Everybody knows that

I’m a very late starter. Or is it the same for everybody? Do we all realise halfway through life how much we’ve failed to understand even though it was staring us in the face?

I always thought I was clever, understood the world, and was a good judge of character. After all, I could read before I started school, could express myself well, and was good at doing sums in my head. I knew I had to steer clear of Frank Häberle and the caretaker, and I could rely on Simmi Sanders and the needlework teacher. But as for the bigger picture, structures and power relations, I didn’t have a clue — that my life might have been different, for example. That must be what they call security. Feeling safe. A happy childhood.

I can still remember the exact moment when I realised: Fuck! If my parents had lived somewhere else, we’d have had a different kitchen floor.

I was in my twenties when this flash of insight came to me, after I’d already moved several times — first out of my parents’ home to Berlin, and then a few times in the city.

This time I’d landed a really fantastic kitchen floor: dark green, 1930s pulped chipboard in excellent condition.

My parents had 1960s West German PVC tiles, thirty by thirty with a streaky grey pattern — which meant that it kept changing direction. There was nothing wrong with that floor: I had grown up on it just fine. And it was easy to clean. You practically had to get stuck to it before my mother said: ‘This could do with a mop’ and then I would shake some scouring powder over it and scrub it with a bare brush, amazed at how black the water was that I poured down the toilet afterwards.

The floor was the floor. And if people had a different floor, it was because they were different people.

The toilet cistern had a black lever on the side. I would push it down to flush away the dirty water. It was never renewed, not even when all kinds of water-saving flush systems became fashionable, or when the mechanism got so old that it broke, and the lever snapped off from wear and tear. My parents never told the landlord. In all the years that we lived in that flat, I never once saw the landlord. Perhaps that’s why it took me so long to work out that there were flats you rented and flats you owned — because my parents treated their rented flat as if it were their own, calling a plumber if there was no way round it and paying him out of their own pocket. Why? To avoid arguments, I imagine. To pretend they were free.

‘Why are you so angry?’ Renate, a friend of my mother’s, asked me when we were sitting together in a café.

I flinched because I thought I was very composed, sitting there drinking my tea and talking to her about all kinds of things. She, however, only wanted to talk about the book I’d written, in which I accused mothers like mine of saddling their daughters with their dreams of freedom, without giving them a clue how to put them into practice. Renate had taken my book personally. Rightly so, I thought, even though I hadn’t been thinking of her in particular when I was writing it.

‘No generation can avoid being blamed by the next,’ I answered.

‘Well then, good luck with your own children,’ she said, and I nodded.

‘Yes, thanks a lot.’

I am a last-word freak. But so is she.

‘You’re welcome.’ She said it with that facial expression: poorly disguised smugness, fake meekness.

I can do that expression too. Mothers pass it down to their daughters, along with their unfulfilled dreams. In fact, this expression tells of your dreams while your lips stay tightly pursed, and you say nothing. Lips pursed, chin jutting forward slightly — Renate is a pro at that expression. But so am I.

And Bea has started doing it too, and I can’t stand how some things just keep on playing out forever. I’d rather be angry, talk, write, and spit in Renate’s tea, so she really sees for once what being angry means.

‘Do you remember the floor tiles we had in our flat?’ I asked.

‘No, why?’

‘They were ugly. And it didn’t have to be that way! But I had to work that out for myself. You didn’t talk to us.’

‘Of course we did, all the time! Don’t pretend we didn’t.’

‘Not about floor tiles and why we had them.’

Renate raised her eyebrows and gave me a derisive look. That’s another thing she’s good at: making you feel that you’re out of your mind.

She used to do it back when she came over to visit my mother, and I would join them and tell them some story — about school, friends, or the injustice of the world. Renate would raise her eyebrows, along with doubts about what I’d said, pointing out things I’d overlooked, doing her best to unnerve me. And I let her, instead of using her objections as arguing practice.

These days it’s different. These days I argue back. So I told her I was now convinced my mother had thought the floor tiles were ugly too, but had accepted them because they were all she could afford, they just happened to be there, and had nothing to do with her. But that’s where she’d made a mistake; now, the floor stood for her. Well, okay, maybe that was a slight exaggeration: for me, my mother is the woman who stood on that floor.

Renate’s eyebrows stayed raised.

‘Don’t you get it?’ I asked, furious. ‘I should have known what she really wanted, and how we ended up with the things I thought were normal, and what other options there might have been, and why she didn’t take them!’

‘And what has that got to do with you?’

‘Everything! Because I stood on that floor too!

Renate shook her head and ordered more tea. Went to the bathroom, clearly didn’t want to talk about it. But now she has to, since my mother can’t: she died before I realised what I needed to ask her, where I needed to dig deeper because, as I was to find out from Renate, her silence was deliberate, not an oversight. Neither Renate nor my mother wanted to burden their children with anecdotes and old stories, especially not ones about their lack of options, unfavourable starts in life, or lesser evils.

‘We wanted you children to be free to follow your own path.’

‘Yes, exactly,’ I said. ‘Clean slates all round.’

Renate wasn’t in the mood for my irony. She preferred to be the one to tease.

‘Your mother would have obviously preferred terrazzo flooring in a chalet on Lake Geneva.’

Yeah, yeah. Obviously.

List for Bea: pulped chipboard floors are my personal favourite, but they’re ridiculously expensive these days because they’re so niche. Pulped chipboard has become a luxury for enthusiasts only, so forget it.

Floorboards in the kitchen might look nice at first, but they’re prone to grease stains, and all the dirt falls into the gaps. You know the kind from our flat: a floor like that is very hard to clean.

On the other hand, a tiled floor, which is easy to mop, isn’t exactly low maintenance either because you have to mop it every day. It doesn’t absorb or hide anything unless it has a streaky or speckled pattern — and then, Bea, it’s absolutely hideous. Even worse than PVC, in fact, because tiles are cold underfoot, except if you have underfloor heating. Let’s just say that neutral terracotta tiles with underfloor heating are okay if you have a cleaner who takes care of them all the time.

I’ve never had a cleaner. I’ve worked as a cleaner, but that isn’t part of my list about floors — or is it?

Of course it is. Definitely.

I’ve decided to tell you everything. Nothing is natural; everything is constructed and connected; everything helps or harms somebody or other; and anything that’s taken for granted is particularly suspicious.

Bea is fourteen and needs to be taught the facts of life. She has to be initiated and introduced to the world of kitchen floors, the division and distribution of labour, cleaning jobs, labour costs, accommodation costs, basic and additional costs, cost-benefit calculations, and the whole business of setting off and settling up, both financially and emotionally.

Unlike my mother, I won’t presume that she’ll find out everything she needs to know in time; unlike Renate and her friends, I won’t hold back for fear of having a negative influence on my children, of discouraging them or stunting their development. Quite the opposite: I imagine arming them with knowledge and stories, so they don’t go out into the world as naïve, carefree souls, but are, instead, loaded with insights and analytical powers. Munition and weapons are heavy.

Speaking of weapons.

A letter came for me. It’s addressed to me and contains a neatly folded sheet of paper, which is the termination of the lease on our flat. No, that’s wrong. It’s a copy of the termination of the lease on our flat for my attention. Because our flat is really Frank’s; Frank’s name is on the contract, and he’s terminated the lease.

We’ve lived here for four years. When Frank and Vera moved into K23, we took over their flat. A stroke of luck, because ours was already too small with three kids — and by then, we had four. What a stroke of luck that we knew somebody with an eighteen-year-old lease who no longer needed it.

But what comes around goes around.

This letter is a comeuppance for what I’ve done, and that’s why it’s not addressed to Sven, or to us both, just to me. This whole mess is my fault. I put Frank in a position that made him do it. I only have myself to blame for everything that’s happened, and that’s what I’m doing here in my broom cupboard, my two square metres next to our old-style Berlin kitchen, which is really the pantry, which is really the rear section of the loo that it shares a window with. The kids are at school or childcare, and Sven is in his studio, which he’s only temporarily able to lease, until the investor has reworded and resubmitted the rejected planning application. It all comes down to the wording. I stare at the letter.

Dear Sir/Madam it says impersonally, addressing the housing agent, and for me, there’s an extra stamp saying: For Your Attention, and no salutation whatsoever. Just the green rubber stamp. Very official and very strange, because Frank isn’t an official, he’s an old friend. Where on earth did he get that stamp? Couldn’t he have phoned?

No. Frank doesn’t want to talk to me.

‘There’s no talking to you,’ Vera would say.

Vera sent me an email months ago, which said: ‘This is where we part ways.’ Which I hadn’t interpreted as: ‘You better figure out pretty quickly where you’re going to live, because I’ll get Frank on to you next.’

I’d understood that she was terminating our friendship, and didn’t want to see me anymore.

She’d also written ‘I love you’, and it wasn’t until the termination of the lease arrived that I realised there are two ways of saying this: simply and passionately, because it’s true. Or threateningly, to show that action will be taken. Parents talk like this. And gods.

When I held that termination letter in my hands, I realised Vera had been using it in the second instance, because even though I’m not her child, I’m a very, very old friend, a member of her chosen family. In other words, family rules apply to me too.

In Vera’s family, love was always emphasised very strongly, no matter what horrors were going on at the time or followed later. Vera’s declaration of love should have made me suspicious; after all, I had ‘seriously broken the rules’ and therefore ‘shouldn’t be surprised’.

The rule I had broken was: ‘Don’t wash your dirty laundry in public.’ It’s a nice phrase that holds families together. ‘Laundry’ stands for privacy, ‘dirty’ for ‘unpresentable’, and ‘wash’ for spilling the beans, snitching, and telling stories. And when I say that telling stories is my profession, Ulf says: ‘You can’t use that as a smokescreen.’ Because in the end, I chose my profession.

There’s a children’s book by Leo Lionni that defends the profession of the artist. The book was a bestseller forty years ago and is now a classic, but that doesn’t mean its message has sunk in.

In the story, a group of mice is busy collecting food supplies for winter, and it’s hard going. One of them lies in the sun all day and says he’s collecting smells, colours, and impressions. Will he have the right to eat from the supplies when winter comes? But behold: at some point, during the darkest, hungriest period towards the end of winter, the lazy mouse’s moment comes, and he saves the other mice by describing the colours, smells, and tastes out there in the world. ‘You’re a poet,’ say the other mice, and the artist mouse blushes and nods.

I wonder whether Leo was also chased out of his flat because of his story? I bet some of his friends with full-time jobs recognised themselves in the depiction of the humdrum gatherer mice, and his ex-wife said how arrogant he was to recast himself from failed breadwinner to world saviour. But who knows? Perhaps they all laughed, and Leo’s book was a favourite birthday present for friends and relatives; perhaps they were proud, and grateful to him for managing to express their ambivalence and their never-ending struggle with life choices.

In any case, Vera, Friederike, Ulf, Ingmar, and the rest were not grateful to me for finding words for the mess we were in. Quite the opposite, in fact: they even thought ‘mess’ was an unsuitable description. Because everything was fine.

What’s good: to have made it this far. To have made it to higher ground — or, at least, to have got your kids into the school of your choice, which is better than the local school in any number of ways.

Everybody’s still healthy. And cheerful — or, at least, not bad-tempered enough that something has to change. We’re still at the stage when taking out your bad temper on others is enough — on the ones who don’t behave the way you think they should.

What sucks: calling this good life ‘a mess’.

In the darkest moment, instead of telling stories about the sun and the colours, I talked about how dark the moment was. Only some mice found this comforting, whereas others didn’t; and some, who played a role in my story of the darkness, felt betrayed and exploited.

‘Who do you think you are to impose your views on others?’ they asked. ‘And who, may we ask, gave you permission?’

I gave myself permission, the poet mouse.

In the darkness, it’s dark, and in my broom cupboard, it’s lonely.

The statutory period of notice on a lease is three months. We have to leave this place by the end of the year.

Do you even know, Bea, that the lease is in Frank’s name? I’m afraid I’ve left you as much in the dark as my parents did me. I’m afraid you might also take our kitchen floor for granted.

I took a gamble on the flat. And lost. Only myself to blame. What comes around goes around.

No one talks about things, at least not the important things, such as personal hardships and your own part in them. Twenty-five per cent of the whole sum — I wonder what that is in euros?

I can write what I like. The only sound I can hear is the humming of my laptop. The humming is disturbingly loud these days. Who knows, maybe it’ll give up the ghost soon. I need a back-up, a security copy.

Did you know that writing provides security? It’s an insurance, a reassurance, a linchpin for the future. There it is in writing, see? Yes, I remember!

I can’t provide you with a house, Bea, not even a flat; but I can tell you everything I know.

I don’t care if you want to hear it or not. I’m Resi, the narrator of this story and a writer by profession. Sucks for you: why did you choose a mother like me?

Because that’s another widespread myth: that children choose their parents. That before they’re born, they are little souls floating on their way to find the right couple. It’s like the idea that parents get the child they deserve — or need — to become real grown-ups.

Do you like stories like these? I don’t.

But you see, I’ve heard people telling them and seen their effects. That’s another thing I realised too late: the strength of stories and the power of telling them.

I remember that parents’ evening at your school a few years ago when things got slightly out of hand, and men with greying temples and strident voices kept interrupting each other — late-in-life fathers who, as I found out later on, were all journalists for big broadsheets.

Of course! I thought. Some people are journalists because they like the sheer power of it. It isn’t just the medium of choice for introverts and stutterers. It can also be a way of hammering home your point, opinions, and analyses.

In any case, the tone of the statements at that parents’ evening was: ‘I’m going to wipe the floor with you’, and the circle of chairs formed an arena into which the talkers stepped and flexed their muscles to scare off the others. In their children’s best interests, it goes without saying.

Back then I didn’t have a book to my name yet. No one said afterwards: ‘That’s Resi, the writer.’ They said: ‘That’s Resi, Bea’s mum’, and that should have meant I was qualified to have my say at the parents’ meeting. But no. In groups randomly thrown together by fate, who you are is what counts. And who you are is nothing less than the extent of the power you possess — which is especially depressing when the points on the agenda are: ‘Treating each other with respect’, ‘How to stop bullying’, and ‘Each person is an individual’.

You know, Bea, I’m a late-in-life mother myself these days. I notice how I run out of steam, especially at parents’ meetings. I’m not optimistic or curious like I was when I used to go to parents’ evenings at your kindergarten. I was in my early thirties then and all enthusiastic about being a mum. Now I’m in my mid-forties and want these dickheads to leave me in peace. I despise them, really. Fear seeps from their pores, and they throw their weight around and stir things up and try to find something in common with people who will protect their interests. They form little cliques, exclude the weaker ones, and lie in wait for the others to make fools of themselves.

I’m exactly the same.

There’s nothing you can do, it’s the fear. There’s nothing worse than groups randomly thrown together by fate, and nothing more terrifying than a bunch of people who think they have to come to an agreement at all costs.

But staying away isn’t an option. I have to protect you by marking my territory as a parent — and not just any old parent, but one with power! Enough power at least to get through a parents’ evening! Yes, that’s right, darling. It’s a vicious circle.

When it comes to being power hungry, children come in very handy. You can use them as a shield, even when they’re not your own. The line about it being ‘in the best interests of the children’ always works: who wants kids to suffer? The hypocrisy of it is shocking.

But what should I do? Stop going? Avoid parents’ evenings? Avoid parents’ social nights? No one seems to realise the irony of calling them ‘social nights’: they’re the most anti-social gatherings I’ve ever been to.

‘Don’t be like that, Resi!’ they say. ‘It’s just a name.’ ‘Don’t be so negative!’

I now know the power of words, clichés, and stories; but the solution can’t be to stop using them. I’m a leftie — in other words, pro-justice, pro-respect, and pro-everybody-being-equal — and I think the world still has a long way to go. But if everybody is equal, that doesn’t settle the question of who is right and who gets to decide. Quite the opposite, in fact. People mistrust claims to power, so much so that they sometimes prefer doing nothing than being suspected of claiming power. Lefties are terrified of blame, precisely because they are so pro-justice and pro-respect. But the opposite of power is powerlessness, and the opposite of having your say is letting others have it.

‘You abuse words,’ says Friederike. ‘You use them to wipe the floor with people.’

Is she right?

At parents’ evenings, I do see my words as a weapon. It’s calming to picture myself later describing how insane it all was, and to imagine shaking up the world with my report.

But that’s ridiculous: that’s not how it works.

Exactly the same thing will happen at the next parents’ evening; or, as Erich Kästner put it: ‘You can’t prevent the catastrophe with a typewriter.’

I’m just holding myself together. I write for my sake, no one else’s, or at any rate not for Friederike, who thinks my writing is mired in clichés. Why do the journalist dads have to be greying at the temples, for God’s sake?

And if I go even further and say that the people in the group who said nothing all evening were the young women in yoga pants and tailored fleeces and Birkenstocks made of vegan leather, then, Bea, you’ll think it’s beside the point. But these are important indicators of reality and have to be included in a text, even if they make it unbearable; even if it pinches, and bites, and bursts with clichés.

I would have preferred things to have turned out quite differently.

I could start writing sci-fi. Fantasy.

As I was going up the stair

I met a man who wasn’t there.

He wasn’t there again today

I wish, I wish he’d stay away.

I can’t do it, Bea. No matter what I do, it always comes down to the same thing. I like rhymes — and it’s comforting when a word reminds me of my childhood.

Bähmullig, for example. Do you know what a Bähmull is? A tetchy — or just pretty annoying — fourteen-year-old, say, but possibly even forty-year-old, who turns up her nose at everything. A perfectionist who quickly gets in a huff. In a word, a fusspot.

Maybe it’s my vanity that makes me want to preserve this word in literature. Somebody else could do it; after all, there are enough books, millions of stories, so why does it have to be mine? But if you start thinking like this, you could start asking: What’s the use of me? There are enough women. The world is overpopulated, on the verge of collapse.

‘You don’t have to write,’ Friederike said. ‘Please don’t act like it was anything but your own, selfish decision.’

She had recognised herself, and she didn’t like what she saw. No one wants to be a fusspot.

‘Don’t be like that,’ Ulf said to me in the same café where I had sat with Renate, as well as Friederike, Ulf, and Ellen. I met them one after the other and had to explain the reasons for what I’d done. Ulf just wanted to be a go-between, he said, because he hadn’t been as deeply affected as the others.

‘Affected by what?’

‘You know exactly what.’

I said nothing.

‘Imagine somebody wrote about you.’

‘Okay.’

‘How would you like it?’

‘I wouldn’t have to like it.’

‘You’ve exposed people’s private lives!’

‘I’m sorry.’

‘It doesn’t seem that way to me. It seems like you’d do it again at the drop of a hat.’

‘Yes, I would. Because I think it’s necessary.’

‘Hurting others is necessary?’

‘Yes, I’m afraid so.’

‘And then you’re surprised when they stop talking to you?’

‘Yes. I’m surprised that they don’t understand. I was just using them as examples. But it was about the bigger picture.’

‘About you.’

‘Of course it was about me! I’m the one condemned to silence!’

‘That’s what I was worried about.’

‘What?’

‘That you’d make yourself out to be the victim.’

Ulf, my old friend. Not as deeply affected, but at his wits’ end all the same.

Speaking of wits. Ulf was top of the class, even did Latin. He studied it as a hobby when he was still at school. Always make sure you pick the A-class boys, Bea, forget the B class! My parents thought that only applied to Benzes.

Ulf believes in good. I’ll have to make a show of understanding or else there’ll never be peace.

Peace comes when people agree on a story, on who plays which role and what the script is. Things can’t settle down while everybody is fighting for the role of victim. As long as I decide who’s who.

So, there’s Friederike. The fusspot. The princess whose whims everybody tries to satisfy. She can’t help herself. It’s her role to be the fusspot, and it always takes two: one (usually a woman) to say no to everything and another (usually a man) to keep making new suggestions and do everything right. Fusspots and do-righters belong together like peas in a pod. You could almost write a rhyme about them.

And then there’s Ulf, my go-between, with whom I went to primary school and who was my first proper boyfriend. Back then, at Gymnasium, our university-track secondary school.

That’s where we met Friederike, who nowadays says I should have thought beforehand whether I could afford to have children. ‘Everybody knows that,’ she said when I complained how expensive school excursions were.

Friederike has two children, Silas and Sophie, with Ingmar, the doctor she met at Christian’s wedding — the same Christian who also went to Gymnasium with Ulf, Friederike, and me.

Vera didn’t. She changed to a private school after fourth grade.

Vera went to primary school with Ulf and me, and then joined the same tennis club as Friederike and Christian.

Vera and Frank also have two children, Willi and Leon.

Ulf doesn’t have any children: he has Carolina and his architectural firm.

Christian and Ellen have three children: Charlotte, Mathilda, and Finn.

I’m wondering whether this type of list is of any use to anyone.

I bet the only person who sticks in your mind for longer than two seconds is Friederike — because she has such a great nickname that sums up her character. Like in a school yearbook: ‘Friederike, the Fusspot, “Everybody knows that.”’

When we did our A-levels in the early 1990s, some of our classmates made a yearbook because they’d watched too many American high school films. Ulf, Friederike, Christian, and I were grouped together on a page and called ‘The Brains’.

I had to explain to my mother that it meant we were intellectuals but that it probably wasn’t meant nicely. There was also a page for the ‘Knitting Betties’ (the girls who always got out their knitting gear in class) and the page for the ‘No Names’ (the people no one could come up with a name for.)

‘Fusspot’ can be translated as ‘having high standards’; and at eighteen, we were all fusspots, of course — snobbish intellectuals in the eyes of our simpler classmates who liked to party. And then we all moved to Berlin where anyone who thinks they’re someone ends up.

That’s really how basic it is.

And yet it’s true.

Speaking of true.

It’s a battle cry, Bea. I’m using it in a crude effort to make my story seem plausible. It’d be smarter to assume that it seems true by itself. Because you know Friederike! And you understand the thing with the show-offs ending up in Berlin.

The truth is: these are all just words. True words, of course, because why would I write rubbish?

Another story you’ll hear again and again, ad nauseum (or until you’re ready for the gas chambers, as my anti-intellectual classmates would have said, not understanding why that was problematic) is that, sooner or later, the truth will out. Concealing the truth doesn’t work, and hushing it up definitely doesn’t either, and sweeping it under the carpet means it will come back to bite you in the bum. So I’m not even going to try.

I learn from stories, you see.

It’s better than following the principles of a mythical ‘social consensus’, which we call ‘common sense’ in a crude effort to make it seem plausible.

‘Hey, everybody knows that people grow apart, especially when you’re over forty and have kids.’

Yes, exactly. In my case, that means we’ll all be out on the street in January, or our rent will be three times as high.

‘Everybody knows that children cost money, grow up, and need more space. You should have thought about whether you could afford them in the first place.’

Yes, exactly. I’ve lived beyond my means, and now it’s my problem where that leaves me.

Not in Zone A, that’s for sure.

Living in the city centre is not a human right, as a member of the Berlin Housing Department put it. And in a couple of years, perhaps even months, this too will be incorporated into ‘common sense’; and anybody who thinks differently is a late starter.

I’m not going to complain. Pity is for the meek; and for mice whose idea of contributing to the common good has been misunderstood. Those who complain and those who are out of touch steal empathy from the others.

There’s no way I’m going to want something I can’t have. I don’t want to be a victim. I’m strong. I can get a grip on my feelings, and, if need be, tell myself lies, like the fox who says the grapes are ‘too sour’ because he can’t reach them.

Another one of those stories, Bea.

We’re surrounded by stories.

‘Everybody knows that’ is one too, albeit a very short one.

As long as Friederike tells hers, I’ll tell mine, in which the main character takes ‘Everybody knows that’ to mean ‘Shut your mouth, bitch, and just deal with it.’

I know you hate it when I swear. You’re the one thing that keeps me in check, my sweet angel, you’re my better self—

No. You’re just my daughter. And I’m afraid for you. Of you? They’re probably the same thing.

I want you to be happy, or at least not be blamed if you and your brothers and sister make a mess of your lives. But how do you measure a successful life? What do you all need from me? What should I give you? What should I spare you from? What the hell should I do?

‘No matter what you do, it’s wrong,’ as the perennial adage for parents goes. It’s supposed to remove blame, but the effect doesn’t last. Because in the long run, every parent wants to do what’s right.

One way is to do the opposite of your own parents. Even if they did nothing wrong, you’re bound to find something, because no matter what parents do, it’s wrong, so they definitely did something wrong. Which you, in turn, can do differently, and rightly. Wrong again.

Tell me how it’s possible not to lose your mind over these things.

Speaking of losing your mind.

Ingmar has decided I’m mad. And that touched a nerve, because he’s a doctor and has the authority to put people into psychiatric wards.

When people annoy me, I often say they’re mad too, of course, like Ingmar, for example. But it’s different when I say it, because it’s just my way of stating that I don’t agree with his opinions and don’t like how he expresses them, especially considering what might happen to me as a result of his opinion — i.e., being committed to a psychiatric ward.

Ulf replied that I shouldn’t make myself out to be the victim. I started it, after all, and now it was enough.

‘But it’s not enough.’

And off we went again.

‘You’re not the one to decide that, Resi.’

‘Who does then?’

‘Everybody has to decide for themselves.’

‘Exactly. And I’m saying that it’s not enough for me.’

‘We know that. You made sure we all knew that.’

‘Who’s “we”?’

‘You could have been a part of it.’

‘But I didn’t want to.’

‘Why not?’

‘Because it wasn’t enough!’

And again, from the top.

‘That’s just your opinion.’

‘Yes, exactly.’

‘Keep it to yourself.’

‘I’m a writer.’

‘Then write about yourself.’

‘That’s exactly what I did! I. Didn’t. Think. It. Was. Enough!’

And so on, and so on, until one of us gives in or starts a fist fight.

Frank raised his fists. He saw my story as a declaration of war and threw everything he had at me.

For the record, after my book was published, I was so shocked when I found out who felt humiliated and who felt insulted that I thought I’d have to stop being a writer. I hadn’t meant to hurt anybody, but then it occurred to me that I hadn’t expected Ingmar to stop being a doctor.

No matter what you do, it’s wrong. Power gives you responsibility, and if I stop doing what I do now, it’ll be my fault for not having done anything.

People who want to avoid this dilemma have to die. I mean, withdraw from life. And definitely not have children, even though children are a reason to ignore the dilemma and keep going to the best of your ability and conscience. Somehow. By doing the opposite of what your parents did, or by telling stories to help you understand how the world works. Either because of or despite these stories, I had you all vaccinated. And who did it? Ingmar, of course.

Idea for a TV film: the main character, Resi — a writer who has withdrawn from professional life because she’s afraid of abusing her power, using the wrong words or being narrow-minded (and who now devotes all her time to her family and their best interests) has her toddler vaccinated by Dr Ingmar; the child suffers brain damage and falls into a coma.

The worst part is that Resi was against any kind of vaccination to begin with — Too risky! Just more profits for the pharmaceutical industry! — but let herself by persuaded by Dr Ingmar.

Resi didn’t want to be lumped together with anti-vaxxers who are just stay-at-home mums with nothing better to do than look after sick kids.

She sues Dr Ingmar but loses, because she signed a form listing the possible risks and side effects, and she only has herself to blame.

I’m a writer. I just do what I think is right. (And what was it again? To vaccinate? Or not? Talk? Or shut my mouth? To act or do nothing, reject or endorse, do things the same way or entirely differently?) And anyway, my children have chosen me, and they’ll have to stick with me through thick or thin, because they know me and care for me.

Whoops. No. That’s exactly what I expected of my old friends.

A message to all my old friends: you won’t like this. ‘This is where we part ways,’ as Vera wrote in her break-up email to me. I think it’s sentimental and twee, but on the other hand, I imagine that’s exactly why you all like it. And you’re bound to believe it’s better than anything I have come up with, so please stick it up your arses.

Bea hates it when I swear. She’s my eldest, but still just about young enough to love me anyway. To want to see and somehow understand me, in other words.

She has no choice; she’s still dependent on me.

Is it violent to address my text to her?

Maybe. But I also had her vaccinated. She could have died.