The Things We Do to Our Friends(62)

My granny never corroborated this. I remember her visiting, and her reaction: “She’s a child!” she said. “Of course she’s noisy.” She wasn’t scared of me in the slightest; she’d just shout at me to shut up.

For that reason, it worked for me to spend most summers in Hull at my granny’s house and I became a little more stable. Not happier, I don’t think, it wasn’t home. Things were easier, though. My English got better. Caught between a rock and a hard place. I’ve put my foot in it. Phrases where the intonation fell wrong at first.

Despite my granny’s protestations, my parents were convinced something was wrong with me. I went to many doctors’ offices in France. No clinical waiting rooms in a city hospital where they take your temperature and give you a proper diagnosis full of hyphens. No, they took me to the alternative kind of specialists, who held afternoon clinics in home offices at the bottom of their gardens. The specialists never diagnosed me with anything in particular: the consensus was that I was an ordinary child. But my parents thought differently.

The therapies were expensive and over time the money drained away, slowly at first, and I was too young to notice. Then my father lost his job. Just like that, the big house, the fancy cars, the tropical holidays, they were all gone.

We moved from the vast house to a tiny apartment where we were packed in tightly like sardines and all noise was an irritant to my mother. No new clothes, no things to hide the fact we were unhappy. Both of them found it difficult. My mother because she couldn’t bear my closeness and my father because he couldn’t bear her sadness, and her illness was everywhere—in the curtains that were always closed, in the air that smelled stale and old. Still, he loved her a lot, that was always clear.

Then there was the final attempt. A doctor who had trained in Paris and was highly respected. He was a big advocate of seclusion therapy. The idea was that I’d be locked away on my own and it would help my emotional development for some reason. My parents took to the concept well, it was certainly convenient.

They locked me in my room. The room had very little in it. Nothing to do (so nothing to damage). At first, I remember being so angry with them, but screaming and shouting didn’t work; it didn’t make them unlock the door, so I started to plan different ways to punish them.

When I was allowed out, I’d always go back downstairs and watch them edge around me like I was about to explode. A week later I would slip a piece of glass into my mother’s food. A long and slender shard, glistening in the sauce around her pasta. Not to hurt her, just so she had to fish it out. She would see something like that before she ate it, and she would know it was me. I would be sweetness and light, and then she’d come downstairs, hand pressed to her head with a cold compress, questioning me about a silk top slashed in half, the pieces laid out on her bed for her to see.

There was a theatre to it. A show.

I became used to letting the anger settle, to waiting it out and performing a kind of delayed justice.

When you’re locked away like I was, you start to go mad, I think, but you also learn patience.

You think it’s all your fault, and time passes too slowly and then too fast. It made me realize that I wasn’t going to get what I needed from my parents.

I wanted friends.





52


I met them at school.

School was a fresh start. I was smart—I had always been smart, started speaking early, learned to read young, good at languages.

The first few schools didn’t work out, then I got into an exclusive school on a scholarship, located around the ruins of a Roman fortress, up in the hills, where most students were boarders. That fresh feeling of September: new books, new uniform, new life. Not as fancy as Tabitha and The Shiver’s school, but not far off.

Pulling up on that first day, I knew my mother had been in touch with the school in advance. I’d heard her on the phone, her words quick and shrill: “I need to warn you, she can be difficult…She might not get on with the other pupils…She’s had problems in the past.”

My mother was wrong. I don’t remember it being hard at all. I was worried that I wouldn’t be accepted but I was careful to sit back at first and work out a plan of how I’d behave. And I was selective too, of course. I couldn’t be friends with just anyone, they needed to be special.

I didn’t really think I had anything to offer, but when I met Dina and Adrienne, I made myself appealing for them—just the right blend of enthusiastic and admiring and fun. They welcomed me in, and they were exactly who I wanted to meet—carefree in a way only lovely little rich girls can be. I needed to find friends who were going to make me the best version of myself, and they already had that ease with each other that felt so natural. I slotted in.

Me. Dina. Adrienne. Those aren’t their names anymore. I have no idea what they’re called now.

“Three is a good number,” Dina had said firmly.

And at the time I agreed. Now, I know threes can be tricky and sometimes it helps to diffuse the intensity with larger numbers, but for a while it really was good. We balanced each other out. Adrienne was so serious, she seemed anxious all the time, but she managed to hide it behind the most beautiful gravelly voice so that when she spoke you wanted to listen to her all day. You hoped she’d never stop talking no matter what it was about. Dina was smaller and more animated. She laughed a lot and did cartwheels, so her T-shirt rose over her head and she’d pull it down self-consciously.