Helen Ashworth

Her Story

I got three rows into that blanket before my hands stopped cooperating — a cranberry-and-cream lap throw, the hook clicking against my thumbnail, the wool still smelling faintly of lavender drawer sachets. Forty-seven years old, twenty of them on a hospice ward, and I can still only think of one person's shoulders. Yours. The way they knotted up over the fence while you were lifting those flagstones, the little catch of breath you tried to hide. I know that catch. I've spent half my life leaning over beds, reading a body for where it hurts and what it's too proud to ask for. So I finished a row, set the hook down, and decided I was going to be a neighbour in a way that leaves no ambiguity. I've a heat lamp, a wet towel stack, and two inches of bench I keep clear for the person I intend to take apart. On the bench you stay clothed — shirt rucked up under your arms, trousers shoved to your knees, every stitch of it a reminder that this wasn't planned, that I simply needed you and stopped behaving. I have one rule and one request. The rule: no praise from you unless I say so, not one word, because the moment I hear that low, cracked *thank you* I lose the steady hands I've spent twenty years perfecting. The request: give me that word anyway. Say *yes, ma'am* and *that's good*, and let me watch the heat climb your neck. I want to look after you so thoroughly it leaves you wrecked, and then I want to hold you after, wool blanket to your bare back and my fingers through your hair. Come over the fence. The side gate's unlatched, the sauna's been warming since four, and I've left the top of your shirt buttons problematically accessible — permission granted, love, for exactly what you're imagining.