Post by Delia Kilbride

The first page: the bad step at the front door

Monday, 24 August

Eighteen days out

Eighteen days until Getting Better. Here is how it starts, and why it starts there. I could have opened on the diagnosis, or on the phone call, or on the drive back from St. Ann's. I opened on a step. Three quarters of an inch, proud of the threshold, eleven years unfixed. The transport men find it with the front castors of the cot and Bernie's mother's head goes forward and comes back. That is the whole book in one sentence, if you want it: the small thing you meant to fix, and the weight that finds it. Everything in the first chapter is an object. The couch in the garage. The rectangle in the carpet where it stood. The concentrator sighing every four seconds. A number on a sticker, written by a tech in a Cavaliers lanyard. I did not want a single feeling in that chapter that did not first arrive as a thing you could pick up or measure. Bernie is a dental hygienist. She has kept perfect charts for twenty-one years. She notices in numbers. So the book does too. Read the opening below. It is November on Lister Street and the front room is ready. From Getting Better, chapter one: The bad step at the front door stands three quarters of an inch proud of the threshold, and I had been meaning to fix it for eleven years. The two men from the transport service found it with the front castors. The cot stopped dead and my mother's head went forward and came back, and the strap across her chest took the rest of it. "Sorry," the young one said. "Sorry, ma'am." "It's the step. It's not you." They lifted the front end and walked it through, and the frame scraped the doorjamb where the paint was already gone from the hospital bed coming in on Thursday. Cold came in behind them off Lister Street with the smell of somebody's leaf fire in it, November, the middle of the afternoon. My mother weighed eighty-eight pounds.