17

At four-thirty I’m back at the medical centre, where I’m told, Doctor’s running a little behind, so please take a seat.

I sit near the TV and kids with runny noses and palpable fevers clamber across the furniture and tip over a pot plant. At least in the medical centre everyone around me thinks it’s fine to have bandages, and probably only the relatively small number of people over the age of ten think I’m wearing them because of some failed suicide attempt.

At five-fifteen my turn comes. Greg’s door opens and he calls me in and inspects my wounds in a very business-like way and says he’s pleased with the progress. He says we could probably leave them open, but it might be an idea to cover them just so they don’t get bumped. Then we sit down for our chat.

So how’s it going? he says, in a way that makes it seem very like a standard opening remark.

Fine.

How’s the cat? Did it turn up?

Yeah. The cat’s fine.

He looks down at my file, as though trying to work out where to take it from here. He clicks his pen a few times, but writes nothing. Your address, he says. I used to look after the woman who lived there.

Yeah, my grandmother.

This wasn’t … This may sound a little strange. The cat. It’s not an orange cat, is it?

An orange cat called Greg, yes. The cat my grandmother named after you. That’s the one. He’s very nice normally. Just not a fan of the flea bath.

Who would be?

So you’re saying that cutting me to ribbons would be the reasonable response of any orange Greg in the circumstances?

He laughs, though in a slightly unsettled way, as though I might be offering to flea-bathe him. We miss your grandmother round here. She was certainly a character.

Yeah.

She always used to bring biscuits. She made them herself. I always looked at her and thought that’s what I’d like to be like at ninety.

Yeah, me too. I thought that. There she was, ninetyone and still putting shit on me. You’ve got to respect that.

So, how do you get to be living in her house?

It’s a complicated set of circumstances. Well it’s not really. It’s actually pretty simple. I was in a relationship. It ended. I had to live somewhere. I stayed with my parents but, you know.

Yeah, I do. I do know. I worked in England for a while and when I came back I stayed with mine for a few months. I hadn’t lived with them for maybe ten years. It was very strange. Too strange. They ate dinner really early, and took an intense interest in my day.

Yeah. That’s it. That’s it, exactly. They’re great but they’ll drive you crazy. And you want to shake them and say, These things are just habits. They don’t matter. You can get over this. People can eat dinner after dark. But you know they wouldn’t understand. They think there’s something really Bohemian about you because you don’t want to eat till seven-thirty.

In the end you have to leave, don’t you? You’ve got to get back to some place that’s your own.

Yeah. Or in my case my grandmother’s. But it’s fine now. I’m settling in.

And the relationship?

It’s over. That’s been made clear to me. So now I’ve got to make it clear to me too, and then work out what happens next.

He says these things can be rough. Sometimes they’re all you can think about and you can feel them weighing you down, but in the end you pull through, even if there are times when you don’t expect to. We talk a bit more, probably until he decides I’m safe, until he believes his feline namesake caused the harm that brought me here two nights ago. And he says that we could talk again, if I wanted. That I can come back if I notice I’m not coming to terms with any of this and I want to talk to someone who’s not part of the situation.

And right at this moment I realise that sometimes I still work on the assumption that I’ll be fine. That something will happen, or nothing will happen, and this will all lift from me and I’ll be fine.

I walk home up the hill. Right now I don’t feel bad.