I stayed on at the Latimers’ house for eight months, which was a thoroughly awkward experience for everyone except Annabelle, who I suspect liked having someone in the house who wasn’t a Latimer. With Jimmy gone and Sophie realising that she was one child closer to an empty nest, her need to try to nurture grew more intolerable. Every day she would make Annabelle a flaxseed smoothie for breakfast （‘Dear girl, there’s nothing of her, she still doesn’t need a bra!’） and she became fixated on trying to get her daughter to meditate with her at every opportunity. For a therapist, she was remarkably obtuse about the root of her neurotic daughter’s problems. But perhaps the children of other therapists would say that was pretty standard.
It was clear to all of us that the uneasy bargain we’d made when the family took me in was on its last legs. I’d come to their house too late in life to really be one of them, and Jimmy had been the glue which held us together. Without him, our interactions dwindled rapidly, and I took to spending more time out of the house or in my room. Earning my own money for the first time meant I felt less inclined to follow Sophie’s unspoken rules to the letter. I eschewed home-cooked food for McDonald’s and chopped all my hair off into a severe bob which even I will concede was a mistake. I don’t have the jaw for it. If I didn’t eat dinner with the family at night, Sophie would tell me that she was worried about me. She was never cross, an emotion that she would have found too base. She just expressed concern endlessly. About my hair, about my ambition, about my lack of friends. She was right about the lack of friends. Jimmy was the glue there too. I had never found it easy to forge relationships. Partly it seemed like a skill I didn’t possess but mainly because I had decided early on that teenagers were terrible. I wanted to skip ahead to adulthood where I could be on my own as much as I required. I like to be on my own, and have never understood what weakness exists in people who crave the company of others all the time. Perhaps that was partly why Sophie and I never really connected. John was like me, he could hide away in his study or work late hours every night of the week. But she wanted everyone around her, that would show that she was a successful person with a family who saw her as the vital lynchpin.
So I moved out. They protested, which was understood by both sides to be the standard polite thing to do, and then John paid for me to hire a van and to buy a mattress. They also subsidised some of my rent, which I found uncomfortable at the beginning but grew to accept. After all, people like John and Sophie need to offset their guilt. Sponsoring a child you’ll never meet in another country is base level. Fostering a （semi） orphan is big league. I’d played my part, so why not let them help long term? I found a one-bedroom flat in Hornsey, barely a fifteen-minute walk away from the attic room I’d shared with Marie, and I endured one final meal with the Latimers. Jimmy came back from uni for it, Sophie was insistent, and after a desultory moussaka （the woman could never cook something if she didn’t find its provenance exotic in some way）， he came back to my new flat with me and produced a bottle of wine smuggled out of the family home. We slept together that night, which was a strange but inevitable event. Sex was a form of intimacy we’d been growing more and more curious about as we got older, as we got closer. It was a way of binding us together even further – something nobody else could claim. Perhaps there was a control element for me too, opening up another part of me to him and only him in the knowledge that he would prize our relationship even more fiercely. It wasn’t just a calculated act on my part. I have spent years now wavering between loving Jim like a brother and wanting him like a partner. Sometimes he’s just a comfort blanket I take for granted. But he’s also the only person I know who could break my heart. I find it all confusing really, always pushing him away and pulling him towards me. It’s not surprising that I didn’t let him stay over that night. I didn’t want to find him there when I woke up in my new home. I wanted it to be mine and mine alone. But I still opened my eyes that morning expecting to see him lying next to me.
I worked and I ran and sometimes I would meet up with a schoolmate who’d come back home from uni for a few days. I cooked a lot, something I’d never really done before. I studied books about making your way in retail, some of the most boring words a person can ever have the misfortune of having to read. But they were helpful, if only because the bullshit jargon it used gave me a language that has helped me to this day. If you introduce a few choice phrases, you’re understood to be competent. ‘The PC will love this deal’ tells a retail manager you understand what the price-conscious customer is and also makes you want to walk into a door.