8.01 am

The cutlery goes with points and tines up. Pen rearranges them by type, knives together, forks together, spoons on the other side. There is a feeling inside your head when things are in order. Empty-headed means unintelligent, but what joy would it be to have an actually empty head, to not have the echoes of stupid people saying that you’re broken jangling around inside. Pen asked the woman-therapist in their very first session if talking was the only way to get things out of her head? The woman-therapist said that a) Pen is right, she’s not broken, and therefore she is not in need of fixing, b) wouldn’t it be great if the world could be made to suit everyone, and c) that no one has to talk if they don’t want to. So sometimes they just sit quietly and that, in a way, is like having an empty head.

‘What does a full head feel like?’ That was a question the woman-therapist had asked her. Pen had just shaken her head, so the woman-therapist asked her to come the next week with some words written down and they’d get there slowly. When you find the right words it’s as if they make the world come into focus, but when Pen tried to find words for the feelings on the inside of her head it was like standing in front of a wall of words. So that by the morning of her next appointment, Pen still hadn’t thought of the right thing to say, or even write down. She’d taken one of her mum’s poetry books instead, Dickinson, with golden lettering on the spine. When she got to the room, she opened it at the page and held it up for show.

I felt a Funeral, in my Brain

And the woman-therapist said, ‘Is this whole thing how you feel?’ and Pen nodded and then the woman-therapist asked her to say which lines felt the most like how she felt. Pen pointed to the first line and then, when she realised she was meant to say something else, she slowly read out:

A Service, like a Drum –

Kept beating – beating – till I thought

My mind was going numb –

The woman-therapist nodded again, and Pen realised that she’d finally found someone who listened properly. Then the woman-therapist explained that thinking of things – like thinking you should do something, or wondering what other people thought of you, or wondering if your mum was okay – each of those thoughts was like opening a file in your brain. And the more thoughts you had, the more your brain filled up with open files, which flashed and clicked to remind your brain that they were there. So if you had a lot of ‘active thoughts’, the woman-therapist said, it was like your brain being filled with flashing lights and clicking noises. And that was enough to send anyone into panic mode.

Pen rinses the bowls and the water-feeling on her hand is kind of soothing, which is why she chose this chore. Bowls in the upper rack, starting at the back so that the weight of them doesn’t drag the hinges too much. The therapy room is calm and quiet and kind of blank, which Pen likes now that she’s been going long enough to relax and look around her more. Pen sits opposite the woman-therapist, which is also opposite the window, so she can see sky through the window, and because they are high up she sees the tops of the buildings across the road, a roofscape (if Pen ever writes a poem, it will include the word ‘scape’). When she is there, in the room, and the woman-therapist explains that there are strategies for turning off the flashing lights in your brain, for making things feel calm, they all make sense and Pen nods and says thank you at the end and goes home. Last week she’d told the woman-therapist about the protest and the date with Alice, and she’d said she was calm about it. But today it feels more complicated. What if people won’t give her space, or there’s too much shouting? Because too often other people don’t wait for her to take a breath and find her bearings, they just don’t want to wait. Once, when Pen had had a bad week, the woman-therapist told her she would be okay because she has two things in her favour: she’s resourceful and she has agency. Then she said that neurodiverse people are often highly successful or creative because they have this resourcefulness, all these coping strategies for Real Life, that they take tasks methodically or differently from everyone else. That they get shit done. She had said that, ‘shit’, and Pen had smiled, because it was like something Alice would say.

There are glasses you have to wash by hand, like this one, made of a kind of green glass, which has a bubble inside the base and is heavy. Pen is careful picking it up from the drainer, turning it inside the cloth to catch any last drops of water. She slides it gently onto the higher shelf. It was a wedding present for her parents and there was a set of six originally. Now there’s just this one so you have to be extra particular with it.

Pen calls her dad Sandy, but he doesn’t like her to use his name like that – when she does, he pauses and says, ‘Excuse me?’ Sometimes he calls her Penelope and she won’t respond, or she calls him Mr O’Neill the next time, which he hates even more, so there are two of them in it, Claire says. Sandy is a roads engineer. He wanted to be an architect, but people don’t always get their first choice, which Sandy-sorry-Dad seemed to think was an important life lesson but Claire-aka-Mum thought was ‘a bit defeatist, actually’. ‘Whatever,’ shrugs Pen when they get like that. Sandy is interested in buildings, in how they look or don’t look. ‘Uninspiring,’ he says every Saturday when he picks them up, looking at the house with narrowed eyes, as if it’s the nondescript street he doesn’t want and not them. Pen knows that the things people say aren’t always about you, that instead they show you how the other person feels on the inside. Pen thinks of the way words touch the surface of things, sliding across the world and your tongue. Some words can make you feel loved and soft, and others dent and damage.

Did the builders or designers find it uninspiring? Pen wonders if they were disappointed, if all the people that it took to create even one house had tried to make something that would make others feel inspired? Or did they just want to make the occupants feel sheltered? But Pen does not shudder the way Claire does when Sandy says things like that, or things about ‘this country’, she does not say, ‘What’s so great about being from England?’ Mostly, Pen just listens, because she likes looking at buildings too, and she likes imagining the lives inside, and she likes it, basically, when Sandy talks to her at all.

After her parents split up, the noise and the anxiety got really bad, and even though Pen didn’t like school she would ask her teachers if she could stay late and read in the classroom, but she couldn’t because of insurance or something. She had to come home and even if only her mum and Soraya were there it was still like you could hear the noise, so then Pen would refuse to leave her room (which was also Soraya’s room, which meant Soraya would start shouting because Pen-always-gets-what-she-wants-it’s-my-room-too). Then they moved and the noise got less. And then she started going to therapy. ‘It’s only half an hour,’ her mum said because Pen didn’t want to go at first, but then it became the best half-hour of the week, it was funny the way that could happen (funny-strange). The therapy room has chairs that are far enough apart that you don’t have to touch and if you look over the other person’s shoulder it doesn’t look rude, it just looks like you are being thoughtful. And then the woman-therapist asks her questions and when Pen answers it is like a weight lifts from her chest (which is a metaphor but also it feels real). It’s good to be her, is what the woman-therapist mostly says, hard sometimes but good.

Pen thinks about the timetable. Transport, check. Meeting, check. Rally, check. March, check. After that, Pen’s not sure, but she and Alice will probably hang out until the concert. Pen has a lot of places marked on her phone map so that they can go for food or a walk. She’d wanted to ask Claire what was cool to do in town but that seemed like an uncool thing to do when you were sixteen, asking your mum, so she’d looked it up instead and that had made her remember going to see the bog bodies in the museum and the Viking gold. Maybe she can take Alice there, though she’s not sure if Alice will want to look at bodies from 400 BCE that were basically just from the Midlands. The first time she saw them, Pen looked at the bodies with skin like darkest brown leather and fingernails and fingerprints and hair and thought, we are the same, we feel the same, even across thousands of years. Will Alice think that too? Museums probably don’t count as cool or romantic though. (‘Draining or sustaining, Pen?’ the woman-therapist asks, because she is always urging Pen to actively choose what’s best.) But maybe Alice, even though she likes-her-for-her, doesn’t need to know that Pen prefers to be in a museum than on a street? Maybe she’ll text and ask her? She’s going to walk on the edge today anyway, she’d reminded Alice in a text last night. Pen loves texting, which is talking without faces, basically. Sometimes, when she’s stuck, she wishes she could just hold up emoji signs.

Pen checks her phone because she should see what is happening in the world, because it’s no good just going on marches. You need to know the facts. She has to search deliberately these days for stuff about the Amazon fires – last month it was everywhere but now the top stories are all invasion and borders, refugees rather than fires, though they are basically the same story. The world is burning. Not that you would know from the media, Pen scrolls for ages, no real-burning-Amazon (lots of the other one).

Pen had brought up the fires with Sandy one time. They were in his apartment (uninspiring, actually) for dinner, and he’d even remembered to get her the melt-in-the-middle vegetarian burgers she likes, which automatically marked the day as unusual. ‘What are you doing at school?’ he asked, though it was still August and they weren’t back yet. But Pen forgave him because it was hard to make conversation. ‘What do you think of the rainforest fires?’ she’d said, because current affairs seemed like a safe topic. ‘South America, hunh?’ he’d shrugged. ‘You know why they do it?’ Pen had given a tiny headshake. ‘Where do you think all that soya comes from?’ And Sandy had nodded at her burger. She was contributing (how many grams?) – that’s what he was really saying. Pen wanted to tell him that his burger was worse but he’d moved on, he was teasing her sister about something now. Later that night, Claire had found her a chart online of all the greenhouse emissions of different proteins and Pen started eating more lentils because you could grow them in a drought.

‘There has been a significant drop in new blazes in the forests,’ says Brazil, although there are questions about how reliable these statements are, given the president is, basically, a total dictator, says Alice. But even he admits there are more fires than before, though fewer new ones, but more overall than at any time in recorded history, which is not all of history, just the bits they write down. If you don’t have statistics things don’t exist, says one website, though anyone can see the flaw in that one.

It’s rare that Pen is in the house by herself, there’s usually Claire and Soraya, or Catherine, who picks Soraya up from school, or Claire working from home. ‘I can’t afford to do the job-share thing,’ Pen heard Claire say once, on the phone to her best friend. ‘I’m just exhausted, abso-fucking-lutely exhausted.’ (When you split a word like that, with another word in the middle, it’s called tmesis. Tmesis is also an unusual and thus favourite word, because there should be a vowel between consonants ‘t’ and ‘m’ but the vowel is left out.) Anyway, being alone is a rare pleasure for Pen. Plus, on-your-own means you can look at anything. Pen heads for the main bedroom.

She can smell her mother, her familiar, comforting, body type of smell. It smells of night. Would her mother want her to open the window? Pen wonders if her mother dreams, perhaps she’s too tired, she says she’s tired a lot, with a long sigh, stretching her back, or rubbing her feet, ‘I’m so tired, make me a cup of tea, love.’ That word, love, it slips out sometimes and Pen can’t help it, give me more SPACE, she jerks away. But she does make the tea, at least. It is an irony, now, that she wants to say the same word to Alice, and she hopes, really hopes, that Alice will not want space. Pen is good at making tea, at warming the cup, if they had a teapot she could do it properly. But then think of the waste if they made a pot and didn’t finish it. At least they’ve switched to loose tea (no more plastic teabags), but only because Claire said she couldn’t take the nagging any more, and Pen suspects she still drinks the Barry’s stuff at work.

The top drawer is underwear, some neatly rolled, a reminder of Claire’s magic tidying-up phase, the rolled ones look lacy, brighter, the others a jumble. Camisoles in there too. Her mother says she wears them so she can wave her arms around during class and not get fired for flashing, but Pen would wear them for the silky, sexy feel on her skin. The word camisole is pleasing, camisia, Latin for nightgown or shirt. There are five people in the Latin class and Pen guesses she’s not the only one using the lunchtime slot to avoid the social crush of the canteen. ‘I’m taking Latin now,’ she’d announced at home, back when they lived in the old house. ‘Going to be a doctor, then,’ said Sandy, as if it’s only about jobs. Pen does not know what she wants to be (‘You can’t “be” something,’ says Claire, ‘you do things’), but something where there is beauty and time and space is what she wants.

The drawers aren’t really that interesting, so Pen’s attention turns to the wardrobe. The top shelf is too high for her mother who needs to use the bathroom stool but Pen’s fingers can grasp the edge of the box, tug at the scarf that keeps it closed, pull it down towards her. There is a rattle. Remember how it was, put it back how it was, move through life carefully, Pen’s fingers fumble at the knot. There are only four items inside: two rings, one necklace and a roll of notes. Pen fingers the metal, recognises the setting and the plain band. It makes sense that you can’t throw these things away, that you keep them, and keep too, for a while, the ridge on your finger where they used to go. They are too small for Pen’s hands. The necklace Pen has never seen before, it looks old-fashioned, gold. Pen slides off the elastic, a hair bobble, and unfurls the notes. Fifties, twelve of them. Why is there six hundred euro in the wardrobe? Pen thinks of the economising, her mother’s mantra, thinks of the twenty in her pocket from this morning, and re-rolls the notes, carefully nesting them so the elastic will go back on. Is it exactly how it was? Money is a kind of dirt – if you work with money your hands are filthy at the end of the day. Money is freedom too, though. You can want to wash your hands of one, but you need the other.

Pen sits on the floor for a while, wondering what the box really means. Most of the time Claire says she is just busy getting them all through each day. Did she put the things in the box on purpose? Or in that way where you do something you don’t know you’re going to do? Knowing her mum, probably the first way. Pen lids the box and ties the scarf around it again, tips it onto the shelf – it’s pretty much how it was as she closes the wardrobe door. Pen checks her watch. Nearly time.