It’s ten to two in the morning, and Pauline has rewritten the message to her sister four times.
The phone call had started well enough. They were sorting out Christmas, as they do every year, and somewhere between who would collect Mum and who always ends up doing the turkey, Linda said, “Well, you’ve never exactly put yourself out, have you?” Pauline ended the call before she said something she would regret, and she has been saying it in her head ever since.
The message on her screen is now quite long. It lists the hospital visits, the Sunday lunches and the fact that she called off her own holiday that year. Every line is true, and every line has been sharpened so that Linda will feel it.
The Old Question
Lying there, she can hear a quieter voice underneath. Why does she always get to me like that? What’s wrong with me that I can’t let it go? She knows that voice perfectly well. That voice has kept her awake on a number of other occasions, going over things she said thirty years ago.
So she tries something different. She asks herself how this would look if she didn’t need to win it, and didn’t need Linda to admit anything or to see how much she has done.
What is left, she realises, is that she is hurt, and that Linda has been driving forty miles every Tuesday since Mum’s fall and is probably exhausted. The hurt is still there when she sees it more clearly. What has gone is the need to make Linda feel it too.
In the morning she deletes the long message and writes a short one: ‘I didn’t like the way that call ended. Can we try again tonight? I know you’ve had a lot on with Mum.’
Linda’s reply comes in before the kettle has actually started to boil. “Sorry, I’m absolutely shattered. Yes, please.”
The story is fiction. The point of it isn’t.
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