This month’s advance extract from The Cure For Sleep (W&N: 20 Jan 2022) concerns promises: those moments in life when we pledge ourselves or strike a bargain. After reading, do share a short true tale of your own on this theme in the comments section (no more than 300 words).
I hope my journey to publication can encourage new and emerging writers to risk putting their own words out in the world: it is so exciting to see stories coming in from so many of you already.
You can read the wonderful tales that subscribers have already contributed on The Cure For Sleep book site: march issue | april issue | may issue | june issue
july’s extract
‘WHEN ARE WE GOING TO HAVE CHILDREN?’
Nye’s question breaking the quiet of our New Year’s Day alone at home into sounds wild and discordant. A pigeon sobbed on our chimney top; outside, a child took a stick to the railings.
He’d put his book aside to look at me. Expectant.
I watched the light curdle and the small space between he and me separate, split. We were side by side in our ancient horsehair armchairs that disgusted everyone but us when I bought them in my old hometown just hours before we married at twenty-five. Like yesterday, I thought, while realising, all of a sudden, that for Nye it may seem otherwise. A very long time ago, and too too much with just me for company.
Very slowly, reluctant suitor, I got down on one knee and reached for his hand while my dry throat tried to make tongue work.
Is this how our marriage ends? I did not say.
‘When are we going to talk about it, Tan?’ Tears in his eyes, a catch in his voice. ‘I’ve always wanted this, since I was a boy myself. To be a father.’
You are that for me, who never had one. This, too, I did not say.
‘I’ve never wanted to have a small person in my power.’ I said instead. ‘What if I they felt trapped, like I did? I’ve got no model for family life, no feeling for it. It’s only something I wanted to escape. And what if we have a child and each stage of its life triggers memories of what I’m trying to forget in mine?’
‘But I’ve loved you ten years now. When will enough time have passed for you to be over all that?’
Never, I thought.
But instead of that terminal answer, I asked for just a little longer, please: If Nye and I could both cast off our inertia, our shyness — if we booked holidays and went abroad like normal people instead of spending our annual leaves parked by our childhood beaches reading books with our feet on the dashboard — if we began to use our money instead of only saving it for accidents and emergencies (his carefulness a legacy of growing up in that mining valley during the strikes; my caution got from the short rations of Mother and me alone) — if we lived more in our bodies and less in imagination — then we could try for one.
This time next year. Yes?
Like the Miller’s daughter who promises her firstborn child to a stranger if he will spin straw into gold, I did not think we would change very much, or that Nye would hold me to that moment.
Before we kissed on it in the white light that revealed his age and mine, I should have remembered the shadow side of bargains: their strange insistence on terms. Even when those who make them have no belief in fate or design themselves.
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It's strange that you should write about the bargains we make. Ten years ago, newly diagnosed with metastases, I remember saying "10 years. 10 years would be amazing". And here we are, as if some greater force had heard me and kept me to that bargain.
Now I'm bargaining again. Two-thirds of a life? Yes, I'll take that. A week of pain and fatigue for 2 weeks of relative normality. That seems fair.
Half a life? Yes, I'd take that. A third, a quarter...
How small would I go? What sliver of life would I hold on to? A finger-nail, like the smallest imaginable crescent moon? Would that be enough? A pinprick of life?
We'll see.
Hi Tanya, thank you for sharing and giving us the space to risk it in!!!
As I lay here looking out at the swaying bamboo outside my window I am trying to remember promisers made and bargains struck. It is like looking through muslin in the sun. I am waiting for the memories to take shape the colours to deepen, the stories to come. Bargains, stones and jewellery come to mind. A long time ago whilst paddling in the lower lake in Glendalough I saw a shiny object winking in the sun lit water. I picked it up and beheld a small brooch. A hand made pin clasp faced up and when I turned it around the most delicate inlay of flowers made from Mother of Pearl lay in the palm of my hand. An object of real beauty and days gone by. I later learned it was from the Victorian era and I have always felt a connection with some lady who paddled with her full skirts hiked high who bent to pick a stone and dropped her brooch for me to find. It has been one of my most precious possessions more valuable to me than any eye popping jewels. Many moons later when my dear friend Isabel was moving to live in Trieste I felt the significance of the distance that was going to come between us and how life can fade the consistency of friendship. As I had a fear of flying I knew it would be a very long time until we would sit drink coffee, share our thoughts, ideas, creativity and hugs so I made a bargain with Isabel when I loaned her my brooch! To be brought back in her own time. A few years later Isabel, my brooch and our bond were reunited. This beautiful simple little object has been our bargaining touchstone.