The Art of Not Breathing(57)

Are there any problems at school? At home?

How long has he been restricting for?

“What do you mean, restricting?” my father asks the first time this question is fired.

“I mean limiting his intake of food or fluids.”

My parents cannot answer these questions, and I don’t want to, so I stay silent. It comes easy, just like it did five years ago.

Hours pass. I sit by the door so I am the first to see any visitors coming down the corridor. My parents sit against the back wall, a single frayed brown chair between them. My father pulls the stuffing from the middle chair. My mother yawns. They both have their eyes on the floor.





When the corridor is empty, I slip out and wander down the hallways, peering into all the rooms until I am stopped by a lady doctor wearing a white coat and clickety heels. She was in our waiting room earlier.

“Are you looking for the toilets?”

I shake my head.

“The coffee machine?”

I nod, only now realizing how thirsty I am. She points down the corridor.

“I’m just going to check on your brother,” she says, smiling. Then she turns and clicks off in the direction I’ve just come from.

“Wait,” I call.

“Yes? It’s Elsie, isn’t it?” She walks back toward me, adjusting her stethoscope.

“Yes.” I suddenly feel afraid of what I have to say, but the doctor keeps smiling. She is listening.

“He . . . I mean Dillon . . . Dillon has been ill for a long time. He makes himself sick and he pretends to eat. I don’t think he’s eaten for days.”

I swallow what feels like a golf ball and wait for her to yell at me, but she speaks softly.

“You found him, didn’t you? Well done for ringing an ambulance.”

I want to tell her that it was my fault, that I didn’t stop him, that I let him do this to himself because I was too busy trying to sort my own life out, but then I tell her about the lemon water. On her badge it says DR. S. SHAW. I wonder if her first name is Sarah. Or Sally. Or Serena, like the tennis player my dad fancies.

“Thank you,” Dr. Shaw says. “That’s very helpful.”





When I get back to the waiting room with two coffees, I notice the room smells of alcohol. I hand my parents the cups and take my seat again by the door.

“Where have you been?” my father asks.

I frown. “To get you drinks.”

My father looks down at the cup in his hand, perplexed. He gulps the coffee back in one go and then grimaces at the taste.

“Look at the state of you, Elsie. What have you been doing?”

My hair is all straggly and salty. I smell of rubber and sweat, and Tay.

“I went for a run.”

He throws the cup on the floor and the plastic crackles.

“For Christ’s sake, I leave you all for a few weeks and look what happens.”

“Not now, Colin. Can we focus on Dillon?”

“Oh, now you want to focus on Dillon?” My father turns his whole body to her so she can’t avoid looking at him. “Now you care about your son? You didn’t seem to care about him earlier when you were at the pub.”

“And where were you?” she screams back at him.

Her whole body is trembling. My father storms out.

At three a.m. Dr. Shaw tells us to go home. We have no choice but to stay at my father’s flat in Inverness.

I don’t hold my breath as I lie on the sofa. Instead I take big deep breaths and count them and count them. Mum is on the other sofa, whimpering. I don’t go to her. I don’t even ask if she’s okay. I just stare at her silhouette and try to make sense of everything Dillon said. It can’t be true. Dillon’s brain must have shrunk so much, he’s got confused between his own parents. My father was the one missing that day. Not Mum. She arrived in the car later. I know this. I was there.

When everything is quiet, I get up and wander around the flat. There aren’t many places to wander to—the bathroom, the kitchen, and back to the living room. I prop myself against the kitchen cupboards, and the cold tiles underneath me keep me awake. There are twenty-six large tiles on the kitchen floor. Above the oven there are twelve small ones—gray and white and black. I follow the patterns with my eyes, left to right, right to left, top to bottom, zigzag.





At seven thirty a.m. the phone rings. We need to come in straightaway.

Dr. Shaw greets us in the corridor as we approach the ward. I’m guessing she hasn’t been home to sleep, but she looks as though she has. She tells us that they need to get a tube down Dillon so that they can get nutrients and calories into him. His heart rate is too low, and oxygen isn’t getting to his major organs. They can’t wait any longer. He could die.

“Give him some orange juice,” my mum suggests in a wobbly voice. My father moves me out of the way and grabs her by the shoulders.

“It’s not a f*cking cold, Celia.” His teeth are bared, and he snarls through them, spit spraying into the air. “How could you not notice how thin he is?”

“You’re the one who walked out on us.”

“I thought that you might actually get out of bed and start looking after your children. Instead you just shoved your head inside a bottle. And what’s wrong with Elsie? You’ve been letting her drink again.”