*
I began to spend every day in there. After a while, I stopped lying down on the sofa and would sit and look out at the street instead. One day I found a pen between the seat cushions, and when my father noticed me drawing indifferently on my arm he got up and came over with some paper and a Shorter Oxford Dictionary. Perching next to me for a second, he wrote the alphabet down the left margin and told me to write a story in one sentence, using each letter in order. He said the dictionary was just to press on and went back to his desk.
I wrote hundreds of them. They are still somewhere in a box but I only remember one from that time because when I had finished it my father said it would one day be recognised as the high point of the oeuvre.
After
Barbara’s
Contentious
Divorce,
Everyone
Felt
Genuinely
Hurt,
Including
Justifiably
Kin
Left
Melancholically
Noting
Or
Perhaps
Questioning
Rumours
Suggesting
That,
Unannounced,
Vincent’d
Wed an
uXorious
Young
Zimbabwean.
Sometimes still, when I can’t sleep, I make them up in my mind. K is the hardest.
*
A friend of Ingrid’s, who came over once when I was there, told me that the Headspace app had changed her life. I wanted to ask what her life had been like before and what it was like now.
*
I felt alright in September. My father and I decided I should start university. But I was only alright when I was in that room, with him. From the beginning, I couldn’t last through an entire lecture. I missed whole days and then whole weeks. I began going back under my desk when I was at home. Towards the end of the term the dean put me on academic probation. He gave me a pamphlet on stress management and told me that I would need to make a good show in my exams if I decided to come back in January. I should use the holidays to have a serious think. Seeing me out of his office he said, ‘There’s one of you in every cohort,’ and wished me a Merry Christmas.
*
On the highest floor of the Goldhawk Road house there is an iron balcony that we did not go onto because it was rusted out and coming loose from the wall. One night, in the holidays, I went out and stood on the grille floor in bare feet, staring over the rail to the long black rectangle of garden four storeys below.
Everything hurt. The soles of my feet, my chest, my heart, my lungs, my scalp, my knuckles, my cheekbones. It hurt to talk, to breathe, to cry, to eat, to read, to hear music, to be in a room with other people and to be by myself. I stayed there for a long time, feeling the balcony move sometimes according to the wind.
Normal people say, I can’t imagine feeling so bad I’d genuinely want to die. I do not try and explain that it isn’t that you want to die. It is that you know you are not supposed to be alive, feeling a tiredness that powders your bones, a tiredness with so much fear. The unnatural fact of living is something you must eventually fix.
*
This is the worst thing Patrick has ever said to me: ‘Sometimes I wonder if you actually like being like this.’
*
Here are the reasons I went back inside. Because I did not want people to think my father was not a good parent. I did not want Ingrid to fail her exams. I did not want my mother to one day make art out of it.
But Patrick is the only person who knows the main reason because it is the worst thing I have ever thought. I went back inside because, even as I was then, I thought I was too clever and special, better than anyone who would do what I had come out to do, I was not the one in every cohort. I went back inside because I was too proud.
Once, in my funny food column, I said that Parma ham had become pedestrian. After the magazine came out, a reader emailed me to say I came across as unpleasantly superior and she for one would continue to enjoy Parma ham. I printed it out and showed Patrick. He stood reading it with his arm around my shoulder, then pulled me in and said, his face turned down to the top of my head, ‘I’m glad.’
I said, ‘That she’s not going to give up ham?’
‘That you’re unpleasantly superior.’ He meant, since it is why you are still alive.
Probably, it is not the worst thing I have ever thought. But is in the top one hundred.
*
This is the worst thing Ingrid has ever said to me: ‘You’ve basically turned into Mum.’
*
A few months ago, Ingrid called and told me about a kind of fade cream she had started using to get rid of a brown spot that had appeared on her face. On the back of the tube it said that it was suitable for most problem areas.