These hands are ninety-three years old.  They belong to Charlotte Marie Bradley Miller.  She was so frail her grand-daughter had to carry her onto the set to take this photo.  It’s a close-up.  Her bony arms emerge from the top corners of the photo and the background is black, maybe velvet, as if we’re being protected from seeing the strings.  One wrist rests on the other and her fingers hang loose, close together, a pair of folded wings.  And you can see her insides. Her knuckle bones bulge out of her skin, which sags like plastic that has melted in the sun and is dripping off her, wrinkling and folding.  Her veins look stuck onto the outside of her hands.  They’re a colour that’s difficult to describe - blue, but also silver, green – her blood runs through them, close to the surface.  The book says she died shortly after they took this picture.  Did she even get to see it?  Maybe it was the last beautiful thing she left in the world.  

I’m trying to decide whether or not I want to carry on living.  I’m giving myself three months of this journal to decide.  You might think that sounds melodramatic, but I don’t think I’m alone in wondering whether it’s all worth it.  I’ve seen the look in people’s eyes.  Stiff suits travelling to work morning after morning on the cramped and humid tube.  Tarted-up girls and gangs of boys reeking of aftershave, reeling on the pavements on a Friday night, trying to mop up the dreariness of their week with one desperate, fake-happy night.  I’ve heard the weary grief in my dad’s voice.

What people say:

Wise, true and moving, Thaw poses important questions about how and why we live.  It deserves lots of readers.

Esther Morgan, author of The Silence Living in Houses