ISSN 1758-6488
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You Would Leave All This Fiction |
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‘Do you know your father used to say bath like it had an r stuck in the middle of it? I wouldn’t want you to end up talking like that,’ she says, and then she picks up the parcel and hands it to me. ‘In case you forget,’ she says, and then she plants a kiss on my cheek and she’s gone. I listen for the sound of the lift taking her down.
I open the parcel, there, in the hallway – a mournful rip of paper. It’s a framed map of another, older, Ancoats – the road names are written in copperplate, the fields are tinted a pale watercolour green. I pick out the building I am leaving tomorrow. It is shaped like a piece from a puzzle, hand-painted a muddy brown. It is a rebuke – I know, she knows. But I will take it with me. I will hang it in the hallway of our new flat in our new city, and greet it each time I return.
