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.

I wanted to be elsewhere, but, trapped in the back of a hot truck, my only escape was to refuse to learn to identify the birds. I battened down the hatches of my mind and refused my father entry. Refused to know. Refused to catalogue those birds into categories of similarity and difference, to recall and compare, which gave my sister and my mother their bond with my father.

fifty-two

“So, I went on at her about my eccentric but good-enough childhood and my well-intentioned parents, doing my best to keep from her everything that really troubled me. The experiences I could neither name nor claim, I had channelled into my writing. I saw no reason to repeat them, but I suspect I knew even then that if I did, she would be onto me – and there would be nowhere left for me to hide.

sixty-six

“I told him that I had tried to write a suicide note, but I could not write one. Nor could I plagiarise the ones I found online, written by people more eloquent than I. ‘Writer’s block,’ I told him. ‘So far, it’s kept me alive.’ I laughed at my joke, but he did not. He looked at me over slender steepled fingers and said, ‘It’s what’s alive in you – your writing, your creativity – that won’t let you finish.’ That was not something I had considered, and it gave me pause.