Jon McGregor - If Nobody Speaks of Remarkable Things

She touches his lips with one finger again, stroking the knuckle against the chapped edges of his upper and lower lip, he moves his mouth, his eyelids lift a little, like papers rustling in a light breeze. She whispers wake up, she leans her face across to kiss his mouth, she rolls the weight of her body onto him, feeling the warmth of the sun on her back, moving her head so that her shadow bounces in and out of his eyes. He wakes up, he opens his eyes and she spreads her fingers flat across his chest, moving her hips so that his belly rolls a little from side to side.

She says have you slept enough now, are you rested?

She says the house is still empty you know.

And he raises his eyebrows, and there is a rolling of bodies, a rustling of tangled bedclothes, a creaking of old bedsprings.

And in a moment’s breathless pause, blinking at each other and already wiping sweat from a forehead, she thinks of their further surprise, a few short months after their doubled blessing, the unexpected planting of a third child they had not been ready for, and she knows they were right to seal off further possibility, to let the doctors take scissors and stitches to her husband and close the shutters on their fertile windows. There is not the money she’d said, my body is tired, and he had not been able to deny her that. We have been given more than we asked for she’d said, this is enough now, and he had agreed.

They had kept it a secret, they were not sure his parents would approve, but his mother had made no more comment about extra brothers and sisters for their children. Perhaps she thinks three is enough after all. Perhaps she thinks that they no longer move together in that way, now there is no need.

She draws her fingernails slowly down her husband’s back, she listens to the sounds she can draw from out of him, and she thinks well so at least she is wrong about that.

I woke up late this morning, I had to leave for work without having a shower and I felt sticky and straw-headed all day.

Before I left, I noticed that Michael had left the broken clay figure behind, it was still on the table, lying forlornly on its side.

I picked it up and looked at it again, resting the head on the shoulders, looking at the long thin ears, the tiny beads around the neck, the stillness of the expression.

I wondered how it had been broken.

I wondered if I could fix it, if that would be okay, if it was supposed to be like this.

I looked around for some superglue, I looked in the kitchen drawer with the elastic bands and the sellotape and the silver foil, and I found the leaflets from the clinic, the ones I’d stuffed away in there the other week.

I read the sections I’d started to highlight, I read the rest of them, and somehow it seemed a little less alien than it had before, I kept checking the clock and reading a little bit extra, stroking my belly and imagining the quiet bubbling miracle inside.

But in the end I had to put them back and run for the bus with my mouth crammed full of toast.

And I spent all day standing over a photocopier, getting tiny paper-cuts on my hands and thinking about yesterday afternoon.

I thought about how nice it had been to just spend the afternoon walking around, talking, not talking, thinking, telling each other what we were thinking.

We went to the park, and I saw the girl from the shop downstairs, I think she saw me but I didn’t know whether or not to say hello, I wasn’t sure that she’d recognise me.

I was sick behind some rhododendron bushes, and it barely interrupted the flow of the conversation.

We had lunch in a cafe by the lake, we sat by the window and looked out over the water, he told me about him and his brother learning to swim on a camping trip in the lake district, how they’d egged each other on to walk further and further out.

It was a hot day he said, but the water was still icy cold.

He told me how they stood there, shivering, calling each other chicken, a step further and a step more, until the water was tapping against their clenched teeth.

He was looking at the lake, at the people in rowing boats, and he said we stopped talking, we were looking at each other, wondering what to do next, and suddenly we grabbed each other and pulled each other forwards, out of our depth, face down into the water.

I said and what happened, he said I don’t know, I remember being under the water for a while, throwing my arms and legs around, and then somehow my head was in the air again and we were both swimming.

I told him I couldn’t swim and he pointed at my stomach and said so a birthing pool’s out then and he smiled and I laughed.

And after we’d talked some more we walked back through the park and across town to an art gallery.

There was a special exhibition on, it was only one piece of work but we were there for an hour, looking and looking and telling each other about it in hushed awestruck voices.

It was in one room, a large room with long skylights, and we stood by the doorway and looked in at it, at them, looking over them, thousands and thousands of six-inch red clay figures, as roughly made as playschool plasticine men, a pair of finger-sized sockets for eyes, heads tilted up from formless bodies.

Each one almost identical, each one unique.

We knelt there, looking at them looking up at us, the thousands of them, saying I wonder how long and I wonder if they all and I wonder what.

A small boy came running up behind us, shouting and then suddenly stilled into quietness, he said it’s like being on a stage.

I wanted to steal one, I wanted to put it on my bedside table and wake up to see it smiling kindly at me, but Michael said it wasn’t fair, he wouldn’t let me, he said it might get lonely.

I wanted to count them, give them all names, make up stories for each of them, but it seemed impossible to even begin.

And so we just knelt there without talking, looking at them looking at us, unblinking, expressionless.

By the time we came out the sun was heavy and low in the sky, we were both hungry but I didn’t want to go home.

We went and bought soup from a coffee shop, we sat on high stools at the window-counter and talked without looking at each other, our reflections laid thinly across the glass.

He said you’re not too tired are you, we haven’t done too much walking have we?

I said no, no, I’m fine, I’m a bit knackered but it’s okay I said, I’ve had a good day I said.

And we both sat there with mouthfuls of hot soup and I wondered again what sort of good I meant, I thought about the last few days, I thought about why he was here, about who he was and why he had come looking for me, what he had been expecting, what he was thinking now.

He said, my brother, he said I only met you a week ago and already I feel like I know you far more than my brother ever did, he said it doesn’t seem fair somehow.

I said oh but I feel like I know him, I said you’ve told me so much about him that I almost feel like I’ve met him properly, and he said I suppose but it’s not the same.

There was a pedestrian crossing further up the road, the signal was red and I looked at all the people waiting to cross, a huge crowd of them, motionless, blankfaced, looking up at the lights.

They looked like the figures in the art gallery.

There was a white van parked outside, two men in fluorescent jackets were loading huge reels of cable into it, shovels, traffic cones.

He said what’s the most frightening thing that’s ever happened to you?

I started to speak, I was going to say that day, that afternoon, seeing that moment, watching his brother moving to where it was, but he said I mean really happened to you, not something you’ve seen or read about but happened to you.