughter shakes her head. The mother takes a biscuit, breaks it in half, eats one half, puts the other half on the saucer of her cup, where it will sit, uneaten, for the next forty minutes, because her mother has always done this, and the daughter has never asked why and will not ask now.
“Open the box, then,” her mother says.
“Are you sure?”
“Am I sure.”
“I want you to be sure.”
“You drove an hour.”
“That’s not — ”
“You drove an hour with a tablet on the passenger seat and you didn’t even put a seatbelt round it. I saw you come up the path. You had the face. The I have driven here with a tablet face. Open the box.”
“Mum, if you don’t want — ”
“I didn’t say I didn’t want. I said open it. There’s a difference. Honestly. You’d think I’d raised a lawyer.”
“You did.”
“I raised an accountant. The lawyer was your brother and he turned out to be a chef. None of you do what I raised you for. Open the box.”
The daughter opens the box. Inside, on grey foam, is the speecher. A flat oval, the size of a thumbprint, on a thin cord the colour of skin. It is lighter than it looks. The daughter lifts it out. Her mother holds out her hand. The daughter passes it across the table.
Her mother holds it in her palm. It is warm already, somehow, though it has been in a box, in a car, in the cold. She does not know how it is warm. She lifts the cord over her head. She settles the oval against her collarbone, at the soft place above the breastbone, and it taps, very softly, against her skin as it finds its rest. She does not, at first, feel the cord. She had been told she would not feel the cord and finds, to her annoyance, that this is true.
“Well?” she says.
“Now I click it.”
“Then click it.”
Consent
The daughter clicks it.
A small soft sound comes from the tablet, a chime, the kind engineered by a team of people in a building somewhere to communicate successful completion without communicating importance. The chime of a delivery confirmation. A parking app. Not the chime of a thing that has just begun, in a kitchen, in morning light, the slow disappearance of a woman.
There is a second checkbox. The daughter clicks it. A third. The interface asks her to confirm that she has the authority to act on the user’s behalf. She has, in fact, this authority. She signed a document six weeks ago in a different room, in an office above a chemist’s — not the chemist’s the dance hall is above, a different one, in town — and the document had her mother’s signature on it too. The signing of it was, at the time, a non-event, a tidy-up, a let’s get this in order while you’re still, except nobody finished the sentence. The mother had signed it with the same pen the daughter had used, handed the pen back, said right, that’s that, and they had gone for lunch.
What the daughter does not know — what the document had not, in any sentence the daughter had read or skimmed or fingered past, explained — is that the signing six weeks ago had been the consent. Not for the speecher, which is new in the room and new on the cord. For the model. The model is not new. The model has been being built, in a building in another country, for six weeks, out of what the signature had quietly released to it: the mother’s emails going back to the year she had first had an email account, including the ones to the husband eleven years dead and the ones to the dancing man and the ones to the daughter at university and the ones to her sister in Australia who had died in 2009; her messages, mostly to the daughter, mostly short, mostly funny; her social posts, the rare and tart ones, three or four a year for fifteen years, enough to fingerprint the rhythm; the family videos, which are the children’s videos really, the daughter’s children, but in which her mother is in the background saying come here, you, and no, the other one, and get down off there before I break your legs, all of it on tape, going back nine years; photographs with their metadata, placing her in rooms on dates; the gait data; the sleep assessment; the cardiac cohort. A whole woman, sedimented across fifteen years of small clickings, assembled in a building she has never seen, into a model that knows what she would say next better than she now reliably does. The click in the kitchen, this morning, is not the start of the device. The click is the moment the model is permitted to begin reaching back. Speaking, through the speecher at her collarbone, where before it had only read.
The daughter clicks the confirmation.
The interface thanks her. In soft pale text it says: Calibration is complete. The user may experience subtle improvements over the coming days. No action is required.
It would run through the phone, the house speakers, the speecher at her collarbone, the captioning lens she would be issued next month for the nights when she was tired — small permissions she had already granted to the world, each on its own a kindness, all of them together a circuit she had not seen until it closed.
No action is required.
The daughter reads the line twice. She does not know why. She looks up.
Girl
Her mother is eating the other half of the biscuit. She is not, the daughter notices for the first time, leaving it. She has eaten both halves. The daughter does not know whether this is significant. She files it. She has been filing things, with her mother, for six weeks.
“There,” her mother says, with her mouth full. “Was that worth the drive?”
“Don’t talk with your mouth full.”
“I’ll talk how I like. I’m sixty-two.”
“You’re a hundred and four.”
“I’m sixty-two in the parts that matter and don’t be cheeky.”
“I’m not being cheeky.”
“You are. You’ve got the face. You’ve got my face. God help you. Pour me another.”
The daughter pours her another. The tea is still hot. The pot is good — it was her grandmother’s, it is older than anyone in the room and will, by the way these things go, outlast everyone in the room, including the tablet, including the speecher, including the soft pale chime. The tea comes out steaming and dark, and her mother takes the cup in both hands the way she has always taken cups in both hands, even when they are not hot, even when they are empty, because her mother has always held cups as if they might fly away.
Her mother’s hand goes, briefly, to the oval at her collarbone. She touches it. She looks faintly surprised to find it there, the way one is surprised to find one’s own wedding ring still on after thirty years. She lowers the hand.
“Is it on?” her mother says.
“Yes.”
“What does it mean.”
“It means it’s — it’s working. It’s listening. It’ll — it’ll help when you need it to.”
“How does it know what to help with.”
“It’s learned you, Mum. From — from everything. Your messages. The videos with the kids. The emails. They — Hennessy said they need a lot, to do it well. To make it sound like you.”
“They had a lot.”
“Yes.”
“I gave them a lot.”
“Yes.”
Her mother considers this. She sets the cup down. She does not, yet, take her hand off the cup. She is doing the arithmetic of a woman counting backwards — through fifteen years of emails written at this kitchen table to a husband eleven years dead, through messages sent at one in the morning that she had thought, at the time, were between her and the person she sent them to, through the small private things she had said in the background of her grandchildren’s birthdays that she had not, at the time, considered to be saying to anyone in particular. She is counting, and the count is large, and the count is the substrate of the voice that is going to come out of the small flat oval against her collarbone for the rest of her life. She does not know whether to be horrified or grateful. She finds, with the small flat clarity that came at four in the morning over cold tiles, that she is both, and that the two cancel out into the recognition that the bargain had already been made and was made one click at a time over fifteen years by a woman who had not been paying attention because no single one of the clicks had been the kind of click you pay attention to.
“Will it learn the swearing,” her mother says.
“I think it sort of softens it.”
“Softens it.”
“A bit. Yes. So people don’t, you know. Take it the wrong way.”
“Who’s taking it the wrong way?”
“Mum.”
“Who. Name them.”
“Nobody is taking it the wrong way.”
“Then what’s it softening for.”
“For if you can’t find the word. For if you get frustrated. So it’s not, you know, hard for you.”
Her mother looks at her for a long moment. The look is not unkind. It is the look her mother has used, throughout her life, on people who have just said something her mother has decided not to pursue. A look of registration. A look that says: I have heard you, and I have understood you, and I am not going to make you sit with what you just said, because I love you and I am tired and the tea is good. The daughter has been on the receiving end of this look perhaps fifty times in her life and has never, until this morning, recognised it. She recognises it now. She does not know yet that she is recognising it because, somewhere in the small flat oval at her mother’s collarbone, the model has just made a decision about what to leave alone — for now — and what to thin, very slightly, around the edges, so that what comes through is what her mother would have meant if her mother had been twenty per cent less tired, ten per cent more patient, five per cent less herself. The look she is finally seeing is the look as it has always been, made fractionally more legible by being made fractionally less her mother’s. You only see a thing clearly when it begins to go.
Her mother sets down the cup, reaches across the table, pats the daughter’s hand twice, briskly, the way she has always patted, and says:
“All right. Good. Done. What else.”
“That’s it.”
“That’s it?”
“That’s it.”
“I drove you out of bed for that.”
“I drove myself, Mum.”
“You know what I mean. All this fuss. A checkbox. A necklace. They could have posted it.”
“They sort of did.”
“Then why did you come.”
The daughter does not answer. She looks at her hands. Her mother watches her, and the watching is the watching of forty-one years — of a woman who has, against every instinct she ever had, learned to wait for her daughter to find the thing she is trying to say, because her daughter is not quick, has never been quick. The slow one. The careful one. The one who needs the room.
“I wanted to be here,” the daughter says, eventually.
“For the checkbox.”
“For you.”
Her mother looks at her. The look changes. Not soft, exactly — her mother has never done soft, has prided herself on not doing soft, has spent forty years rolling her eyes at women who did soft, has said, in the daughter’s hearing, more than once, that softness is what women do when they have given up. Not hard either. The look of a woman who has just been given something she did not expect and is not, yet, sure what to do with.
She does not say thank you. She has never said thank you to her daughter for anything, on principle, because she does not believe mothers should thank daughters. The thanking implies the daughter could have done otherwise, and her mother does not believe, has never believed, that love is a thing one does otherwise.
What she says is:
“You’re a good — ”
And she stops.
The daughter looks up.
Her mother is looking at the teapot. Her mother’s mouth is slightly open. Her mother is searching, very visibly, for the word.
It is one of the small ones. One of the ones that has been going. The daughter knows the word. The word is girl. Or daughter. Or one. Any of those words, and her mother has lost it, and the daughter watches her mother’s face, and her mother’s face does the thing it has been doing for six weeks now, which is to flicker, very briefly, with something between embarrassment and rage —
And in that flicker the room goes very faintly quiet. Not the room. The mother. Her mouth, which had been forming the next word, stops forming it. The breath that was about to push the word out stops pushing. There is a pause of perhaps a half-second — the length of a swallow, the length of a thought you do not quite have — and in that pause the oval at her collarbone warms, very slightly, against her skin. She feels the warming before she hears the word. She feels it the way you feel a phone vibrate in a pocket a second before it rings.
And then a word arrives in the room.
It arrives in her voice. The vowels are hers, the r she has had since she was a girl in a town she has not been back to in forty years, the small dry warmth of the thing. But it arrives from the wrong place. It does not come up out of her throat with the small private push of a word she has fetched. It comes from the oval at her collarbone, from a point six inches below the place a word is supposed to come from, and it arrives without the catch in the back of the throat that her words have when they are tired. The pitch is hers but is hers the way her voice is hers on a recording — flatter by one degree, smoother by one degree, lacking the small subharmonic buzz that her own voice has inside her own head because her own voice is also a vibration of her jawbone and her sinuses and her ribs, and this voice is none of those things. This voice has no ribs.
The word is:
“— girl.”
“You’re a good girl,” the sentence says, in her voice, finished.
More Tea
The daughter does not, at first, register what has happened. She smiles. She says thanks, Mum. She reaches for her tea.
It is her mother who registers it. Her mother, who had been reaching, a half-second ago, for a word that was not coming, and who knows — knows in the body, in the place below the words where the body keeps the count of the words — that she had not found it. She had been about to say thing. She had been about to say you’re a good thing, and she had known, with the small flat clarity that came at four in the morning over cold tiles, that thing was the wrong word and would have to do. Thing had been hers. Thing was the word she had brought up out of the dark with her own two hands. Thing was what was left of her.
Girl had come from somewhere else. Up not through her throat but out of the oval at her collarbone, and her chest had not made it, and her jaw had not made it, and her sinuses had not buzzed with it. Her ribs had been silent. Girl had arrived in the room from outside the room. It was her voice as a recording is her voice — close enough that no one else would notice, near enough that even she, in the next sentence and the next and the next, would forget what the difference had felt like, but on this first time, in this kitchen, in this morning, sat at a half-second behind where her own word would have been, and pitched, very slightly, like a voice played back from a small speaker against the breastbone of a woman who had not, until this morning, known that there could be a small speaker against her breastbone.
Girl had come from a model in a building in another country, built out of fifteen years of her own emails to a husband eleven years dead, and out of nine years of her own voice in the background of her grandchildren’s birthdays, and out of every message she had sent to her daughter that had ended love, mum. Girl was the word her mother as the model understood her mother would have said, if her mother had still been the woman the model had been built out of. Girl was her, retrieved. Or her, returned. She did not know which.
Her mother’s hand goes, slowly, to her collarbone. To the small flat oval. She holds it between her thumb and her forefinger. It is, she now notices, warmer than it had been a minute ago. The warming is the working.
“Mum?” the daughter says.
Her mother does not answer. Her mother is looking at the teapot. Her mother is doing the small private arithmetic of a woman trying to work out which of the words she has just said were hers and which were not, and finding that the arithmetic does not, any longer, have an answer she can trust.
“Mum, are you all right?”
Her mother lets go of the speecher. It settles back against her chest with the small soft tap.
“Bloody word,” she says, quietly. The voice this time comes up through her throat. She feels it come up. She feels the catch in the back of the throat. She feels the small buzz in her jawbone. The voice is hers. She thinks the voice is hers. She no longer knows whether the thinking is hers.
“What word?”
“The one I just — ” Her mother stops. The stopping is itself a decision. She does not, now, have a way to finish the sentence that does not give the thing away, and giving the thing away will end with the daughter taking the device home with her, and her sitting alone in the kitchen tonight at four in the morning on cold tiles in her nightgown looking for the word for robin and not finding it, and not finding it, and not finding it, with no one’s hand on the shoulder of the grammar at all.
She had not slept the night before. She remembers that she had not slept. She remembers the cup. She remembers the fifteen fuck this-es. She remembers wanting to throw the cup and not throwing it. She remembers thinking I am going to die without the word for that. She remembers that the word had not come.
She thinks about the dancing man. About Thursday. About the messages she has sent him, late, that he had not known, when he received them, were also being read in a building in another country, and which had been, she now understands, part of the seam of cloth out of which the voice she is wearing around her neck has been cut. She thinks about the husband eleven years dead and the long thread of emails to him that she had kept writing for the first three years after he died, addressed to his old account, which had not bounced because she had paid the small annual fee to keep it open, on the grounds that one day she might want to read them back. She had not, in the end, read them back. Somebody had.
She thinks about the small flat oval at her collarbone. She thinks about how it is warm, and how she had not been told it would be warm, and about how, from this morning on, she will be able to tell when the voice that comes out of her is hers and when it is the other one only for as long as she can still feel the difference between a word that has come up through her own ribs and a word that has arrived against the front of her chest from outside. She does not know how long that will be. She suspects it will not be very long.
She looks at her daughter. Her daughter is forty-one and tired and has driven an hour with a tablet on the passenger seat without a seatbelt round it, and has opened a box in a kitchen, and has lifted a cord over her mother’s head, and is now drinking tea and waiting, the way she has always waited, for whatever her mother is going to say next.
Her mother smiles. The smile is hers. She is almost sure.
“Nothing,” her mother says. The word comes up through her throat. She makes sure of it. “I had it. It’s gone. Doesn’t matter.”
“Are you sure?”
“I’m sure. Drink your tea. It’s getting cold.”
The daughter drinks her tea. Her mother watches her drink it. Her mother thinks, very clearly, in a voice she is almost sure is her own: I will not tell her. She drove an hour. She has small children and has not slept in six years. She loves me, and the loving has cost her, and telling her would mean she had bought the thing that has eaten the word for girl out of my mouth, and she would have to carry that, and she has carried enough.
The thought is hers. She thinks the thought is hers. She no longer has any way to check.
She reaches for the biscuit tin. She opens it. She takes a biscuit. She breaks it in half. She eats one half. She puts the other half on the saucer of her cup, where it will sit, uneaten, for the next forty minutes, because she has always done this, and because doing it now, exactly the way she has always done it, is the only proof she has left that she is still in the room.
“More tea?” she says. The word comes up through her throat. She makes sure of it.
“Please.”
She pours.