Sweet Sorrow(64)

In one other sense, care was almost the opposite word because sometimes – and this was something that I would never say out loud – sometimes a part of me wanted the catastrophe. All children, I’m reassured, fantasise about the death of their parents but rarely in such plausible circumstances. At least if something happened to him then I’d get the attention and sympathy I felt I deserved; at least I could get on with things, whatever those things were. These thoughts seem shocking and shameful to me now, and the only defence I’m able to come up with is that I both hated and loved my father more than anyone in my world, the strength of the first emotion proportional to the second. I could only hate him like that because I’d once loved him to the same degree.

I should recount one other incident, at the climax of the conflict that had preceded Mum’s departure in the spring. The row that night had been apocalyptic: accusations, recriminations, brutal character assessments dripping with contempt, things that could never be unsaid and which would make any future life together quite impossible. I’d retreated to my room to revise, or rather to stare blindly and uncomprehendingly at my textbooks, fingertips drilling at my temples. My sister, in the bunk bed behind me, had taken to wearing Dad’s large expensive headphones in order to muddy the worst of the words, but tonight the flimsy membrane of our bedroom floor was vibrating like a speaker. The effect must have been the same for our neighbours too, because for the first time someone actually called the police.

Billie saw the blue light first. We stepped out onto the landing, and watched from the top of the stairs as my father, astonished and humiliated, opened the door and showed the police into the living room. My parents stood next to each other like children caught in some act of vandalism. Had it really come to this? Were we really that family, the one the neighbours complained about? The voices downstairs were placating now, No, officer, we quite understand, we’re all right now and I wanted to scream down the stairs, no, they’re not all right, they’re like this all the time! Instead I stomped into the bathroom, loud enough for the officers to hear, clattered through the cabinet to find the aspirin, slammed the cupboard door shut, pressed two into my hand, then a third, then paused. I opened the cupboard door once more, sorting through the tubes of lotions, the sticky bottles of ancient syrup, and found a brown bottle of liquid paracetamol. I tossed the pills into my mouth with a swig of filthy liquid, craned my head under the tap to wash it all down and then, for good effect, unscrewed the lid of the same night-time cough medicine I’d taken as a toddler, several years past its sell-by date and so presumably all the more concentrated and toxic. Hearing the door close on the police downstairs, I swigged at this too, wincing at the chemical sweetness, then arranged the packaging on the toilet cistern, the brown bottle left on its side for effect, a little diorama of despairing protest. Below us, my parents were speaking in sharp, urgent whispers. My sister lay on the top bunk, feigning sleep. I lay down beneath her, my hands clasped on my chest in anticipation, like a figure on a tomb.

This scene took place just before my father was prescribed his own medication, and I wonder if I’d have had the nerve to unscrew the lids of those particular brown bottles. I doubt it. I contemplated suicide in the same way that I contemplated murder, as a kind of thought experiment, and if I ever pressed the dull edge of the butter knife against the blue vein in my wrist, then it was in the same spirit as imagining where I’d bury Chris Lloyd’s body. Even as I gulped down the ancient cough syrup I knew that expectorants were rarely fatal. The concern and remorse of my parents, this was the main aim. To pull themselves together, to remain together.

But in the morning I woke with embarrassment and regret, and rushed to the bathroom to find Mum waiting, the blister pack of pills in one hand, the sticky bottle held by the fingertips of the other.

‘Charlie, is this you?’

‘Yes?’

‘So, Charlie, can I ask you not to leave stuff lying around like this?’ She tossed the syrup in the bin. ‘This is out of date. And if you’ve got a headache, take aspirin or paracetamol, not both. They’re not free. And put. Things. Away!’

If such a blatant performance could go unnoticed, then something even more theatrical would be required. Fortunately, the perfect opportunity loomed just a few months away in the exam hall.

Some, not all of this, I told Fran over the rest of the summer, but in the orchard I just confirmed the facts of my academic catastrophe.

‘F for fucked up. I just thought you ought to know.’

She was silent for a moment. ‘What do you think I ought to know?’

‘I don’t want you to think I’m something I’m not. That I’m going places that I can’t go.’

‘Okay. So you’re warning me off.’

I shrugged. ‘I suppose so.’

‘Well, it’s true that I do usually like to know grades before I get to know someone. It’s a simple points-based system really, but if you do well in the practical and the interview—’

‘No, but if someone’s a screw-up—’

‘It’s continuous assessment, really.’

‘—or just dim—’

‘The only time that you sound dim,’ she said, ‘is when you say that you sound dim. Does that make sense?’

‘I think so.’

‘Well, there you go.’