It's Still Life

Stick of Butter

when I was ten, maybe nine, but certainly no younger because we were living in the house where we lived the longest, and my bedroom window emptied its view straight into the yew tree and the park beyond, so I must’ve been ten … or nine … anyway,

I spent the night at a school friend’s house, they were Swedish and their surname translated as Stick of Butter, and my dad knew her dad (they were both postmen at the same station), and my friend’s little sister had died a month earlier from leukaemia, and every once in a while I’d hear her mother weeping in the kitchen, and her father would clear his throat, and that night I overheard them talking in the hallway when they thought we two were sound asleep … I couldn’t sleep because I was too excited to be sleeping in a big canopy bed with pink ruffles just like Cinderella probably wished she’d had —

and her father said, “Bob thinks his daughter can help our girl with grief, and that maybe she can do what we can’t.”

I looked up at the pink canopy overhead and rolled over. My friend’s eyes were wide open, hearing everything being said in the hallway, and I asked her, “What do you want me to help you with?”

“I want to go to sleep with my sister,” she said.

And so we held hands, and stayed awake all night.