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

thinking. She has the baby, she has the pram, she has the bag. She looks up the stairs, she looks at the lozenges of light set into the front door, she looks down at herself. She has the baby in one arm and the bag slung over her shoulder, across her body, across her pyjamas.
     
    Clothes. She needs something to wear.
     
    In the bedroom she surveys the heap of clothes on her chair. She picks them up with her spare hand and drops them to the floor. A pair of jeans with an enormous waistband, some dungarees, grey jogging pants, a sweatshirt with a trailing flower design. She finds something green tangled up with something red and she can’t separate them with one hand so she gives them a shake, snaps them in the air, and a red scarf soars free, tossing out into the bedroom. Elina watches it as it falls in a graceful arc away from her, as it settles to the floor. She looks at it there, the red against the white carpet. She tilts her head one way, then the other, considering it. She looks back at the baby, who is making movements with his mouth, as if trying to communicate something to her. She doesn’t look at the scarf again but she thinks of it, the way it shot out like that into the air. She thinks that it somehow reminds her of something she has seen recently. And then she recalls what it is. Jets of blood. Beautiful, in their way. The pure, garnet brightness of them in the scrubbed white of the room. The way they would spin and resolve themselves into droplets as they travelled, before hurling themselves with definite, sure force against the fronts of the doctors, the nurses. The way they commanded such attention, the way they brought everyone running.
     
    Elina drops the green smock and sits quickly on the chair. She is sure to keep a careful hold of the baby, of her son, and to keep looking at him, at nothing else, and she sees he is still mouthing secrets to her, as if he has all the answers to everything she needs to know.
     
    L exie stands at the window, cigarette in hand, looking down into the street. The old woman from the flat below is setting off on her daily walk. Dog lead in one hand, shopping-bag in the other, back bent into a comma under her coat, she inches, inches into the road, without looking left or right.
     
    ‘She’s going to get run over one day,’ Lexie murmurs.
     
    ‘Who?’ Innes says, from across the room, lifting his head from the mattress.
     
    Lexie points with the tip of her cigarette. ‘Your neighbour. The one with a hunchback. And probably by you.’
     
    She looks different from the girl who was reading on a tree stump. For one, she is naked, wearing only a candy-striped shirt of Innes’s, open down the front. For two, her hair has been cut in sloping, silken curtains about her face.
     
    Innes yawns, stretches, turns on to his stomach. ‘Why would I want to run over my neighbour? And if you mean the old battleaxe from downstairs, it’s not a hunchback it’s a dowager’s hump. Known in the medical trade as thoracic spinal osteoporosis. Caused by—’
     
    ‘Oh, shush,’ Lexie says. ‘How do you know all these things anyway?’
     
    Innes raises himself on to his elbow. ‘A misspent youth,’ he says. ‘Years squandered on books instead of on the likes of you.’
     
    She smiles and exhales a stream of smoke, watching as the woman and her dog reach the pavement. It is a stifling, close day in October. The sky is heavy, threatening electric clashes, but the woman is dressed, as she always is, in a thick tweed coat. ‘Well,’ Lexie says, ‘you’ve made up for it since.’
     
    ‘Speaking of which,’ Innes twitches back a corner of the counterpane, ‘come here. Bring me your cigarette and your body.’
     
    She doesn’t move. ‘In that order?’
     
    ‘In whichever order you damn well like. Come on!’ He slaps the mattress.
     
    Lexie takes another pull on her cigarette. She scuffs her bare foot against the arch of its twin. She takes a last glance into the