Ninety-one days before he is born, Row floats in a dark that turns red in the sun. He knows the world only through his mother: her heartbeat, which he takes for a pulsar at the centre of the sky; the taste of the oranges she eats; her voice, which reaches him through her bones; and, at night, the loose pieces of her dreams, in which a man smelling of pine resin is always just about to say something.

Then a careful stranger knocks at the door with a paper, and the pulsar stops. Things go into boxes. There is a train, a sea crossing, a wet new country with a metal roof and an older woman who snores through two walls. Every night his mother cries without a sound, three short and one long, and the only one who feels it is the child who will not remember.

One night she does not cry. She walks out alone to the hollow wood above the water, and her heart goes calm in a way that frightens him, and he does the only thing he can.

The version of a family’s hardest months that is told to the children afterwards is almost always gentler than what happened. I wanted to write from inside the one witness who was there for all of it and will remember none of it: the only person who knows exactly how his mother grieved, and the only one who can never tell.

The hardest part was the night on the hollow wood. The child cannot understand what his mother is about to do, and I did not want to say it either, so the danger is told only through the pulsar, which goes calm in a way that frightens him.

Still open

What I keep working on is the landing. The story could end at birth; instead it goes on into a future Row will not remember, to an evening when his mother runs the tap so that he won’t hear. I am still testing how far objects and callbacks can carry the feeling when the narrator cannot name them, and which echo the ending should keep for itself, so that its last image is also the one that hits hardest.

The story is told in dated fragments that count down toward a birth. A child with no words cannot name what he feels, so every place the journey passes through arrives as a sound, a motion or a taste.