The Making of a Positive by Rosemary O' Dowd

I have shortened my life in a thousand delicious ways, she says. A misremembered line from a poem; she is giving it to me.

Strings of warmly lit bulbs taken from our Christmas tree, tealights laid out, flickering amber. Such love. Her anxious eyes watching mine, to see if I was pleased. I’d fallen in love; now (newly) engaged. I still feel lucky. A single, stray note underscored me, a jangly edge beneath my laughter. It was only when it came to sharing the news – good news, happy news – though not for everyone, that I started to perceive the cold spot held in my belly, tension changing shape.

Things started to knuckle at me. I’d take a fresh coffee to my desk, hear the printer click and paper fold, notice movements in the hallways, colleagues coming in from lunch – and for no reason I could trace, I would be elsewhere entirely. Four, or five, with my mother. My whole world wrapped up in her. Our world. Big Sainsbury’s. Maxim’s school. Church. Mamie’s boot sales. Her decisions big enough for us both. Too early, yet. Another year. Or Let’s cut your hair, it’ll come thicker. Holding my short wisps mournfully against hers, falling over me when she came to kiss me goodnight. I longed for my pitted chest that looked like Mowgli’s in The Jungle Book to take the shape of pretty fruit, as hers did, above where my head came in when I pulled myself to her. After being naughty. After pinching my brother. After looking too long in a direction she told me not to look. Clinging fast to her, crying I’m sorry, I’m sorry.

As the days shortened, darkened, it was as if I’d come loose from the world I’ve assembled, secured around myself. Thirty-three, my hair a thick rush of dark waves, like hers was then. As if I’d walked away from the people I live with, work with, love, and in some sort of dreamlike twisting, been copied, cut and pasted, dropped back in the street we used to live. Like the little figure in Google Street View, the dizzying way the shoulders can be dragged, transported; the images lagging, taking time to catch up. I felt a kind of motion sickness.

When people asked me how I was, I told them I was happy. It didn’t feel like a lie.

I giggled at the wedding. Accepted glasses that fizzed and the compliments of strangers. I felt the absence of my mother like a dull pain. The knowledge that if I’d married the way she’d wanted, she would be there, showering my hair in confetti, arranging family photographs. There was no family to photograph. Aisling’s family took theirs on the sly, passing phones to extended relatives, they huddled in and beamed. My wife radiated a warm, jubilant energy – the kind I love her for. A twinge of guilt forked inside me. I was making myself double. A photograph and its negative.

Rosemary O’ Dowd writes short fiction. She is from Co. Kerry in Ireland, and lives and works in London.

Photo courtesy of Cress Kinnear