*
The Goldhawk Road parties were suspended at my father’s behest. He told my mother, just until I was on the up. She said, ‘Who needs fun I suppose,’ and subsequently cut her hair very short, and started dying it shades that do not appear in nature.
Supposedly, it was the stress of my illness that caused her to get fat. Ingrid says that if that is true, it is also my fault that she began wearing sack dresses; waistless, muslin or linen, invariably purple, layered over one another, so that their uneven hems fell around her ankles like corners of a tablecloth. She has not deviated from the style since, except for acquiring an additional layer for each additional stone. Now that she is essentially spherical, the impression is of many blankets thrown haphazardly over a birdcage.
Before I got ill, my mother’s nickname for me was Hum because as a child I used to sing, one meandering, tuneless, made-up song that I started as soon as I woke up and continued until someone asked me to stop. The memories I have of it are mostly from other people – that I once sang about my love of tinned peaches for all of a six-hour drive to Cornwall, that I could be so affected by a song about a dog without a mother or a lost felt-tip, I made myself cry, so hard on one occasion I threw up in the bath.
In the only memory that is mine, I am in the garden sitting on the unmown grass outside my mother’s shed, singing about the splinter in my foot and her voice comes from inside and she is singing, ‘Come in here Hum and I will get it out for you.’ She stopped calling me Hum when I got sick, and began calling me Our Resident Critic.
Ingrid says she has always had bitch-like tendencies but it was me who really brought them out.
*
Last year, I got glasses that I do not need because the optometrist fell off his rolling stool during the eye-test. He looked so mortified I started reading the letters wrongly on purpose. They are in the glovebox, still in the bag.
*
From the beginning, my father stayed up with me in the night, sitting on the floor, leaning against my bed. He offered to read me poetry and if I did not want him to, he talked about unrelated things in a very quiet voice, not requiring a response. He was never in his pyjamas, I think, because if he didn’t change out of his clothes, we could pretend it was still just the evening and we were doing a normal thing.
But I knew he was worried and because I was so ashamed of what I was doing and, after a month, I did not know how to stop doing it, I let him take me to a doctor. On the way there, I lay down on the back seat.
The doctor asked my father some questions while I sat in the chair next to him looking at the floor, eventually saying that based on the fatigue, the pallor, the low mood, it was so likely to be glandular fever there was no point in a blood test. Likewise, there was nothing he could give me for it – glandular fever could only run its course – but, he said, some girls liked the idea of taking something, in which case, an iron tablet. He clapped his thighs and got up. At the door, he tipped his head at me as he said, to my father, ‘Evidently someone has been kissing boys.’
On the way home my father stopped and bought me an ice cream, which I tried to eat but couldn’t so that he had to hold the melting cone out the window for the rest of the drive. At the front door, he paused and said, instead of going straight back to my room, I could always come and have a rest in his study. It is the first room off the street. He said, for a change of scene, the scene being the space underneath my desk although he did not say so. He told me he had things to do – there didn’t have to be any talking. I said yes because I knew he wanted me to and because I had just done the six steps up from the footpath and needed to sit down before taking the stairs up to my room.
I waited in the doorway while he cleared books and piles of paper off the brown sofa that had migrated inside again and was pushed against the wall under the front windows. Things slipped out of his arms because he was trying to do it so quickly, as though I might change my mind and leave if he took too long. Until then, I always thought I wasn’t meant to go in there, but waiting, I realised it was only because my mother said why would anyone want to if they didn’t have to? Out of all the rooms in the house, it was the one she hated most because, she said, it had an aura of unproductiveness.
Once he was finished, I went in and lay down on my side with my head on the sofa’s low armrest, facing his desk. My father went around to his chair and adjusted a sheet of paper already in the typewriter, then he rubbed his palms together. Previously, whenever I heard the sound of his typing from another part of the house or passed his closed door on my way out, I imagined him in torment because he always looked drained when he emerged to cook chops. But as soon as he started pecking the keys with his index fingers, my father’s face took on an expression of private bliss. Within a minute, he seemed to have forgotten I was there. I lay and watched him – stopping at the end of the line to read over whatever it was he’d just written, mouthing it silently to himself, usually smiling. Then, smacking the lever with his left hand so the carriage flew back to the margin, more palm rubbing, another line. The keys of his typewriter did not make a sharp crack so much as a dull thud. I was not agitated by the noise, only calmed to the point of drowsiness by the repetition of his process, and his presence – the feeling of being in a room with someone who did want to be alive.