A Habit of Dying Read Free

mother or father that the child knows. Lydia allowed herself a few moments on each page, seeing the words rather than reading them, sensing the thoughts of the author rather than struggling to find perfect meaning where none would be found.
    Still she deferred the album that she had quickly flicked through, the album with names and places and photographs to match, the album she supposed to be the key to the ultimate satisfaction that awaited her. Preferring to savour that prospect, she chose instead a slimmer one, one she thought might be a little more modern, a little nearer her own time. Her guess proved correct. This third selection was indeed closer to her own childhood, a family album of smiling faces, of holidays and ice creams, of round faced children in plimsolls and airtex tops. There were a handful of colour pictures scattered on the last few pages, but mainly they were of a muddy black and white that spoke of cheap processing and Box Brownie imaging under an inexpert hand. A few had captions that gave a name or a year. Lydia let herself drift into the scenes, taste the ice cream that cost three pence when a threepenny bit was a single twelve-sided coin. She looked at the man posing proudly beside the shiny car, all chrome bumpers and white-walled tyres and wondered if his wife took the same pride in it. Their first car? Certainly the finest car that they had ever owned, something to mark them out from their friends and neighbours. And where togo in their new found affluence? Why, to Hastings and to Margate to make sand-castles across the promenade from the Beach Hotel, sea-view rooms a little extra. Lydia spent maybe half an hour slowly absorbing the scenes and the family, touching their lives, sharing their moments, becoming familiar with Fred and Archie, with Susan and Paul and the enigmatic ‘self’. At length she put them all aside, knowing that they would be revisited and examined as clinically as she was able.
    Choosing the second of the two ledgers next, at first glance it also appeared unused, but in fact it was neither empty nor a ledger. Whatever its original purpose, the pages had once been separated by very thin sheets of something which to Lydia seemed akin to the grease-proof paper that her mother might have used for cooking. These sheets were all that remained, since the pages that they separated had all been removed. So it was a book not only void of writing but also of pages and she was about to discard it when a final flick through took her to the last few sheets. It was not void of writing at all. In fact it had a lot writing in different styles and inks, covering perhaps twenty of the translucent pages. It was not what she expected or thought might be valuable in her original purpose, but true to her curiosity she began to read the last and most legible entry.
    It has taken forever to get these first words out of my head onto this page in this old copy book. I have struggled so long and now they are written but none of the words are about what I need to write about. They are written now like this because a woman who I see once a week, an old woman, a volunteer at our local centre, has listened to me breaking into pieces over the last few weeks and the idea of writing out my demons has come up again today.
    Lydia stopped, suddenly shocked and embarrassed that she found herself reading these private words. This was not for her eyes, this was nothing to do with her. It immediately and vividly reminded her of finding letters from her grandfather to her grandmother amongst her mother’s things. They had been written from Tokyo bay in the days after the end of the war in the Pacific. Eventually,she had screwed up the courage to read them and found them so personal, full of love and yearning to be home, full of disgust for the scenes of war still fresh in his mind. Even though it was several years after her mother’s death and more since her grandparents’, she still saw herself as a thief, a