Out of the Woods - 7. Mrs. Laurence

In the middle of maths, my phone began to ring. I mistakenly took it for someone else’s.

And so I rolled my eyes at the general stupidity of humanity and waited for it to stop. When it didn’t, I glanced behind me to spot the culprit. You can always tell them: they go very still, unnaturally so, the muscles of their neck straining; a strange expression moves their face, an enforced nonchalance; the more intelligent of them attempt to copy their peers by searching for the idiot with the insistently ringing side pocket.

It was only after a moment’s searching that I realised the idiot was me.

But it’s fine—what was Mr Wilton going to do about it? I grinned at him when he muttered, barely audibly and to the space on the wall directly above my head, that mobile phones weren’t allowed in the classroom. I took the phone out, silenced it, and checked the caller ID.

It was Chris.

‘What does he want?’ asked Tom.

I frowned. ‘Who?’

‘Chris, you idiot. What does Chris want?’

‘I never said it was Chris. What makes you think it’s Chris?’

‘Is it Chris?’

I paused. ‘That’s not the point.’

‘Oh my god. He’s been calling you constantly all day. Just tell me what he wants.’

In the background, Mr Wilton shot me a quick glance.

He had been getting bolder recently, for some reason. The other day he even went so far as to ask me to stop talking.

Someone would have to do something about it if it got any worse.

‘I think he wants to meet up after school.’

‘The three of us?’

I thought about it, and shrugged. ‘Sure.’

Of course, that wasn’t what he’d wanted. He wanted the two of us to meet in Starbucks. He wanted to eye-fuck me across the table while we drank macchiatos. And I…

And I was strangely reluctant.

There wasn’t really anything strange about it, in fact—Jamie had been outed only a week before. It was still talked about, occasionally, though Hannah Brown getting caught giving head to Harry Stanley in the field changing rooms—Hannah, who was my sister’s age and unfortunate enough to still be in braces—had lessened the general enthusiasm for Jamie’s misery somewhat. Despite my rather liberal reputation when it came to getting with members of my own sex, being caught on a date with a boy was something I doubted even I would be able to take in my stride.

‘I don’t understand why he didn’t just call me,’ Tom was saying, a small frown playing across his forehead. ‘Or at least text me. Or you, for that matter. I mean, he’s still in school, you know? He should be in class right now and I’m pretty sure you can’t make calls in class even in his school. Do you think he’s bunking off?’

‘I hope so. At least one of us should be enjoying ourselves right now.’

Tom smiled widely. ‘You aren’t enjoying your time with me, Laurence?’

I snorted. ‘If you could be any more boring, I’d pay you to sit by my bed each night and put me to sleep.’

He laughed, but he wasn’t really listening. He had created some ridiculous game on the desk using various mathematical implements, his lashes fluttering and the tip of his tongue poking adorably out between his lips in concentration. Each time he scored he would smile so innocently, as genuinely delighted as a child—and, at the sight of it, I was torn in half, caught between sneering and crying, melting bonelessly, falling against him, insinuating myself into his skin.

A fumbling move sent the pencil sharpener flying across the surface to land on my chair near my crotch. He looked at me, eyebrows raised suggestively, and in one fluid gesture reached a hand down between my legs.

My breath hitched.

It was an innocent moment, entirely unplanned, and had he thought about it first he probably wouldn’t have done it.

But the heat from his fingers as he rummaged around the chair was unbearable.

And I closed my eyes and I imagined myself in a maze. My footsteps crunched over frozen snow, but they didn’t travel so far as they should because the air was dense and still. The sky was the colour of stone. It might snow again at any minute, and I was all alone, and it was beautiful.

Pencil sharpener… There’s a tasteless joke for you.

A voice beside me chuckled. ‘What are you doing?’

It was a valid question. I was nearly eighteen—we both were. Why the fuck couldn’t I control my hormones? I turned towards the sound of his voice, my eyes still firmly closed. I smirked. ‘Shut up for a second. I’m going to my happy place.’

‘Your happy place?’

I opened my eyes. ‘As if your therapist never told you.’

‘I’m not crazy. I don’t have a therapist.’

‘Neither do I.’ I grinned. ‘You wanna be my therapist?’

He ruffled my hair. ‘I don’t think anyone should be allowed inside that head of yours, mate. God only knows what we’d find there.’

‘Sophie certainly doesn’t seem to think so. Sophie’s very fond of my head.’

‘She wouldn’t be if she knew what you’re hiding inside it.’

He reached into his bag and pulled out a drink. He was quietly swallowing when he finally got the joke. ‘“Sophie’s fond of my head!” You are disgusting. You know that?’

‘And you are slow. That was, what…five minutes of my life, spent waiting? Wasted. I could have spent it learning maths.’

‘Shut up. So, anyway,’ he leered, ‘about this therapist position… Do I get to take advantage of you?’

‘Sexually?’

‘Of course.’

‘Hmm.’ I eyed him suspiciously. ‘Will you be gentle?’

He smiled. It was a strange moment, the interval between two acts: the curtain fell, and suddenly he was serious. ‘Always.’

And I felt it today. The sincerity of it crawled under my skin, caused a flush on my cheeks and a feverish dizziness; I felt myself choking up. The ache to touch him, even if just to run my fingers through his hair… It was so strong that my hands shook. Smothering was harder today than it should have been.

But like a good best friend, I ignored it.

We laughed and talked a little more; at some point, we managed to scribble notes. We had a system: he’d write everything down on the left of the board, and I’d take the right—and then later, at his house, we’d arrange them into two coherent pieces of identical homework. I knew, vaguely, that I wasn’t as responsive to him as I should have been; but I was having a strange day.

A strange day. Not a bad day, necessarily—I had yet to decide on that. But it was a strange day, nevertheless. Grandpa was coming for dinner that night, and I felt strangely raw—things, in general, felt strangely raw.

It was as if I was walking on broken glass—as if that was perfectly normal, and everybody did it. We all walked on broken glass every day of our lives but, somewhere, I had lost my shoes.

In some corridor not so far away he’d head off to the left, and I’d head off to the right, and I was both dying for that moment and dreading it. The bell rang, and we left the classroom, and just before he turned away I found I couldn’t smile at his goofy grin anymore. I could barely look at him at all. All I wanted to do was hug him, press myself into him and just…let him wash over me. I wanted to kiss his smiling mouth over and over and never let go of his neck.

But I didn’t do any of those things. Instead I winked and wiggled my eyebrows suggestively at him like he had done to me earlier, and said, ‘See you later, hot stuff.’ He laughed, and punched my shoulder, and walked off.

There’s an old saying—it goes something like, ‘Many a true word spoken in jest.’

As I watched him walk away I thought about how horribly, ridiculously apt that saying was. I thought about how much, at that moment, I hated that bloody saying. I wasn’t stupid: I was well aware of the dangers of fancying a best friend. Of fancying a straight guy. I understood the ramifications could be disastrous.

What had happened to me today?

I skipped classics. There’s something about the subject that attracts freaks, and I just couldn’t be bothered with to be in the same room as them. I knew all the myths better than the teachers anyway—the benefit of having no social life to speak of for much of my childhood—and the essays were the same format as literature essays. I made my way out of school, pondering inanely the practicalities of taking up smoking as a pastime; my mother, on the one hand, would hate it, and I’d have a legitimate excuse to leave school every few hours; on the other hand I’d probably die.

It was a grey, oppressive day, the clouds heavy and leaden in the sky. I could feel them pressing down upon my head but the effect of it was perversely uplifting; they were everywhere, cloaking everything indiscriminately, and of a swirling, changeable nature. They made slow patterns, and every now and then a veil would break, revealing another underneath it, this one softly glowing. The wind was cold and calm.

There was a figure leaning against the school gates, small against the rearing twisted mass of wrought iron, a fleck of golden hair against the black. I watched it for a moment, coming slowly closer, and when it turned round it smiled at me.

Mark Little was new this year, like Jamie—the second, lesser anomaly. He was too big to be a swimmer, and too friendly for your typical rich kid. He was both too good looking and too athletic to be uncool but he wasn’t friends with the jocks: he seemed irritated by their vacuous jokes and easy arrogance. He sat with the alternative kids at lunch, looking altogether too comfortable with himself amidst their angst-ridden huddle—but often he didn’t seem to show for lunch at all.

His clothes looked good on him but they weren’t expensive. It was slight, but his accent suggested he wasn’t from my expensive suburb.

Despite all this, when he saw me he turned and smiled. He held a cigarette between his fingers.

‘Hey, Laurence.’

‘I didn’t know you smoked,’ I said.

He grinned. ‘Only sometimes. Don’t tell anyone.’

I watched the billowing curls of it as it poured, silken, over his lips. I watched it disperse into the sky.

Sometimes I felt like I’d love to be a smoker, even if only so I could follow its graceful, inevitable journey, climbing forever upwards, every day.

There’s something so calming about it.

‘Do you want?’

‘Sure.’

He held out the box and I took one, marvelling at the feel of it between my fingers. It was slender, elegantly so, and it seemed to fit there perfectly above the fine swell of my finger joints; it was warm to say that our surroundings were cold. When not lit, the smell was pleasantly dusky. I put it to my lips and he raised the lighter to meet it; I felt, briefly, the heat of the flame on my chin.

I had never smoked before. The truth is I’m horribly, impossibly sheltered—the inevitable result of not leaving the house before the age of seventeen. I didn’t know how to do it and I felt that familiar shame, as I always did when I found myself at a disadvantage against ordinary teenagers, that I pushed fiercely downwards. I could pretend—I would pretend. Mark need never know.

For a few drags I was perfectly content to inhale only enough to fill my mouth, wait a few seconds, and blow it away; but his eyes followed me, a small smile on his lips, and I found myself blushing.

Fuck.

‘I’ve never done it before,’ I said.

He laughed, but he wasn’t laughing at me.

‘That’s cool. Just try to breathe in normally. Don’t breathe too hard, and don’t breathe too soft. Just breathe.’

But did I really want to? I could imagine it, the grey, snaking tendrils; I imagined their progress as they curled slowly down my throat. In my mind I watched the sickened, diseased coils as they squeezed around my lungs, turning everything black. It was, in the short term, an ineffective method of asphyxiation; in the long term it could kill you.

But it was more than that—it was the fingers, yellowing; the hair, skin, nails, growing slowly dull; the rasp in the throat, the smoker’s cough; the fine lines that spread like spiderwebs, almost imperceptibly, growing outwards from my eyes and down the sides of my mouth, quietly ravaging my face. It was the pallor and the lingering smell, and the gasps as I fought for the energy to climb the stairs.

My body is the best and worst thing about me: the idea of harming it filled me with dread. But I wanted to try it, even if only to prove that I could.

And surely I’m too clever to develop an addiction.

I took a deep breath and began coughing uncontrollably. Mark laughed.

‘I take it back,’ he said. ‘I don’t like the idea of you smoking after all.’

He reached out and snatched the cigarette out of my fingers. He dropped it, barely used, and crushed it under his foot.

‘Why don’t you want me to smoke?’

He regarded me for a moment as if the question surprised him; as if his response had been a reflex, entirely unarticulated, and only now had he come to wonder why it was.

He shrugged. ‘It doesn’t suit you.’

Of course it suited me. I was the very embodiment of youthful rebellion. Aesthetically, nothing would suit me more than a cigarette between my lips or a needle still clinging to a vein in my arm, and Mark knew it.

He laughed.

‘Well, maybe. But it’ll ruin that pretty face of yours before long.’

That wasn’t it, either; perhaps it was half of it but it certainly wasn’t what made him snatch it out of my fingers. That wasn’t the reason he wasted a perfectly good cigarette.

But I didn’t know him well enough to push it, so I shrugged. He finished his own and gestured back towards the school gates. ‘Are you off back inside?’

‘Nope. I’m off home.’ I frowned. ‘Or, I’m off for fish and chips. I might come back in later for art.’

Mark nodded, his golden bangs falling over his eyes as he picked up his bag.

‘I reckon I’ll join you.’

***

The nearest chip shop was in Oakwell. It had once been a quiet little village before the city, ever swelling, swallowed it. There was something of a village still to be found in the old stone walls and the empty square, but surrounding it had grown a hundred housing estates, each as grey and ugly as the last; views of the surrounding countryside, which had once spanned every direction, were an ever dwindling species, reduced to the odd small gap between squat houses. They were beautiful still, but their presence only made Oakwell more forlorn.

We sat on the old stone wall outside of the chip shop, watching customers come and go. On a day like today the square was empty; we observed a plastic carrier bag as it blew from one end to the other like a dust devil.

‘There’s something sad about that,’ Mark remarked.

I didn’t say anything.

Mark had an intrinsic ability to detect affected behaviour. In accordance with my strange day I found that I could say nothing right; everything I said came out stilted and false, or ridiculous; and every word he grasped tightly in his jaws and shook until the corpse lay still and blatant by my feet.

With every interaction I stumbled; I missed each hurdle altogether, floundering uselessly, my leaps falling short. I lay on the track, bleeding from a thousand little holes in my knees.

There was something quite surreal about it.

Bloody grandpa. Bloody happy families.

‘Hello? You listening?’

‘Hmm?’

He smiled; a mild, perfectly comfortable thing. There was no hidden meaning behind it and the quiet blatancy of it shocked me—it was just a smile, not at all like Chris’ sly, cryptic smirk, and not even like Tom’s wide, innocent grin. There was nothing for me to dissect.

‘You spaced out there for a second, mate. What’s up?’

‘Nothing. I’m knackered.’

He laughed. ‘Right.’

‘What? I am knackered.’

I found myself avoiding his gaze; I found myself picking away at my fish and chips, my eyes intently following the progress of the little wooden fork in my hand—thank god that two pronged, flimsy absurdity was so useless at picking up food as it was, or my concentration would have looked odd.

And with each mouthful, each heavy mouthful, each fatty, noxious mouthful, glistening wetly even in the bleak daylight, I felt slightly sicker. Everything glittered. The faint sparkling film, the pools of grease darkening the newspaper it was wrapped in—it would have been pretty to look at if I didn’t feel it gradually clogging my arteries. I imagined it sinking, slowly, like dirt, polluting everything it touched.

Have you any idea how many calories are in fish and chips? This is Yorkshire—they rarely fry in vegetable oil here.

‘So,’ he said mildly. ‘Tell me about yourself.’

‘What do you want to know?’

‘I dunno. I’ve seen you around, of course, but you’re a pretty mysterious guy. You’ve got a thing for creepy old buildings but apart from that I’m pretty much drawing a blank.’

I frowned. It took me a moment to decipher exactly what he meant—and once I did I wondered, vaguely, if I had any right to be furious at him for seeing my artwork without permission. I wondered if I could make him apologise.

‘You’ve seen my artwork?’

Mark shrugged. ‘Yeah. A friend of mine wanted to show me his. But once we got into the art department he spent most of his time gushing over how good yours was. Apparently you’re quite the David Hockney.’

‘Giacometti,’ I corrected immediately.

And then I blushed.

Why had I said that? What on earth possessed me to share that with him?

Because, now that I had, he’d expect me to explain myself.

‘The inspiration for my stuff was Giacometti. You know, the guy who did the really tall, spindly statues?’

Mark frowned.

‘Well, that’s where the style came from. It’s not that interesting.’

‘It sounds interesting to me. And you’re pretty amazing at art.’

I didn’t know what to do. In a moment of desperation I glared at him, and he laughed.

‘You don’t like talking about yourself much, do you?’

‘Maybe I just can’t take compliments.’

‘Nah, that’s not it. You didn’t even flinch when I compared you to David Hockney.’

‘If you’d seen David Hockey’s work, you’d know you were lucky I didn’t slap you.’

Mark laughed, louder than necessary; an old man hobbling past shot him an alarmed look and Mark winked at him solicitously. The man turned quickly away.

Damned kids, I heard him think. Bloody delinquents.

‘You’re scaring the locals.’

He snorted. ‘I am the locals.’

I couldn’t help it—I stared. The area was a dump. ‘You live round here?’

‘Right down that street.’

There was a shift, almost unnoticeable; his perfect, easy smile turned to plastic. He placed his chips on the wall and bent down to fasten his shoelace—but really he was giving me time to consider my reaction. I imagined he did that with all the kids in my school; I imagined they all reacted the same.

It was him, holding out a hoop for me to jump, waiting for my response.

I shrugged. What did I care about the size of his house? What did I care if his clothes were handed down from his cousins instead of bought last week at Harvey Nichols? They looked good on him regardless.

And it wasn’t like I had to wear them.

‘You’re a weird one,’ he said as he picked up his chips, but I knew I had passed.

***

Hot water whispered to me all the way home. I was rattling, filled with incessant thoughts and feelings, choking on a cacophony of noise. I needed the silence of falling water and enclosed space, of sounds muffled beyond a blanket of billowing steam; of sweet, merciful oblivion. My fingers shook for a faucet and for peeling off my clothes one by one. I ached to be under the waterfall, passively following the water as it poured over my lips.

It was neither a good day nor a bad day. Just a strange day.

In my haste for the shower I almost missed the familiar figure seated at the kitchen table, seated as if, as he was every time, today was the first time he’d been invited in the house.

Grandpa, seated at the kitchen table, was staying for dinner. I had almost forgotten.

We would be playing happy families that evening.

‘Elijah, my gorgeous boy,’ he said, and I schooled my expression into the usual innocent smile. I reached down for him to kiss me on the cheek.

Occasionally I was struck by the beauty of his accent. He was born in Alexandria, and lived in Cairo; and then Bordeaux, Florence, Salamanca, Lisbon, Geneva and, for the past fifty years, England. He could speak five languages fluently and knew enough to get by in almost as many again. English was only his third language. His accent, an eloquent amalgamation of everywhere he had ever lived, was strange and lovely and entirely unplaceable.

But mostly, when I thought about him, my mind was on other things.

‘How are you, my darling?’

‘I’m fine thank you, grandpa. How are you?’

He sighed sadly. ‘I’m doing well, my son. Sadly, when you lose your wife of fifty years…’

Seated opposite him, my mother rolled her eyes.

‘Have you visited Gina yet?’ she asked, not at all subtly.

Grandpa regarded her warily.

‘I thought I would go after dinner, just to say hello.’ He turned to me and smiled. ‘Have you seen Jane lately, Elli?’

‘Yes,’ I said. ‘We spoke only last week.’

It was a lie. Jane, my cousin, the impetuous little monster, my elder by one year and, formerly, my best friend—we no longer really spoke. When we were younger she would throw these wonderful temper tantrums, beautiful things to watch; she was the bane of her mother’s existence until one day we sat down for coffee and I realised, watching her panicked eyes as she tried to decide what muffin to buy, that my Jane had withered away. My Jane had been pushed out of her skin, blown away on the wind, to make room for the overwhelming vastness of her mother’s opinions; what was left was a pretty husk, an empty space, and a young woman who couldn’t muster the personality to choose between blueberry and chocolate chip.

And my mother and Gina were identical twins. Identical, in every possible way. I couldn’t look at Jane without knowing with a terrifying certainty that, if I was not careful, that could easily be me.

So I passed my driving test and I left the house, and I didn’t speak to them for a year.

I made my way to the bathroom and locked the door. In the mute frenzy of flinging off my clothes I tripped and banged my head against the sink; I cursed, searching for the soothing hum of the bathroom fan and discovering that I had yet to turn it on. Without it the mirror would steam up and, if I was unlucky, the tiles; and when she discovered it she would be furious.

But I was naked and shivering, and the water grew hot so deliciously fast. It was only a moment away across the room but I really couldn’t be bothered.

Mum would hate it. She’d throw a fit.

The thought made me smile.

I turned on the faucet, waited a moment, and stepped in.

—And I was immersed in oblivion, drowning in the delirious ecstasy of it. All sentience left me, all wriggling conscious thoughts; they were swept away under the cascade until I was nothing but a statue, a carven figure hugging its knees, made of and filled with stone. I was a thousand years old and more, because time meant nothing to me—I hadn’t been born but formed, slowly, by the water that ran down my face. Before I had been too hot, in the way that applying heat to atoms causes them to vibrate—I had been vibrating with life, teeming with it, unbearable and noisy, but slowly in the hot water I began to cool until everything was still.

And there was nothing but the water as it swept over my head, and the water as it ran over my skin. I reached a tentative hand to my face, feelings the contours of it, knowing that I didn’t need to be handsome or beautiful because there was nobody around to judge me for it.

I was a sack full of darkness again.

I was free.

I stepped out sometime later. I put on an old, worn T-shirt, the fabric threadbare and soft, the V-neck stretched with use. I put on a pair of jeans and, still dripping wet, made my way downstairs.

I made dinner. It would have been risotto without the wine but we’d had cheese already, last Friday; we’d had chicken sometime last week, my mother was sure, so we had to have vegetarian; and so I made watercress soup. I stir-fried some broccoli with chilli and garlic before being told that frying made food carcinogenic; I turned the heat off and steamed it instead.

I prayed that it went soggy.

Victoria came and set the table, arranging the cutlery and the glasses perfectly. She was so happy in that moment, playing happy families for our guest, a joyful little smile teasing her lips; I was reminded for a second that she was only a child, really, hiding behind her styled hair and her pierced ears. She was a child still playing with nail polish.

I watched as she crouched to place a fork, viewing it from the horizontal so as to ensure its perfection. She replaced it three times before moving onto the next.

I had to look away.

The doorbell marked our father’s arrival, and Victoria went to answer.

***

Just before we came to sit down, as he always did, grandpa pulled out the chocolates he had bought us for inviting him. He pressed the box into my hands and kissed my cheek.

‘I know you like dark chocolate,’ he said. ‘So I always get you this box.’

I looked down at the box, wondering how much it had cost to make. I wondered how many cacao beans had been harvested, how many trees had been felled for the cardboard, how many millilitres of crude oil the earth had lost in the making of its transparent plastic wrapping. I smiled at him and thanked him, and placed it on the side by the bin.

We weren’t allowed chocolate except around Christmas. You can have it in moderation, mum would say, but she had long ago forgotten what the word meant.

I sat down at the table as dad began to serve, knowing that I was calm. I had to be calm; I had just had a shower. I had just watched it all wash away down the drain. The clothes I wore were so comfortable, mine for so long as to be a part of me; no amount of fabric conditioner could strip them of the essence of me, of their subtle smell of me, of the shape of my body that they had slowly moulded themselves to match. I was calm, and utterly comfortable.

Except that Victoria was retelling some amusing tale she had heard at school, and dad was laughing to it, and they laughed so eagerly, so widely and easily, so happily as to cause a smile to break through grandpa’s sorrowful expression—and I wondered how they could possibly bear it. Dad had served grandpa, and Victoria, was moving quickly onto me, and would soon have served mum—how could he possibly be smiling? How could he possibly be smiling when he knew what was about to come?

He apportioned his own soup. He reached for the broccoli and apportioned himself three serving-spoonfuls; he hesitated for a moment before reaching for the bread.

Perhaps without the hesitation our mother wouldn’t have noticed.

‘No,’ she said loudly, and the hand stopped, the roll already taken, hovering above the plate. The room went suddenly quiet.

‘What’s wrong with you?’ she snapped. ‘You don’t need that bread.’

I watched him consider objecting; I watched the vague look of irritation across his face. I saw him think briefly, consider it, weigh out the options, the incentives and the consequences; I saw the moment he decided against it. I watched him shrug, and sigh, and place the bread back in the basket.

It happened every meal—and it was cumulative, gradually ebbing and flowing like the tide; each meal he would put one too many things on his plate, so that with each meal her reaction grew slightly bigger.

The sight of it, so unnecessary as to be obscene, so far beyond the normal as to be ugly to look at, made me furious. It was broccoli—it was broccoli. Our meal consisted of broccoli. How on earth could you begrudge a person a bread-roll, when all we were eating was broccoli?

And I hated that she talked to him like that—like he wasn’t her husband, her partner and her equal. He was pathetic, it was true; but even so, she spoke to him like he was her third child.

‘It’s only bread,’ I said suddenly. ‘What’s wrong with bread? There isn’t an ounce of fat in this entire meal, and broccoli is mostly water. Why can’t he have one bread-roll?’

‘Your father doesn’t need any more food on his plate,’ she snapped at me. ‘He’s nearly fifty. He has to watch out for his weight. And you fried that broccoli.’

‘And fried broccoli is going to turn him into a whale? That one roll is going to kill him? Besides—you’re the same age as he is!’

‘It’s fine,’ said dad, with a warning glance at me.

I should stop, I knew. I could feel it rising in my chest; a billowing, writhing, furious dust cloud. I hated her with such virulence that it threatened to burst from my lips, reduced to a torrent of mindless, vicious gibberish.

I should stop.

‘I don’t think it’s fine. I think it’s ridiculous. I think, if you want bread, then maybe you should be able to take bread. We’re eating a meal made entirely of vegetables, after all.’

‘And I think how your father and I interact is none of your business!’

The table descended into silence. She glared at me, ready to pounce.

And I knew she would. It would take only the tiniest of nudges, the subtlest of eye-rolls, and the conversation would start all over again. She would look ridiculous, of course, and our meal would be ruined.

Should I do it? I shouldn’t do it.

And yet…

When no one but she was looking, I rolled my eyes.

And there was a change in temperature, a slight permutation in the air pressure. A switch had been turned, just like that, and something snapped within her; and within moments she was screaming at me while we all tried to eat.

And I couldn’t hear a word of it.

Victoria sat in silence, not eating. She was staring at her plate but she wasn’t really seeing it at all. I wanted to shove her, forcefully, out of the house; I wanted to shout in her ears until our mother’s insanity could no longer be heard.

A few weeks before Victoria decided to make a snack made from celery, peanut butter and raisins—Ants On a Log, it’s called. Celery, peanut butter, and raisins. Mum watched her like a hawk as she ate it and, when she offered some to dad, she refused to let him eat it. She told him that peanut butter was high in fat, and raisins were high in sugar.

She was right. But peanut butter is high in good fats, and he wasn’t planning to eat the whole jar of it; he was planning to eat about a teaspoonful, spread thinly on a stick of celery. Celery, which the body burns more calories in digesting than it absorbs from the celery itself.

Raisins are dried grapes. They are, it must be said, a fruit. How terrible can they possibly be for you?

 ***

Later, as I stared at the ceiling, she came and sat by my feet on the bed.

‘We don’t have a relationship,’ she said sadly. ‘I don’t know why, but we don’t have one, Elijah. I want a relationship with you.’

I glanced at her impassively, diminished now in her fluffy pink dressing gown. She was sitting on the bed, looking sad, her hand absently stroking my socked foot—and the feel of it there made me shiver, the knowledge that she was touching me made me want to throw up. Since I had started avoiding them she came to see me in my room sometimes, sad like this, and she would hug me; and I would sit there impassive, still as stone, waiting for it to be over. The smell of her hair made my skin crawl.

‘I don’t know why we don’t have a relationship, Elijah,’ she was saying. ‘I don’t know why you pulled away.’

I was six when I first came to understand that she was irrational. I would cry in my room, lonely and confused, because I couldn’t make her see. I couldn’t make her hear what I was saying. I couldn’t make her understand—and dad, who might have been able to, used to tell me to be quiet.

And I was crying because I was six, and because I didn’t understand why.

‘Think of it as a game, Elijah,’ he used to say tiredly. ‘Think of it as a game. You don’t have to make her see that you’re right—just knowing that you are right is enough.’

But that wasn’t how it worked. That’s never how it works. The more powerful one imposes his will, regardless of how wrong he is; if he’s powerful enough, right and wrong cease to hold any meaning. I still got grounded, even if I knew I was right.

I hated her, sitting on the end of my bed, self-righteous even in her self-pity. I longed to scream at her; because, somewhere, my childhood had been lost in her screams and shouts and her anger. In real life, every day, when I encountered people that weren’t her, I wondered whether the way I spoke to them sounded like her and I simply couldn’t tell. Because we can never see our own faults, and we always turn out like our parents.

And so I had gotten into the habit of checking myself periodically; of stopping in the middle of something and taking a mental step back, surveying myself, before reaching my conclusion: no, today you did not act like your mother. Or, yes, perhaps you did.

Whenever I found something of her in my behaviour it scared me senseless.

At that moment my phone rang. I frowned at it across the room and glanced at my watch. It was ten. Could it be Tom?

She reached over and handed it to me wordlessly, obviously not impressed that I was being called so late.

It wasn’t Tom, it was Chris.

‘Hello?’

‘Hey, sexy.’

I blushed. ‘Hey. What’s going on?’

‘Nothing. I was just wondering what you’re doing tomorrow.’

‘Tomorrow? Nothing, as far as I can tell.’

‘Okay. You want to meet me in Starbucks?’

I glanced at my mother, her expression perfectly blank. She couldn’t hear what Chris was saying—I found myself wishing that she could. I found myself wondering, absently, what her face would look like if I put the phone on loudspeaker.

There’s a boy on the other end of the phone, I thought at her. There’s a boy on the end of the line, and he’s just dying to fuck me.

She knew already, of course. But I wondered how she’d react if I rubbed it in her face.

‘Starbucks sounds fine,’ I said. ‘I’ll be there straight after school?’

‘Sure. Then we can spend lots of time together.’

‘Fine. Well…bye then.’

Chris chuckled and the line went dead. I could almost see his sneering, curling smile.

It almost made me smile.

I turned back to my mother, her expression stony, and suddenly I didn’t feel the need to scream at her anymore.

Suddenly—thankfully—I was back to not caring.

‘I’m tired,’ I said, not even bothering to fake a yawn. ‘I think I’m going to go to bed.’

She stood up and left.