Girl A(95)

We didn’t talk about Hollowfield. We didn’t talk about Ethan’s wedding.

I recognized that my parents were older, and that some of that was my fault. The unanswered messages. The phone call from Dr K, in the early, early morning. Weren’t those the things that aged people, more than the fact of time? Sometimes I listened to the tone of their voices, in their bedroom in the night, and knew that they were talking about me. The pockets beneath Dad’s eyes had descended, like an extra set of jowls, and he had developed the habit of following me from room to room. He would wake from an afternoon nap and rush up the stairs, tapping at my bedroom door, or arrive in the kitchen with inexplicable urgency, to stand sheepish over my breakfast. ‘What are you worried about?’ I said, and he shook his head, unable to say it.

‘I don’t know,’ he said.

On a warmer afternoon, I took a bucket of water across the garden and cleaned the trampoline. The best spot in the house for reading. I brushed away the leaves and started to scour it, first the mat and then the springs and the legs. It was just sturdy enough to support me when I was still; if I jumped, I’d land on concrete. I gathered a blanket and a cushion, and read until the light in the garden was hazy and soft. Not long before Dad came out to find me. I watched him cross the garden. The slow, careful steps of him. His hands held against his back. When he reached me, he turned back to the house and heaved his body next to mine.

‘Dad. What are you doing?’

‘Joining you. How’s the reading?’

‘It’s fine.’

‘Do you remember the hours that we used to spend on this thing?’

‘Of course.’

‘I thought that you would kill me.’

‘Come on. You liked it.’

‘I did. I really did. We were so sure – well.’

I put down my book and turned to look at him.

‘Lex,’ he said. I waited for him to say something else, but he only lay there, watching the lull of the branches.

‘You can stay,’ he said, finally. ‘You can stay for the rest of the year.’

‘Dad—’

‘Stay, Lex. Don’t go to the wedding. I mean it. You can stay for for ever, if you want.’

‘I can’t, though. You know that I can’t.’

I could have done, though. Above us, the Downs were patched green and gold, stitched with hedgerows and chalk paths. I could see myself in ten years’ time, and then twenty, living in the perpetual childhood which I had missed. The posters in my bedroom bleached by decades of sunshine. Still sleeping well, in a bed which had sides to it.

‘Unfortunately,’ I said, ‘I have to live in the real world.’

He was nodding. It had been worth a try.

‘I’m a pain,’ he said. ‘I know that.’

‘You’re not a pain, Dad.’

‘When you first came to us,’ he said, ‘I’d have this dream about you. You were always so little. We’d run into each other, as if we already knew one another, and we’d talk for a while. Sometimes we were at the supermarket, or you’d be in the garden, on the trampoline. You were tiny. Just six or seven. Long before I could have known you. They started off as nice dreams, really. But then there would always be the moment when you would have to go. It was like I knew all along that it was coming. And somehow – somehow I knew what you would have to go back to.’

He was crying. I turned away, knowing that he wouldn’t want me to see it, and he pressed his eyes with his hands.

‘I would always wake up then,’ he said.

‘Dad.’

‘God,’ he said. ‘Sorry.’

‘It’s OK.’

‘And once you’re awake,’ he said, ‘even if you try – once you’re awake, you can’t get back into it.’

A condition of my freedom was that I would agree to see Dr K. She was in the process of finding me a psychologist in New York, she said, but it would take time. It had to be just the right person. In the meantime, we would meet once a week.

We would talk.

I didn’t want to visit her office in London, and I hated the thought of her in the cottage, assessing our dynamics. Greeting Dad as an old, lost friend. We came to a truce with a cafe in town. It had dismal service and artfully distressed furniture, but excellent coffee; on that, we agreed.

She no longer concerned herself with pleasantries. She was usually there first, with her handbag on the table and her trench coat occupying a spare seat. She had always already ordered, a coffee delegating my place. She didn’t stand to greet me.

Above our table, a chalkboard said: Live. Laugh. Love.

‘How are you?’ she said, and I answered the question as she required: simply, sticking to the facts of it. I was fine. I was looking forward to resuming my work. I was preparing to return to New York. Evie had died many years before, shortly after we escaped from the house.

‘And why do you think that you’ve been unable to accept this,’ Dr K asked, ‘for such a long period of time?’

Some days, I entertained this line of questioning. The body is notoriously efficient at forgetting pain, I said. Is it any great surprise – with a little encouragement – that the mind can do the same thing? Or just: because you gave me the chance. In the destitution of those early hospital days, you offered me a lie, and I staggered inside it and closed the door behind me. By the time you told me the truth, I was already living there. I had unpacked, and changed the locks.