51

Lauren, 2000

Pumpkin, the rescue cat, kept most birds out of our backyard. Only the same bold robin appeared every morning, a ball on stick legs. I was sure it was the same one to which I used to feed cornflakes before that August. He flew down and perched on the red-brick wall, head cocked, watching me through the kitchen window, like an unwanted friend who refused to accept the friendship was over.

An associative fear, Janet, the therapist, called it. Not as disabling as many phobias, dogs, for example, or crowds. I was lucky, she said, since birds kept their distance. But if a pigeon strutted too close, I’d physically recoil, even though I knew it made no rational sense. My mouth would dry, my heart start fluttering, like a trapped thing.

I never had another seizure like the one in the aviary. But it always felt as if I could. Like there was a blister-thin layer between normal and the other place. But Mum wouldn’t let me take the pills: she didn’t believe in ‘big pharma’ or medicating children, she told the doctor.

‘You’ll beat this, Laurie,’ she’d say, lying beside me on her futon where we then both slept, stroking my hair off my face, trying to feed me hope in little pipette drops. ‘It’s okay to feel sad, okay? We’ll find our way out of this, we really will.’

But Mum had purple shadows under her eyes too. She took compassionate leave from her TA job at the local primary and started home-schooling me again. Between lessons on algebra, Leach pottery and suffragette history – Mum played fast and loose with the national curriculum – I read and read, tumbling out of myself and into the pages. Sometimes I’d look up and Mum would be standing in the doorway: she’d smile brightly but something in her eyes was flinty and frightened. I’d never seen Mum frightened before.

My fault. I was crushed by guilt for not being the ‘old Lauren’ or strong like Kat and Flora, who visited us in Oxford, now awkward around each other but otherwise the same. Kat whispered, ‘Do you blame us?’ And I shook my head: I blamed myself. And I was embarrassed that I was ‘ill’ and that their glamorous, warring mothers were squeezed into our Jericho kitchen, forced together by crisis – the crisis being me – and talking in hushed voices over Mum’s courgette cake. I longed for them to leave. Tiredness sat in my bones.

Every couple of weeks or so, Dad’s car would growl down the narrow, terraced street, and our neighbours would nosily appear at their windows. He always brought a stash of new books for me and, for Mum, a food hamper from Fortnum & Mason, which Mum was very cool about until the moment he left. She’d then fall on it excitedly, unwrapping the cheeses and sniffing, transported. I loved seeing my parents together, such a rare sight normally. I loved the way Dad would make Mum laugh. Tease her about the tea: ‘Are you trying to kill me with calendula?’ He’d pick up her guitar and start strumming. Beg her to play an Irish tune on the fiddle – ‘Just one, Dix!’ She’d try not to look pleased, refuse flat, then say, ‘Oh, go on, then.’ Dad would look so happy, eyes half shut, listening, and I’d curl beside him on the sofa, inhaling the studio smells on his shirt, listening to the percussion of his heart, yawning, rubbing my eyes. Not wanting to sleep.

Sleep meant nightmares. They were mostly about birds – Bertha flying off with one of my fingers in her secateurs beak – and the eclipse, the sun with a parrot’s bite taken out of it. Trying to stay awake, I’d build alternative Augusts in my mind, all ending with me and Gemma hugging goodbye and promising to write, Grandpa waving at the window, his binoculars around his neck. Or I’d sit on the stairs in my nightie, listening to Mum chatting on the phone: ‘We’re just about hanging in there, Becca’; ‘Poor thing still can’t remember, Lou’; and mutterings about the patchiness of NHS mental-health services. Waiting lists. Then one night I heard her say, ‘Hello, Viv, it’s me again. Just checking in. How are you doing, lovey?’ I didn’t know how they could bear to speak – one mother with a daughter, one without – and rushed back to my bedroom, hands over my ears, wanting to die.

Then spring blew in. Daffodil shoots pushed up in our patio pots. I returned to my own bed. School, half-days at first, then full. At the weekends, Mum took me to museums. Baby steps, she said. Oxford, then London. There, we’d meet Dad, who’d take us around galleries for an hour or so.

‘Feeling chipper today, Laurie?’ he’d ask. I’d nod, even though I always felt like I’d mislaid something precious but couldn’t work out what it was. But I didn’t want to waste time talking about the broken stuff. ‘A greatest hits tour,’ he called it, arm outstretched, hailing a black cab. He wanted to show us his favourites: Da Vinci, Gentileschi, Rembrandt, Freud, Bacon, Rego and Auerbach. Point out their geniuses, failings and tricks, revisions and mistakes. They all screwed up at some point, he’d say, and I was never sure if he was talking about their lives or art or himself. Or if he was talking to me or Mum. I wanted to live in those huge, soaring windowless galleries, without the worry of sky. Walking and talking. Eating sticky brownies in gallery cafés. Sitting on smooth oak benches between my parents in front of huge paintings until the colours started to waver, or the sitter winked.

In the National Gallery one day, when Mum was in the Ladies, we stood in front of Gainsborough’s The Painter’s Daughters Chasing a Butterfly. ‘This is my favourite painting,’ I declared, relieved to have finally found one, like when you get a best friend.

‘Oh, excellent choice, Laurie.’ He leaned forward, his hands clasped behind his back. ‘Girls and Birdcage,’ he said, after a while. ‘Well, what do you think? Shall I finish the damn thing, or destroy it?’

The question was too important to answer straight away. I studied the little girl lunging after the butterfly, the big sister holding her hand. And I thought of my first day ever at Rock Point, Kat and Flora helping me down the rocky beach path. The driftwood bonfire they built, and the marshmallows they carefully toasted for me, stacked on a stick, making sure I didn’t burn my fingers. It made me feel warm inside.

‘I haven’t been able to work on it since … Well, you know.’ His voice went funny.

‘Finish it, Dad. It’s good.’

He did. And it was. It was beautiful. A few weeks later he sold it. When I asked Mum why Dad hadn’t kept the painting, she was separating a stringy ball of pizza dough on the kitchen table. The bronze autumn sun was pouring through the kitchen window, making her nose stud glint. ‘I’m not sure he knows himself yet, Laurie. But he’ll tell you one day, when he’s worked it out. Here, catch.’ The ball of dough met my palm with a satisfying slap, a puff of flour. We laughed and, without saying another word, started to knead the dough into life.