about the change, but sometimes I think we’re angry for a reason. I was full of rage, full of it. I couldn’t separate what was my body and what was my mind. Because reasons, real reasons, kept coming and coming at me in the darkness, the man I’d married and loved snoring next to me. I was stuck in this thankless no-woman’s-land between kids and parents. I had put and put and put into this land: blood and tears and scars and milk and flesh and love and the unacknowledged woman-hours that didn’t count, never counted, like man-hours did, and love, and love again – measureless, infinite quantities of it. I had volunteered my body to give us our two children. I had given the very bones and skin of myself in service as gladly as you’d give a cardigan to a friend when the evening turns chilly – here, have this – only for them to take it home and wash it on the wrong setting, return it misshapen, no longer fitting. Ruined. I had donated my body and my life to love. My body and my life had repaid me with nothing, frankly. After all the bleeding and the baring and beating of my mother’s heart on the sidelines of the football pitch and the ballet classes and the nativity plays and the broccoli on the fork, come on, eat it, love, it’s good for you, it’s a tree, pretend it’s a tree and you’re the giant come to eat a whole tree… For what? For what? Ashes. Ashes from a tree left black and standing after a forest fire, a tree that’s dead but doesn’t know it yet.
And now, when my body had tried to reclaim some interest on all that love, there was none. Mark did not see his body as something of service, certainly not to me. He had never had to give it whether he wanted to or not. There were no wars on; he’d never had to volunteer to fight. Maybe women don’t make wars because we’ve already got a war going on every single day of our lives: our own bodies, fighting against us. The world telling us that we’re beautiful as we are while it sells us diets and clothes that would only ever look good on a twig, telling us that it’s fair, that it’s equal, when it isn’t, like one big gaslighting god.
Whatever, thoughts like that rolled in as I tried to get the boiling water inside me under control, mop up rivers of sweat with the tissues from the box beside the bed, fetch a towel from the bathroom to lie on. There were more thoughts but I’ve forgotten them; more rage but it burned itself out eventually. The bottom line was that Mark and I hadn’t done anything in getting on for a year. He didn’t see me that way anymore. He didn’t see me at all.
We ground through Sunday. I didn’t check the news sites that day. I was a zombie, living in a zombie state. Roast chicken dinner I spent two hours preparing eaten in near silence. Pass the gravy. I walked out with Archie but headed up Halton Brow, so I didn’t see the flickering black and yellow tape on the corner of Boston Avenue, the police van, the officer with his clipboard asking passers-by if they’d seen anything. It was only when I was trawling through the online local news at five thirty on the Monday morning that I saw the article.
Girl critical after random knife attack.
I sipped my tea and read on, a pain building in my gut.
A young woman was found bleeding and unconscious at the corner of Boston Avenue and Festival Way late on Saturday night.
Boston Avenue. The pain tightened. My throat closed. I put my mug down on the table.
Customers of the Red Admiral pub were on their way home from an evening out when they saw the girl lying on the pavement.
‘We thought someone had been fly-tipping,’ said Mr Simon Kitchener, a resident of Festival Way. ‘But when we saw it was a girl, we called 999 straight away.’
The woman was taken by ambulance to Halton General Hospital, where she was given an emergency splenectomy and a blood transfusion. She had sustained two knife wounds to the ribs and a contusion to the back of the head. A spokesperson for the hospital described her condition this morning as critical. The woman was carrying no identification on her person