Everything and Nothing by Araminta Hall Read Free Book Online

those front doors, encased in walls which felt so familiar and comforting to them, if they were lucky, but would be alien and frightening to her. It reminded her of going on holiday and how you walk into the apartment or cottage or room and feel so out of place you almost want to go home, but within days those new four walls suddenly feel cosy, like you’ve always lived there. Which in turn made her think about that old cliché, There’s no place like home, which she pictured as an appliqué scene in a wooden frame, sitting in her granny’s kitchen.
    ‘Thirty-four sixty,’ the driver was saying as they pulled up outside her front door. She shoved two twenties at him and only remembered her phone still lying on the back seat after she’d let herself in. She was too tired to feel upset.
    Ruth went into the dark sitting room and saw Christian’s plate and four empty bottles of beer by the sofa. It roused a fresh spasm of defeat in her. She picked them up and carried them into the kitchen, wondering who he thought was going to do it. Her husband had a habit of leaving cupboard doors flailing, drawers open at hip-hitting height, wet towels languishing on beds, dirty pants multiplying on the floor. What did your last slave die of ? she’d shout, sounding like the sort of woman she had never wanted to be.
    As Ruth stood up from putting Christian’s plate in the dishwasher she caught sight of the tiny fence circling what must be the new vegetable patch. She felt a complete desire to see it rush at her heart, making her open the back door and step into her garden made yellow by the light pollution of night in the city. The patch was a perfect rectangle and she could see the grooves of the beds under a fine meshing. At the end of each bed was a white plastic stick with writing on it. She squatted in the grass and worked her hand inside the mesh to pull out one of the sticks. Betty’s inexpert hand had written carrots and just below it Hal had scribbled something orange.
    Her heart contracted so that she wondered if she might be about to die from all the alcohol and cigarettes she had uncharacteristically consumed. But really the problem lay with the image in her head; both her children as they had been as newborn babies, sucking at her breast. She would look down on them as they fed and marvel at the seriousness, the urgency, which accompanied their tugging. It used to feel like her breasts were attached to her heart by a series of thick ropes and that until that moment the ropes had lain slack and dormant. With each suck the ropes grew more taut, so that in the end her heart felt as though it had been pulled free, released like a sail on a ship. Both Betty and Hal had woken all night, every night, and when she had picked them out of their cribs, only half awake and smelling that indefinable scent only possessed by newborns, they had sighed with such contentment that she had sworn to never, ever let anything bad happen to either of them.
    Then the wonder of it all. Watching a blank face smile for the first time must be more wonderful than the Hanging Gardens of Babylon or the pyramids; because don’t all wonders occur only within your own world, really there’s nothing else. Hearing a gurgle turn to a sound, feeling strength in limbs that only a day before had seemed so weak. You wait and wait as a mother at the start, wait for these minuscule miracles which make you writhe with excitement. But then those tiny bodies catch up with their whirling minds and all the things you’ve been searching for suddenly tumble out of them, so that you even miss some things. And then it stops being so precious and you forget, only for something like this to smack you right back to the impact of the beginning.
    How had Ruth gone from falling so absolutely in love that she realised exactly where her heart was in her body, to missing the creation of something so fundamentally marvellous as this garden? Surely it was too mean of life to make