Sweet Sorrow(62)

That night, Mum came into our room while my sister slept, knelt by my bed as I lay facing the wall, cupping the back of my head with her hand. ‘Want to talk?’

‘No. Just sleep.’

But each night I’d lie awake, the only sixteen-year-old insomniac in the world, and in the day suffer a bone-weary nausea like jet lag, or what I imagined jet lag to be. A clouding-over in my head, like steam forming on a mirror. Foggy, stupid I suppose, though the word was never used by anyone except me as I gave another fumbled answer, a sentence that petered out into nonsense; stupid boy, stupid, stupid, stupid. I’d fall asleep with my head on my desk then, half awake, stare at textbooks as impenetrable as Sanskrit, and my gaze would drift to the margin, then on to the grain of my wooden desk, and I’d lapse into that same dumb, frozen state in which I’d sometimes catch my father and think, Oh God, not me too.

For my sister, the madness manifested itself as withdrawal into near muteness; evenings in the public library, lunchtimes in the school library or, on the rare occasions when I saw her outside, alone at the far reaches of the playing field. She had always been the clever one but now books were something that she used to conceal her face. She might as well have been holding them upside down. In less turbulent times we’d argued over the TV remote or the injustice of bedtimes, disputes that now seemed trivial and irrelevant, yet we’d not worked out how to replace them, and passed in the corridor without speaking. Once or twice, I saw her duck around a corner to avoid me. Once or twice I did the same.

Mum’s madness was a kind of mania, frantic attempts to make amends. Three, sometimes four times a week after she’d moved out, I’d find her waiting in the car at the school gates, where she’d wind down the window, beckon me over and offer me tea and cake at the Cottage Loaf. I’d climb in, abducted by my mother while my sister, presumably, walked home alone.

In the café, no sooner did the cake arrive than the tea things would be pushed to one side and out would come the revision guides, fresh from the local stationers. ‘So what shall we do today?’

‘Mum, I can do this by myself.’

‘How’s French? How’s your Biology?’

‘I’m not doing Biology.’

‘You are!’

‘I’m not.’

‘Well that was a waste of money,’ she said, and dropped the guide onto the floor. ‘Okay, English. Lord of the Flies, yes?’ She took the York Notes and opened it at random. ‘Talk to me about … the character of Piggy in Lord of the Flies.’

As an educator, Mum’s great gift was her ability to instil a mutual sense of panic and futility. She had always been content to leave teaching to the teachers. Now she was like someone waking late for the airport, cramming clothes into the suitcase, unwilling to accept that the flight has already departed.

‘The verb voir …’

‘To want.’

‘Not “to want”. To want is vouloir as in voulez-vous. Charlie, that’s not even French, that’s just Abba. Voir. Come on, you know this.’

‘Okay, to see.’

‘Yes! Voir, past tense. Go!’

‘…’

‘Go!’

‘J’ai …’

‘Come on, j’ai …’

‘I don’t know.’

‘You do!’

‘Shhh. Keep your voice down!’

‘But you do know!’

‘Mum, you saying I know won’t make it true!’

‘But you used to be so, so good at this!’

‘Mum …’

‘We were always led to believe you were doing really well.’

‘That’s not true!’

‘Or better than this, at least. Come on, you must know French. What have you been doing for five years! Put your tea down. Here, look at the answers for thirty seconds, and we’ll try again.’

And so she would panic at my lack of knowledge, and I would blank because of her panic, and she would panic because I was blanking, and voices would be raised and one or other of us would storm out in scenes unheard of in the Cottage Loaf. We’d drive past the remains of our old shop in a crackling silence, back to the new house, where I’d leap from the car. The weeks passed, five until the exams, then four, then three, two, like the countdown timer on a bomb. With one week to go, she parked at the end of the crescent, well out of sight, and asked, ‘How’s Dad?’

‘The same.’

She nodded, chewed on a knuckle. ‘Well. He just needs to get enthusiastic about something again.’

‘What, like a hobby, you mean?’

‘No! Is he thinking about work?’

‘Sometimes. I don’t think he can at the moment.’

‘Why not?’

‘Well, he’s nuts, Mum!’

‘Don’t say that.’

‘All right, he is mentally unwell.’

‘He’s having a hard time.’

‘Yes, getting out of bed, brushing his teeth …’

‘All right, I know! But what can I do, Charlie? Tell me what I can do and I’ll do it.’

I didn’t like being asked what to do by my parents. Even if I’d had an answer, she was no longer listening but sat curled around the steering wheel, pressing the heels of her hands against her eyes. ‘I know the timing’s all wrong, I know I should be there, and I hate leaving things to you, hate it, but I wouldn’t help if I was here, I can’t, it’s impossible, it would be total war. I make things worse, Charlie! What do you think that feels like? Knowing that you make someone so unhappy.’ She started to cry and only then did I relent, reaching to embrace her but being jolted back by my seat belt. I twisted more slowly, trying to fool the braking mechanism, was halted again, tugged at the belt— ‘Just unclip it!’