than themselves.
Suddenly a fragment of memory burst into her mind. She heard herself speaking in an urgent, desperate whisper, so frightened her parents would overhear what she was saying and equally terrified he wouldn’t hear her. ‘No, no, don’t, please don’t!’ she pleaded. ‘Please don’t, please don’t, please don’t!’ They were in the bedroom. Next to the stairs! Her mother and father came up the stairs. He was here again, charming, neat, handsome, personable, his shoes squeaking on the linoleum. ‘Please, oh please don’t!’ That was all she had said. And she had meant it, really meant it. Perhaps he thought she hadn’t meant it – or didn’t care. And while it was happening to her, what filled her mind’s eye was the brown wallpaper: she focused on the intertwining lines of the raised shapes, she saw the exact tone of the slick, dark brown paint on the paper and the delicate six-petalled daisy trapped in the arms of one square of Anaglypta.
‘Grace Amelia!’ her mother squalled from downstairs, interrupting Grace’s thoughts. ‘You’ve been up there too long; you’d better be doing something productive. I’m going to the Mothers’ Union Thursday Club for the afternoon. And I’m expecting you to have finished knitting those dishcloths before I get back.’
‘Yes, Mother.’
Grace heard the front door click and her mother walk out. The house was empty. She took the jar of cold cream and talcum powder from her dressing-table and put them on to the floorboards, then dragged the dressing-table into the middle of the room so it was hard against the bed. There was a dead bee under the dressing-table, so she picked up its weightless, papery body and dropped it out of the top of the sash window. A memory came to her as if on a wave and she felt herself overcome with its reality. And shock. She would not, would not think of it.
If she pushed the dressing-table to the left … she’d have to take the glass cover off first otherwise it would be slippy … Would the piece of furniture take her weight? The pile of books needed to be high enough and level – one more big book should do it. She remembered her copy of The Mabinogion and took it out of the drawer in her bedside cabinet where it was always kept. The Mabinogion, the very first Welsh book, began with a story in Narberth. When she took that step off the dressing-table, right under her feet would be the book she loved most. She dusted the wine-red cover then opened it at the first page and read, And he saw a tall tree by the side of the river, one half of which was on fire, from the root to the top, and the other half was green and in full leaf. Grace felt like the tree in The Mabinogion, the one that had stood by Narberth Castle nine hundred years ago, the tree that was half on fire and half in green leaf. That was how she felt, both burned and oddly budding.
Then again, in her mind’s eye, she saw the wallpaper. She blinked tightly, desperate to crush the memory away. She tried extremely hard never to think of those moments but it happened without her wanting to. And it was impossible for her to think clearly about anything to do with it, except that she must be the only person in Narberth, in Pembrokeshire, perhaps in the whole world, to have this happen to her. Her face was pushed against the paper on the wall; she saw the intricate daisy held safe and sound in the square. It was a square with rounded corners. A perfect memory of one patterned square. She knew it had happened because she remembered the bedroom wallpaper. It was true but it wasn’t convincing. It wouldn’t stand up in Narberth courthouse:
‘What do you remember of the event in question?’
‘I know it happened because I remember the wallpaper.’
‘What else do you remember?’
‘Only the wallpaper.’ No one would be sent to Swansea Prison because of the memory of wallpaper.
The six books were chosen now. She placed them in two piles in the middle of her dressing-table. From its drawer she took a silk scarf. The midnight-blue fabric was beautifully, imperceptibly woven; it seemed almost impossible that thread could be so fine and that a craftsman – or probably a machine – could weave it so delicately. She had been given this neck scarf by her nana for