The Part That Was Hers

Leila showed Mum the revised statement on a Sunday morning while Toby was downstairs helping Mo carry unopened packets of napkins from one cupboard to another. The job had no clear purpose beyond keeping him occupied, but Mo had given it enough seriousness to make Toby feel useful.

The new statement was one hundred and thirty-two words. Leila knew because she had counted it several times, hoping the number would tell her whether she had found the right balance.

Mum read it at the desk.

“It sounds like you,” she said.

“It says less.”

“It says what the work is doing.”

Leila sat on the edge of the bed. She had expected relief. Instead she felt a small grief for the lines she had removed, the awkward feelings that were still true even though they no longer belonged on a public label.

“What do I do with the other version?” she asked.

“Keep it, if you want to.”

“But it wasn't wrong to write it?”

Mum turned towards her.

“No. It wasn't wrong to write it. I was talking about showing it to people.”

Leila looked at the laptop. The distinction should have been obvious. It had become tangled with being told she was selfish, though Mum had not actually used that word.

“I thought you wanted me to make us look better.”

“I wanted to recognise myself. That's not always the same thing.”

They sat quietly for a while. Outside, the extractor fan hummed steadily. It had returned to work after its cleaning and seemed determined to make up for the hours missed.

“What would you have drawn?” Leila asked.

Mum looked surprised.

“Of this?”

“Of the weeks here. If you were doing the project.”

“I don't draw.”

“You can still know what you'd look at.”

Mum rested her wrist on the desk. The strap was gone now, though some movements still made her stop and adjust.

“The clock in the car,” she said after a while. “I keep looking at it before the first visit. The numbers seem to tell me whether I'm a reliable person that day.”

Leila listened.

“The washing machines at the laundrette. The little windows. Watching everyone's things go round while mine are mixed together in one drum.”

“What else?”

“The mirror in here, when Toby stands beside you to brush his teeth and you're both pretending not to be annoyed about the space.”

Leila smiled.

“And the inside of my bag,” Mum added. “There's a folded shopping list, six receipts, two pens that don't work and a photograph of you both that I keep meaning to put somewhere safer.”

“Why haven't I seen it?”

“Because it's in my bag.”

They laughed. Leila had made the room so central that she had almost forgotten Mum continued to exist outside it: in cars, other people's houses, the laundrette, conversations Leila did not hear.

“Can I draw your bag?” she asked.

Mum considered this with mock severity.

“Only if you include the pen that does work. I don't want to be represented as entirely incompetent.”

Leila fetched the sketchbook. Mum emptied the bag on the bed, choosing what to show and setting aside papers with private information. There was a small tube of hand cream, a packet of tissues, a notebook full of work reminders written in a shorthand Leila could not read. The photograph was older than Leila expected: herself and Toby sitting on the kitchen floor at Hawthorn Road, Toby holding a saucepan lid like a shield.

“I remember that,” she said.

“He'd been told not to hit the cupboards with it.”

“So he hit me?”

“You negotiated a truce.”

Leila drew the objects, leaving the writing on the notebook indistinct. Mum watched for a few minutes, then went downstairs to find Toby. She did not stand over the drawing, making suggestions. The permission felt like trust because it had edges they had both discussed.

In the final piece, Leila placed the bag beside her own small notebook and Toby's cardboard house. Three sets of things in one room. She asked Toby which view of the house he preferred. He chose the one showing the repaired roof and insisted she include the missing trees.

“Otherwise Anushka won't know where hers came from,” he said.

Nina replied to the photograph Leila sent of the breakfast-room sketch. She was comfortable with the empty table and the materials, but asked Leila to leave out the small figure whose hair made Anushka recognisable. Leila did. The change did not weaken the drawing. It made the table, with its scraps and cups and glue, carry more of the story.

By evening, the three pieces lay side by side on the hotel bed. Mum stood at the foot. Toby leaned against the desk. Leila watched them looking.

“That's my bench,” Toby said.

“Yes.”

“You've made it a bit crooked.”

“It is a bit crooked.”

He studied it, then nodded. “All right.”

Mum pointed to the small photograph in the drawing of her bag.

“You've put the saucepan lid in.”

“It mattered to the composition.”

“Of course.”

Leila smiled. They did not approve every possible interpretation of the work. They had helped her understand which parts were hers to offer and which parts needed asking about.

She took the panels back to college the next morning, wrapped in the paper Dad had bought and protected by cardboard. They were not finished. For the first time, they looked as though they could be.