Notes

1 This piece is as yet unpublished.  

Short Story:
By Your Hand

I am at my parents’ house. It is late winter, and I cannot write.

In the kitchen, my mother proffers me a book of poetry and looks at me, expectant. I put away my own book, folding the page over despite not having taken in more than a sentence in the last quarter hour. I read her face instead, for how I should respond.

She holds it like an offering. An offering of what?

I take it.

I raise my eyebrows in the way I have learnt; not too incredulous as to provoke defensiveness, but not too interested as to grant her hold over me.

Despite myself, I am interested.

My mother busies herself with something peripheral and so I allow myself to look inside. The book is green, old leather, or maybe card or cloth; it is so worn that I cannot quite tell. It pages feels warm.

There, she says, you’ll like that. She leans over to tap the inside cover page, looking knowing.

I shift, uncomfortable.

It is there that I see the real heart of her gesture; a few sparse lines of your handwriting sit on the inside page, waiting. 

My mother moves away from me, sits by the window, looks at her phone.

I never met you, in life. You died when she - that is, my mother, your daughter - was sixteen and she rarely, if ever, spoke of you. Yet you were my teenage obsession: part rebellion, part morbid fascination with the circumstances of your death.  
Why show me now?

You are a kind of mythic figure - a silhouette in the window of a high tower, a distant character, features undefined. But when I look down at your hand now, I feel a more complex need for closeness.

Is this an introduction?

Your hand is there above your husband’s, which is, in turn, above my mother’s - but your words lean vertiginously up the page, where the others are ruler straight.

Your inscription starts with a date - ‘C H R I S T MA S  1 9 7 4’ - that you have helpfully noted in capitals.

I smile because your ‘F’s look more like a loopy backwards ‘E’, like how I imagine Elizabeth the 1st wrote her Es, like a lock or a gate.

I point out this curiosity to my mother and she almost smiles, but it falls quickly, as if it were a jump she had tried to clear but had fumbled during the run up.

Instead, she nods and says dispassionately, I always thought she put it on, you know - affected intricacies to make her writing look more “interesting” than it was.

I flush, feel self-conscious, and then try not to.

I recall my own childhood desire to have “interesting” writing: a fast cursive that suggested intellectualism, some undefined and undirected passion, even a little mystery in its illegibility - handwriting that was the equivalent of smoking a cigarette with an antique holder. A handwriting that is now, through repetition, instinctively my own.

Maybe there is some connection with the desire to write itself there, somewhere in that need. Maybe all writing is an effort to “affect intricacies”, using the careful curation of prosody to provoke affect, to conjure intricacy - intimacy even.

I lean closer.

My grandfather’s hand is there too, just as I remember from the birthday cards of later childhood. His engineering background provides me with a host of metaphors with which to imagine him, all confirmed and reinforced by my knowledge of him in life; how much of his decision making has been led by a logic of damage assessment, of technical evaluations, and practical utility. His y’s are distinctly angular, as if drawn with a set square.

But then I look again at the y in ‘my’, and see instead a crooked arm, awkwardly held, as if injured or broken, something inconveniently burdensome, the discomfort of which inevitably resurfaces again and again.

I look away, feeling self-conscious for him, for myself, overtly aware that my grandfather is still alive. Despite the uncomfortable mix of love and cowardice I feel in analysing your hand, I can bear it better than looking at his.

My mother shifts in her chair and I look back at your lettering. I want to trace them with my own, but don’t.

The pressure of your hand is irregular, near disappearing the ‘u’ of ‘much’ and robbing the ‘s’ in ‘best’ of its upper semicircle. In an incongruous sudden flare, the T of ‘best’ is capitalised randomly so that is looks like ‘besT’ - that lone letter is scorched, strong and dark, the pen pressed deep into the flesh of the page where the others are coaxed out quietly.

Your letters are not connected, well no, there are a few points of connection - the ‘m’ and the ‘y’ in mummy and ‘o’ and the ‘r’ in ‘for’ - but they looks retroactive, as if you had written it with each letter standing alone, disconnected, and then gone back over it and added connection where there was none, as if you were scared to write the letters naturally disparate, intuitively estranged from one another.

Were you so terrified of your own inscribing instincts, scared that someone might say there is no ease to your hand, no confidence, no flow?

Did you worry that your sentences were made up of pieces, where others wrote things whole?

I worry again about my own hand, its tendency to lean to the right and then sometimes, randomly, to the left. As a teenager, I had read on the internet that handwriting which alternates direction ultimately denotes madness and instability in the writer.

I have sometimes found typing helps to smooth the edges of that fear. But only sometimes.

You say, ‘much admired’ and ‘best beloved’, and ‘admired’ strikes me as a strange choice of word for a mother to gift to a daughter. Admire, from the Latin mīror, ‘to wonder’, ‘look upon’, ‘contemplate’. Despite its officially established roots, I cannot entirely separate the word’s meaning from its second syllable’s homonym - mire, as in ‘bog’ or ‘marshland’, and in a figurative sense, to be involved in ‘an intractable situation which is difficult to extricate oneself from’.

I feel my mother’s eyes shift towards me, but I do not look up.

Even though my attempts to know you are based upon a discredited system of analysis, I cannot help but be seduced by it. It feels divinatory, like scrying or augury. I look for signs, clues, little overlooked intricacies which feel as if, if I puzzle them right, might fix the past in a different light.

Despite its failures, I cannot help but resume the attempt.

This extrapolation of meaning from fragments, from notes, is my only way to know you. I spin a biography of familial relations through the loom of graphology, darning over the holes with writing, conjecture.

The word text has its roots in the Latin textus, literally meaning “a thing woven”, from the Proto-Indo European teks - “to weave, braid, fit together, to fabricate”.

I think of Cixous, how she writes of the suppressed female voice which now speaks in a borrowed language, how she champions those very disruptions in the text which have disfigured my family’s tapestry - the gaps and silences, the incomprehensible and inconsistent.

She tells me, her voice soft on the page, to write in white ink, to write with that pre-linguistic and unconscious potentiality which originates from the mother in the mother-child relation, before the child acquires male-centred verbal language.

But what if I cannot?

What if the mother-child relation is disrupted - mired - back when mother was daughter and daughter was yet unmade?

What if potentiality is not enough?

What if -
     but then you use a nickname, a pet name for my mother which I have never heard her say, admit, or use, and it makes me want to pull my insides out through my chest and howl and cry because the tenderness that is there is so clear and so delicate and to know that within three short years it would be replaced by what now exists between you both is the saddest story that I do not know.

You sign the inscription-come-dedication ‘from Mummy B x’, as if she had another mother that she might mix you up with.