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We don’t speak. He walks ahead. Words have been hurled at our faces. They have seeped into us. I don’t think we are good with words.

I’m not Ella. Always talking, filling in the gaps with fluff and fancy, pinks and blues. Babbling across confusion until she reaches that part of you that remembers what it was to be a child. I called her moon cat, jumping bean, little cheese. She kissed my face when I was sick and my breath was rank. She went under the covers, twisted her legs about me and buried her head in my shoulder.

He stops. I nearly walk into him. He is lanky and wears the uniform of his age, black denim, tight at the ankles, a suit jacket over a white shirt, untucked. Black trilby. He looks Dickensian. I want to chisel the front off him until I find him newborn, unfathomed. I want to buy a house with a garden and a greenhouse. I want trains to pass by and passengers to see me with tea and new cut grass. And a hat. And lace. There should be lace in it somewhere.

All this afternoon I sat and watched the sun sharpen the edges of buildings, intensify them against dense blue sky. I watched people in cotton trousers and straw bags behave like they were walking down to the sea. Pavements were sand and traffic roared like waves. Blood pulsed in my ears. Teenage girls gaggled and bounced, peeled wrappers off fluorescent sweets and stared boldly under baby fine hair, daring anyone to name the fear, peeled and soft, that hung at the edges of childhood. Those spindly legs, that too-short skirt, a tease and a promise to a future unlived. Did I run out and pull them in? Did I tell them that monsters as well as princes lurk in woods? In the end I left them to their future. Was that my mistake?

I was married. I took it as read, like buying your first pair of high heels and battling with diets. We lived in a box on Blackheath, bought clothes from catalogues and argued about the mortgage. We caught trains and felt the hours loom like a headache that won’t come. My husband wore a uniform every weekday until it melted on him and he couldn’t take it off, even for weekends. He began to talk like a railway timetable and his eyes became double-glazed and empty. I thought, this is how it is and made casseroles and bought tomato plants.

He’s walking slowly now and I too slow down, behind him, matching his pace until I realise that he’s trying to get me to catch up, to walk beside him. I lurch at his arm, heavily, as if I’m stepping on a bus. He shrugs it off. I understand. We are not breakfasting in Paris or window-shopping in Regent Street but old habits die hardest. I have always been a woman who leans, who takes an arm, who hands over her deposit account. I have never known where to find a screwdriver in my own house. I accept gifts, wherever they come.

Ella was underweight. Always at the breast, sucking until I felt my own life being leeched out, in fine needles of white. You’ll get used to it they said. It always hurts at first. The more you let her suck, the easier it will get. ‘Failure to thrive,’ they wrote in their red books and interrogated me. They told me to feed her from plastic bottles with powders but when I put the teat in her mouth, she bit it, shuddered, spat it out and screamed until her mouth was clamped back at the breast. So I let her teach me. Her father wanted to take her to the nurses for them to write instructions in the little red book. He found manuals, talked about feeding schedules.

She was so small and so huge. My days were full of the flesh of her, the work of her, the burden of such great love. We went to church halls with plastic toys on threadbare carpets, patterned to resemble a toy town. I was given coffee with lumps of undissolved brown in it and told to put her down and walk away. Women talked about feeding habits, night wakings, contents of nappies, cot deaths and I thought, Why are they telling me this? Ella was my shield. She sat, her back against my breasts and I nuzzled and worried at the flaking, dried skin that carpeted her scalp. Later in life I realised that I was walking amongst the traumatised, amongst women trying to reseam the torn edges of their old selves.

It’s humid, the evening is rolling the last of itself out for us. There are children kicking balls on scrubby patches of grass, eking out the final hours, fresh sweat reeking on top of the day’s accretion. Finally they will reluctantly give in to the hunger that feels like their stomachs are dissolving. They will go back and eat sausages, potatoes and carrots and fill up on thick slices of white bread.

When did love, tremulous, unsure, become hard edged and sour? Who gave her the map to despise me? One day we were splashing in puddles and flouting school uniform regulations, I hated the polo shirts squared like a teabag, trousers that looked like a tiny policewoman’s. I took them all in at the waist and painted her nails. One day she asked to look the same as the rest and her father unpicked all my stitching with his sausage fingers. Was it then that unbeknown to herself, she learned to condense me into a single page that she could flip and crush in the small of her hand?

But she would bound back. The sea would part and we would meet and make cakes filled with Rolos, Smarties and marshmallows. The chocolate would melt into the soggy mass, the Smarties colours running blue and yellow. The kitchen would hang with smells of sugar and cocoa. We would gorge whilst it was still warm, digging spoons into the centre, lifting out strings of toffee, eating quickly like half-starved animals. Sometimes she let me plait her hair into hundreds of tiny snakes and weave ribbons through the braids. I would tell her she was beautiful.

‘Am I?’ she’d ask looking serious.

‘No-one in the whole wide world is as lovely as you,’ I said, immediately losing her trust. She despised exaggeration. Like her father, she wanted proof, hard evidence. Then the sea would close back in on itself. ‘You’re just being silly Mummy,’ she’d say primly, leaving me waving wildly at her back, marooned. But it was true, she was the fairest of them all.

‘You still want to do this?’ His eyes are tiny in the midst of pouched red skin. The red is a fortress, built from insomnia, under-eating and alcohol. Beyond it, he is aged and hidden. I can’t find him through his eyes. But his legs are spindly, too long for him in their tight casing and his hair is all fuzz and curl, you want to stroke it and ping the loops backs on themselves. Did she ever do that? Did you play like puppies or did you play grown up games of touching and dreaming and tasting? I think I know.

She didn’t tell me about you. I had to learn the language of inference, the sudden fits of weeping, the endless checking of her phone, the new clothes and breaking of curfew hours. Her father worried about schoolwork, I worried about heartbreak. We both worried about sex but we didn’t speak of it.

I saw them once. In Oxford Street. They had a long scarf that was wound around both their necks, tied together. Bundled in amongst English-language students and Selfridges. I didn’t recognise her at first with her newly dyed black hair and more make-up than was allowed, but the hopefulness of body, the shifting and welcoming hips and raw joy in her face were unmistakably hers. And his too, I noticed. I wanted to cry, to run away, to pretend that this shiny world had not lured her from the nest. I wanted to hold a party in a forest with two guests and make a willow monument to first love.

I tug at his arm.

‘We need to stop here.’ He nods and I move from twilight into the shop’s fluorescence. I am glad for the stark, coldness of the light after all the shadows. It doesn’t take me long in the shop. I know what I need. He waits, looking like he’s trying to merge with the wall. He can hardly stand up straight.

‘Are these ok?’ He looks blank. He cannot trust himself to speak anymore. One more word and everything will fall apart.

She danced down streets when she was happy, taking odd little skips, unable to help herself.

‘Keep your eyes on the road!’ I’d shout, wobbling under shopping bags and money worries. ‘You have to look left and right first!’ The fronts of her shoes were always the first to go, itching at the ground, scuffing and spoiling into holes. She was always moving, dragging her feet against the pavements and playgrounds, running off.

‘Can’t you control that child?’ her father said. ‘She needs you to keep her safe.’

But I needed her to have all the passion I never allowed myself.

The road is quiet, we are walking under a railway bridge. It is grey and dank. It smells like people have gone to the toilet. A car growls in the distance. I will my feet to run at it but they are rooted in the present. I wanted her to go places, to live beyond me but I was also so afraid to lose her. My feet are numb. All of me is numb, except my heart, which is raw and afraid. Everything is too close. Everything is about to end but like a cockroach, I know I will outlast it.

‘We’re here.’ He stops and for the first time I look at the place where my daughter died. I look. And look, but I cannot see her in this patch of anonymous road. There are no cars even. He begins to talk. I watch his mouth and I cannot stop him because as he speaks, he is giving me back my daughter’s last moments. He spares no details. The car. She was skipping. She wasn’t looking. She was so happy. She wasn’t looking. It was going too fast to stop in time. She wasn’t looking.

He stops talking. We wait. And wait, until the silence becomes a kind of inarticulate prayer, shaped by our love of her.

‘Shall we do it now?’ I ask gently, handing him some of the flowers. ‘She loved lilies,’ I add, placing their lengths on the spot where we finally ran out of words.

‘I know. And roses too.’ Suddenly I realise that all over the place there are people with little pockets of her, who know that she cheered herself up by making cheese on toast and that she couldn’t stand the feel and sight of unglazed pottery. He takes the whole bunch from me, the rest of the lilies and all of the roses and places them softly on the pavement.

We will walk away from this. We will go away in different directions. We will never see each other again but for these next few moments, we will stand together on the pavement by the road where my daughter died.

ANNE BENTLEY is currently completing an Open University Advanced Creative Writing course while caring for her two young children. The 43-year-old has been published in The Guardian Family Section and Counselling Journal. She spends around nine hours a week writing, but a chronic lack of self-belief and censoring of her experimental side impede her writing. The support of Calstock Writers’ Group and her family – who inspire and delight – help her get back on course. She once accepted a wedding kimono as payment for teaching English in Japan. Read more about Anne.

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