Fiction

You’re standing in the living room with your face against the wall. “Listen,” you say, beckoning me closer. “I think there are bees in the plasterwork.” I watch your eyebrows pinch together in concentration over your smile. “I can hear them chewing to make their nests, and humming to each other.”

You develop favourites. This is my favourite wooden spoon. It has a short handle that sits well in my dry, ancient hand. The surface is worn smooth, except for that one patch of rough, knotted wood where the tree shows wild in our domestic life.

When this is over, we’ll meet. We’ll go to hug and instead we’ll pause and feel a split second of awkwardness and worry, and then finally reach for each other.

Saturday, March 14th, the messaging frenzy begins. ‘Sorry, darling, simply too big a risk,’ Ma Pru says. ‘Still happening?’ Emil, known for his spunkiness. ‘Not sure we can make it,’ a prep school friend. ‘Feel like shit, might have to pass,’ Naz, my clubbing partner.

This year, 2020, everything has paused. May Day itself is interrupted. In the midst of the Covid-19 lockdown the usual rituals and festivals and rites and wakes and processions that mark this day have all been called off.

The colonoscopy had been booked a month before the wedding, to ensure matters of the body were taken care of before matters of the heart. But it didn’t matter in the end, both had to be cancelled.

It’s spring, and the sunshine has arrived. I put on a black cotton dress I haven’t worn since last summer. It pulls tight as I button it up at the front. My breasts have swelled; they are at least a cup size bigger. I’ll need to buy bigger bras soon.

She is gripping Eddie’s wrist tight, an affectionate Chinese Burn to remind him how loved he is. ‘Work okay?’ she asks. ‘Treating you kindly?’             Not wanting to disappoint his mother, Eddie resorts to fabricating elongated stories about his Cancer Research colleagues, about how kind and unassuming they all are.

God it feels good, Baxter! To be back out here with you, galloping across the Dairy Acres stubble! A venerable Wycherly stamping ground. Hounds speaking low and strong, streaking across the fields! The finest view in Europe!

There were more cars than usual parked in the drive. Sat in his van, the gardener flicked off the radio and surveyed the area. It was a sprawling Georgian farmhouse practically in the middle of nowhere, enclosed within a fortress of holly. Houses like this once seemed remarkable, but in his line of work they…