Chapter 4: Two Bruises
Three bruises, if you want the exact figure.
Two on the right knee, one on the left.
The right pair overlapped.
A new one, plum-coloured, sitting across the yellow-green edge of one three weeks old.
That is all there is to say about them, and I am going to say no more, because they were not interesting and it is a mistake to make them interesting.
I put the stockings in the wash basket.
I ran cold water on a flannel and held it on for four minutes and then I got on with my life.
The bathroom in that house had a black and white tiled floor and a cast iron bath with claw feet, and the mirror over the basin was original, which meant it was slightly wrong.
Everything reflected in it leaned about two degrees to the left.
I used to stand square in front of it just to watch myself be crooked.
I was thirty-four.
I am going to give you the numbers now, once, and then I will not go on about it.
One metre seventy-four.
Eighty-one kilograms when it mattered, and about seventy-seven by then, which is a different seventy-seven than most people's.
Provincial squad at twelve.
National squad at seventeen.
Finished at twenty-two.
Right shoulder: a torn glenoid labrum, repaired badly the first time and adequately the second.
Two portal scars under the deltoid the size of grains of rice.
Silver at the nationals in my last full year.
Eighty-one kilos.
I lost the final on a decision after five minutes and a golden score period, to a woman from the north whose grip I could not break, and I have never once dreamed about her and I dream about the referee constantly.
None of this was in the house.
I want to be clear about that, because people always assume there must have been a shelf somewhere with a medal on it.
There was not.
There were four photographs on the landing, all of them Ashfords, and one wedding picture in the drawing room in which I am wearing a high-necked dress and looking, I now think, extremely capable.
My belt was in a shoebox in the wardrobe under a spare duvet.
Not hidden, exactly.
Filed.
The thing about a torn labrum is that it does not hurt in a useful way.
It aches at three in the morning and in cold rooms and when you carry a tray on the wrong arm.
It also loses about fifteen degrees of external rotation, permanently, which does not matter unless you throw people, and I did not throw people.
I had not touched another human being with intent in twelve years.
Not in a gym, not in a doorway, not once.
That is a longer time than most marriages, and it takes more work.
Julian was asleep when I came out of the bathroom, folder still open on the duvet, pencil on the bedside table with the point towards the lamp.
I closed the folder and put it on the chair, because he hated finding it creased.
Then I sat on my side of the bed in the dark and did the thing I did every night, which was to run through the house.
Ground floor: hall, dining room, drawing room, kitchen, boot room, cellar door on a Suffolk latch that stuck.
Two staircases, front and back.
The back one comes out by the linen cupboard.
Six exterior doors, of which four were bolted at night and two were not, and I knew which two.
I did not do this because I was planning anything.
I did it because I was taught at twelve to walk into a room and know it, and there is no off switch, and thirteen years after the last time it was any use to me I was still auditing the exits of a house in which the only threat was a seating plan.
The floor of the dining room was directly below our bed.
I had worked that out in my first month.
I could lie there and know exactly which boards were under me, and the distance from the sideboard to the window, which was two metres ten.
Sleep took a while.
At some point I got up and found the paperback in the drawer of the dressing table, a thriller I had bought in a station three years earlier and never read past page forty.
I took it into the bathroom and shut the door and sat on the edge of the bath with the light on.
Inside the back cover there was a column of dates in pencil, very small, right down in the corner where the glue is.
Some of them had a word beside them.
Most did not.
I added the eleventh, and looked at the column, and understood something I had been avoiding for about eighteen months.
The gaps were getting shorter.