Births Deaths Marriages

by Georgia Blain

  When Andrew came home, I’d packed up for the evening and gone to bed.

  ‘How was it?’ he asked as he hung his coat on the back of the door.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Working in the new room,’ and he jerked his head in the direction of the shed.

  ‘It was good,’ I told him, and it had been. I had liked my few hours out there, and I had found I could work inside when I needed to.

  He told me he was just going to check on Odessa.

  He came back in and smiled. ‘Have you seen her?’ he asked, as he asks me every night, and I told him that I had.

  ‘She looks so beautiful,’ he said.

  She did.

  I closed my eyes. I could hear the sound of the rain, and from the room next to ours, Odessa sucking her thumb, soothing herself back into the depths of sleep. Lying in the darkness, I ran over the work I had been doing, the stories I had been telling slowly slotting into place.

  Hours earlier, I had sat in the sunroom with a sense of the end so close yet not quite within my grasp. Now I was in bed feeling just as a child feels, sifting through the remnants of the tale her mother has just told her, letting it curl around her as she begins to doze, and I felt the strangeness of circling the place where I had started; not right there but close enough to be disturbingly familiar.

  It was then that I realised I had in fact reached the end. There was no need to search for it. It is right here where it has all looped back on itself, complete in this moment. Here is the place to stop, to pause before the next swoop of the arc continues following the path of all that has gone before, the same shape but a different line. It is transitory, I know, but I would like to hold it still for now, to make it into the happy ending it was in that instant. Because this is the place where I am, like my mother, writing about us. And I have so much more than I had ever hoped for; I have love, work that I want to do, and a couple of rooms to move between each day.