Girl A(96)

On other days, I couldn’t see the worth of conversation. I had told myself stories: that was true. What of it? What of convincing yourself that certain things had happened in a different way? Ethan and Delilah and Gabriel and Noah: they each had their own fiction. Who didn’t tell themselves stories, to get up in the morning? There wasn’t so much wrong with it. Those days, I considered leaving Dr K at the table. Let me stay in this fiction, I would say. Like this.

The only thing we didn’t discuss was the wedding, and the reason we didn’t discuss the wedding was because I had told Dr K that I wouldn’t be attending it. She had asked about each of my siblings under the guise of academic curiosity, but when I was talking, she had the look of a parent at the school gates, comparing other children with their own. I described Ana, and Ethan’s various successes; I softened the scene in the bedroom, and emphasised the protagonists’ love story.

‘I hear that Ethan’s getting married,’ she said.

‘Yes. In October.’

‘A family affair?’ She wasn’t smiling.

‘I think that he wants the spotlight,’ I said, ‘without sharing it with the rest of us. You know Ethan.’

She nodded. ‘Ethan,’ she said, holding his name in her mouth, like she was trying to identify a particular ingredient. ‘I hope that he gets the life he deserves,’ she said.

I consoled myself with legal theory: it was more of an omission than a misrepresentation, and there was little wrong with that. The Devlin in my skull raised an eyebrow. In that case: I hadn’t wanted to waste a session on something happy and mundane.

But before Dr K left, she paused at the table, her coat buttoned and tied. ‘About the wedding,’ she said. She didn’t look at me: that made it easier.

‘Yes?’

‘I’m glad,’ she said. ‘I’m glad that you’re not going.’

At other times, it was as if we were there for her own sanity. She spoke more during these meetings than she had across the years I had known her. In the blunt light of the cafe, she was haggard and illuminated.

‘I don’t forget the expression on your face,’ she said, ‘when I first told you the truth. I think about it all of the time. It was during your third month in the hospital. You had been asking about her for days. You’d become wild. This thought of her, installed with a new family. You asked again and again – you know – why can’t I join them? Now that you were so much better, I had started to question my approach. There was no ending to it, you see. Or rather – there was only one ending. To tell you.

‘So I did. We visited our courtyard, in the hospital. And when I said it, you didn’t say a word. You just looked at me, with this – pity, I think. As if you felt sorry for me – that I could say something so stupid. You started off on another topic, something different altogether. The quality of the hospital lunches. Like you hadn’t even heard me.

‘After that, it was as though we started again every day. You would remember the writer of an obscure poem that I mentioned, in passing, or the name of an animal which you’d never seen. But this – you were always capable of forgetting it.

‘We tried time and again. What was there to do? You had a new family, and a new school in September. You were walking again. You were doing so well, Lex. Just as I had hoped. The Jamesons had their child, and I had my vindication. And to tell you the truth, I think that we assumed you would grow out of it.’

‘Like a comfort blanket?’ I said. ‘Or – what? Sucking your thumb?’

‘Do you know what Alice used to say? “An imaginary friend – what child doesn’t have one of those?”’

The loyalty of that. I tried not to smile, but I could feel it on my face.

‘Eventually,’ Dr K said, ‘I stopped asking about it. Why? Well, I think that now. But it’s obvious. Isn’t it? Because in every other way, you were my greatest success.’

At first, there had been failures, too. There was, for example, a great deal of concern about my lack of friends.

In the late summer, Mum had accompanied me up a wide driveway lined with trees. We walked from sunlight to shadow, each of us nervous. Her hand bumped against mine. A clock tower waited for us at the end of it, and beneath it a headteacher, with his hand outstretched.

That morning, I sat in an empty classroom and completed three examination papers. Lawnmowers hummed across hidden courtyards, and a bored young man gave me notice when I had half an hour left, and then ten minutes. Afterwards, in a bright wooden study, I spoke with the headteacher, who asked me, in turn, about what I was currently reading (The Magus, by John Fowles; my parents knew only that it was about Greece, but not about the sex scenes); the Bible (where to begin?); whether I knew what philosophy meant (yes); and the most interesting place to which I had travelled (Blackpool). A week later, and six years late, I had my school scholarship. For the purposes of the national curriculum, the headteacher said, I would need to join the school two years behind my age group. Academically, I might find that I was a little bored; if that was ever the case, then I shouldn’t hesitate to make it known.

As it turned out, I was never bored.

There were seven lessons a day. There was learning to fasten a tie. There was homework. There were swimming lessons, where I floundered a few widths and disrupted the other students’ lengths. There was operating Microsoft Word. There was an extensive school library, where you could take out eight books – ‘Eight,’ I said to Mum, on our way home – and where the librarian informed me that she could procure any book which I believed was missing, provided that it wasn’t pornographic or Mein Kampf.