Sorrow and Bliss(10)

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.

*

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.’