Read the Booker Prize 2023 longlist: an extract from All the Little Bird-Hearts by Viktoria Lloyd-Barlow

The morning after our first meeting and shortly after Dolly left for school, Vita appeared at my door again. This time she was dressed in pyjamas. She did not reintroduce herself or apologise for the early visit. She moved easily, elegantly, through my hallway and into the kitchen, as if these visits were a routine between us. Her conversation was without preamble or introduction; she talked as if we were already in the middle of an ongoing discussion. It had been a long time since I had desired, or even allowed myself to believe in, the possibility of closeness with anyone. But I wanted it then, could feel the want beating like an excited little creature within me, rapid and rhythmic as a too-small heart.

‘Do you have milk? We have absolutely nothing in our fridge except wine. I am a terrible housewife. Rols always says he would starve in town without all the friends and restaurants.’ When she said ‘friends and restaurants’, she placed a hand on the outer side of each eye in a shielding motion and looked downwards, shaking her head slowly. It was as though she was emoting shame for a distant audience. Vita was extravagant and theatrical in all her expressions, and I appreciated that then. Her smile remained brilliant as she looked up at me winningly, hands still half-covering her large eyes. ‘What will he do up here?’

‘There is a café in town. And a Chinese. There’s a Chinese that does takeaways. You’ll like that,’ I said, intending to soothe her as I would have done with Dolly. 

I repeated her phrasing silently to myself: no-thing in our fridge; ter-rible housewife; s-tarve without friends. It was unclear, as yet, how this seemingly random stressing on such words related to the content of her conversation. I naturally speak in a monotone, and Dolly sometimes imitated this, using an exaggeratedly robotic voice, which made us both laugh. ‘Good. Mor.Ning. Moth.Er,’ she would say in response to my flat greetings, her arms and legs moving stiffly as though she were fashioned of metal.

I handed my visitor a cold bottle of milk and she placed both hands around it, in that grateful and covetous way people sometimes have when given warm tea. She was not going home. She had the requested item, but she was still there, still talking. I sat down opposite her at the small Formica table that is one of the many relics from my parents’ marriage. I do not drink tea or coffee; Dolly had made those things for herself since she was very young. Vita would have to wait until she got back to her own house if that was what she wanted. She was wearing an Alice band and a pair of blue-striped pyjamas that had the navy initials ‘RJB’ monogrammed neatly over one breast. The fabric was of the thin summer sort that makes little effort to conceal what it apparently covers. I could see her chest rising and falling through the light fabric as she spoke, could see her small breasts shift, unfettered and soft.

I had never had a visitor in nightwear before, and was unsure whether her outfit would be on Edith’s list of Things That Must Not Be Mentioned, so I carefully did not. But when Vita casually compared her own dishevelled appearance to my plain and practical work uniform, it was me who blushed, as though my carefully observed omission was something more like a lie or a secret I was keeping. Vita had a scar that covered most of her hand, a silvery-pink covering like fish scales, which caught the light as her fingers moved across the bottle.

I remembered, as I often do, the fish that used to cover this kitchen when my parents were alive. The fish that were laid across every counter, opened up like trusting patients. During the tourist season, my father had taken holidaymakers out on his boat early each morning, and he brought the catches back to my mother to be prepared for the wives or landladies of these men to cook. Ma liked to watch for my father’s boat from her bedroom window, an early return reassuring her that the tourists were already satisfied.

Our little house had smelled permanently of the lake and the shining fish that shivered in my parents’ hands each day. Ma, self-taught, filleted and skinned as expertly as the local women knitted and sewed; her fingers came to know knives as theirs knew needles. Bones as delicate and white as baby teeth regularly littered our kitchen, as though it were the scene of a recent tragedy.