The Scrapbook (25 page)

Or you'd woken one morning and pressed your fingers into the velvet pouch of your wife's armpit, pressed them against your face, breathed her in and remembered that you loved her. Remembered just how much.

Or you'd been walking in a grey street, in a grey city, and a finger of late afternoon sun nudged the skin of a beautiful girl, turned her hair to flames, and you gasped and followed her until she turned and noticed you, smiled and took you by the hand.

So it couldn't be you.

Your car horn. My mother's voice raised in sharp exclamation. My daughter's shouts of fury. Pebbles through the open window, earth on the bedroom floor. The oak quivered as I raised myself onto an elbow and upright. Then your face, floating ghostlike through its leaves. My Green Man. Straddled around a branch, too high and reaching for me, laughing. I ran then, and met you in the tangle of roots beneath its canopy, do you remember? Your trousers ruined and your hands scuffed. Twigs your untidy crown.

I didn't care that my mother and my daughter were standing at the door, or that my daughter was crying. The hairs on my body thrust themselves upwards to greet the cup of your palm, electric shock shivers where skin met skin.

You tried to speak and I shook my head. It didn't matter where you'd been. It didn't matter what you'd been doing, or with whom. I blew a kiss to my daughter, nodded at my mother. She nodded back and grasped our child by the wrist, turned away. I held your hand and led you through the garden gate, barefoot and bag-less.

As you drove us down the lane I looked over my shoulder at my open bedroom window and I suddenly wanted, so much, to stop you. I wanted to walk slowly back inside and lie on my bed and feel again the desolation of losing you, but with
this
knowledge gilding its edges. I wanted to hide my face in the pillow, recreate the anguish, hold it in my cheek and suck at it, so that I could have this moment again, now that I knew this moment would come. I almost did stop you, make you turn around, but then you stroked a hand across my thighs and grinned at me and I gasped and folded myself around your warm fingers, and all thought flew from me with my bitten breath.

The next time you stayed away for nine weeks and three days, four days, five days, I lay in my bedroom and imagined you floating faceless through shoals of fish, tattered limbs trailing at your sides, but I kept my brush and lipstick in my pocket, ready.

Acknowledgements

Without the support and encouragement of friends, I would never have had the courage to believe I could finish this novel and send it out into the world. Thank you Rachel Davies for being there from the start, and for your steadfast faith in me, through chapter after chapter. Thank you Gillian Eaton for the wise and sensitive advice and constant enthusiasm. Thank you Charlotte Penny, dear friend and partner in cake-eating crime, for telling me you loved it and for insisting I send it to Parthian.

I was lucky enough to receive guidance from the wonderful poet Samantha Wynne-Rhydderch, and will always be grateful that she never let me off the hook when it came to chasing an image. Thank you Samantha.

Cathy Stocker, I couldn't have wished for a more perfect cover for the novel.

Thanks to my parents for the support they've always shown, and to Simon for the love.

Huge gratitude goes to Richard Davies and the Parthian team. Susie Wild, you are a star of an editor. Thanks for taking a chance on me.

And lastly, thanks to all those writers who have inspired and moved me: my fellow Bards and beyond them, across a world of words.

Parthian

The Old Surgery

Napier Street

Cardigan

SA43 1ED

www.parthianbooks.com

First published in 2014

© Carly Holmes 2014

All Rights Reserved

epub ISBN 978-1-909844-58-2

mobi ISBN 978-1-909844-59-9

Editor: Susie Wild

Cover design by www.theundercard.co.uk

Front cover image © Cathy Stocker 2013/www.cathystocker.com

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