The Assassination of Margaret Thatcher. Hilary Mantel

they slap them every day?’

      The big girl grinned. ‘If they can be bothered. I expect they shaved her head. Her head was crawling.’

      I put my hand to my own hair, felt the lack of it, the chill, and in my ear a whisper, like the whisper of wool; a shawl around my head, a softness like lambswool: a forgetting.

      It must have been twenty-five years. It could have been thirty. I don’t go back much: would you? I saw her in the street, and she was pushing a buggy, no baby in it, but a big bag with a spill of dirty clothes coming out; a baby tee-shirt with a whiff of sick, something creeping like a tracksuit cuff, the corner of a soiled sheet. At once I thought, well, there’s a sight to gladden the eye, one of that lot off to the laundrette! I must tell my mum, I thought. So she can say, wonders will never cease.

      But I couldn’t help myself. I followed close behind her and I said, ‘Mary Joplin?’

      She pulled the buggy back against her, as if protecting it, before she turned: just her head, her gaze inching over her shoulder, wary. Her face, in early middle age, had become indefinite, like wax: waiting for a pinch and a twist to make its shape. It passed through my mind, you’d need to have known her well to know her now, you’d need to have put in the hours with her, watching her sideways. Her skin seemed swagged, loose, and there was nothing much to read in Mary’s eyes. I expected, perhaps, a pause, a hyphen, a space, a space where a question might follow … Is that you, Kitty? She stooped over her buggy, and settled her laundry with a pat, as if to reassure it. Then she turned back to me, and gave me a bare acknowledgement: a single nod, a full stop.