We clinked bottles and smiled, but his words stung because the life I’d imagined for myself had slipped through my inattentive fingers. It was not the place that was a backwater, it was me. My spirit had eddied into the shallows of domesticity and beached itself. I had let John down because I had let myself down by immuring my combative originality, which he’d always valued and loved. Yes, my brother’s words stung –look how long I have remembered them- but they were a gift: he would not me forget that I had once known other things and made other plans.

twenty

“To make a future, shared storytelling was needed. I read what she had to say about the healing power of writing. That we needed to tell the tales of the past to better shape the future. Jane had opened up a vital literary space. I sat up straight, my mind clear. There was nothing wrong with my head, I knew; it was my circumstances I had got so spectacularly back to front. Pills were not going to heal me. What I needed was work. Real work.

thirty-two

“I stayed put and lost myself in books. I had a decade of reading to catch up on and, because books were the place I had escaped to ever since I had learned to read, I went into a reading frenzy. I distilled what I read into sentences that occasionally had an elegance to them. I spent whole days in the library. Although ambition and work do not fill an empty Sunday-morning bed, and nothing substitutes for the joy of nuzzling the warm nape of a sleepy child’s neck, I learned to live without this. No matter that it was hard, I was ecstatically absorbed.

I found some relief in seeing my present state mirrored in the experiences of another. But this relief was, I knew, only a balm. To heal, I would need to look inward as well as outward. I would need to examine my memories. I would need to interrogate the stories I told myself—about myself, about my family, about the world. My unsolved questions were about my mothers and my father. They were about loss, longing, and fear; about my abandonment. They were about my upended, dislocated body and mind. They were about the geography and geology of my experience— about who I was and how I’d ended up in the blue chair. They were about finding my way out of it. But they were also about the borders and boundaries and fault lines on which we all live. They were about fractured surfaces and tectonic forces; about energies unleashed. This, I knew, was a reckoning. God of fire help me, I begged, or if you cannot help me, then show me how to set my world ablaze.

She snapped the book closed, put it on the fridge, screwed the Marmite a bit too aggressively tight and put a doily over the jam. “It is difficult to describe now, but you felt like you were seen as a one-dimensional being, as if you had no roots, no culture that could give you depth or complexity. When you did something unusual, it was simply luck, and you would soon be exposed as the fraud and thief you really were.”

“Was it not perhaps a kind of inferiority on your part that was in fact not the fault of the English?”

My mother sighed. “It probably played a role. But if inferiority is a given and you want a healthy country, then the elimination of that inferiority must be part of everybody’s plan, not the naked intensification thereof.

“You must have no illusions about this: those people are masters at the art of belittling. They loosen in you a weathervane of hate. They decapitate you with one sentence, with a single adjective sink deadly poisonous teeth into you. You fight futilely for your life . . .”