The hospital bracelet

Text 1: Under the Tray, by Priya Ashworth

An original novel extract.

The sewing box had belonged to Mum’s mother, and it smelt of her still: lavender and machine oil and something sweetish, like old sweets in a coat pocket. Isla had only opened it to find a safety pin. Her skirt had split at the side and the bus came in nine minutes.

The top tray was what it always was. Cotton reels in rows, a pincushion shaped like a tomato, a tape measure coiled like a sleeping snake. She lifted the tray out without thinking, the way you lift a lid to check a pan, and underneath, where she had expected more buttons, there was an envelope.

It was not sealed. Inside it was a tiny plastic bracelet, the kind they put on babies in hospital, yellowed now and soft as skin. The writing on the card had faded to the colour of weak tea, but she could read it. Baby Hollis. Girl. 6 lb 2 oz. And a date.

Isla read the date three times. It was nine years before she was born.

Downstairs, the radio was playing something with violins and her mother was singing along under her breath, getting the words wrong as she always did, cheerful and off key. A cupboard door banged. The kettle began its long climb towards boiling.

Isla sat on the edge of the bed with the bracelet in her palm. It was so small. It would barely have gone round two of her fingers. She thought of all the photographs on the landing, the ones she had walked past every day of her life: Mum at the seaside, Mum at her graduation, Mum and Dad on their wedding day, laughing in the rain. She tried to remember a gap in them. She could not. That was the thing. There was no gap anywhere. Someone had made sure of that.

“Isla!” Her mother’s voice came up the stairs, bright and ordinary. “You’ll miss the bus, love!”

She looked at the bracelet. She looked at the door.

Then, very carefully, she put it back in the envelope, and the envelope back under the tray, and the tray back on top, and she closed the lid on all of it, and went downstairs with her skirt still split.

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