A chance encounter at a Christmas party churns up buried memories in this exclusive tale by the prize-winning novelist
. She is professor of creative writing at Bath Spa University. In 2016 she won both the Hawthornden prize and a Windham-Campbell prize, whose judges praised her “superbly controlled, psychologically acute and subtly powerful” prose. Born in Bristol in 1956, she was 46 when she published her first novel,, which she wrote while bringing up her three sons and studying for a PhD.
We had nicknames for each other which came out of these novels: I was Katarina the Virgin Widow, Rosalind was Juana the Mad. Derek was Old Burst Belly, or the Old Enemy. Rosalind had joined our school in the third year, and then halfway though the fourth year, when we were 15, she was gone, from one day to the next, with no explanation to me or anyone, not even a note or a telephone call. The teachers didn’t know where she was either, because they asked me. That suffering changed me, although I didn’t know it at the time: it hardened me. No one could comfort me, not even my mother; it gave me a new autonomy.
I was so crushed, when Rosalind refused to recognise me at the party, that I felt the guilty pricking of milk in my breasts – though I’d fed the baby before I came out, and she was a good sleeper. The party was ruined and I only wanted to go home, cuddle up with a blanket on the sofa.
We stood confronted under a streetlight, Rosalind laughing and hugging her bare arms, stamping her feet because it was freezing; wet snow fell limply in the blue light, onto her hair. She was blithe, and said she’d changed her name so often –that sometimes she forgot she’d ever been Rosalind. She hadn’t recognised me, she said, in those first moments. I knew she had though, and couldn’t stop myself sounding accusatory, plaintive.
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