nineteen

“‘Time is the trouble,’ I said. I no longer experienced my days as linear or purposeful. I was trapped in cyclical domestic time, I tried to explain, where there was no past and no future because the washing-up, cooking, eating, talking, sex, my period, were always on repeat. He made a little speech about how it takes some young women a while to get used to a new baby and the responsibilities of managing a household. I told him I loved the baby; I understood babies and their wildness; it was not the baby that was the trouble. There were adjustments to be made, said the doctor. On he went. I drowned out his voice by picturing the paper knife on his desk plunged into his heart. It was only because killing him was illegal and I did not want to go to prison again that I sat on my hands and allowed him to live. He went on talking and so I did not tell him about wanting to die when the afternoons took forever to get to the night.

When I went back to my hotel, I would think about Jeanne and her daughter Andrea. They were watching Ryan die, slowly and painfully. They had prayed for a miracle, but the miracle never came. They had every right to feel angry and resentful. But they didn’t feel that way. They were stoic, they were forgiving, they were patient and kind. Even in the most awful circumstances I loved being around them, but they made me feel ashamed of myself, in a way I’d never felt before. I spent half my life feeling angry and resentful about things that didn’t matter. I was the kind of person who got on the phone and shouted at people because the weather outside my Park Lane hotel didn’t suit me. Whatever else had been wrong with my childhood, I hadn’t been brought up to behave that way. How the fuck had I become like this? I’d always managed somehow to justify my behaviour to myself, or to make a joke of it, but now I couldn’t: real life had barged into my celebrity bubble.

He was my baby brother and I was supposed to take care of him. The fact that I had nothing to give him filled me with shame. The fact that I didn’t want to talk to him filled me with shame. I didn’t want to talk to him because I knew he would talk about Anabel. I didn’t want to think about her, so I couldn’t think about him. I shoved my phone back in my purse, left his text unanswered. My father, I thought, would have been disappointed in me.

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.

“I knew I wanted to sign with him. Here was a man who never once mentioned money. To me, that was a real businessman. It wasn’t that I didn’t need money, because I did. But to this day, money doesn’t drive me. Money isn’t what pushes me to do this or that. It’s always been about something deeper. For me, it was about dignity, about pride, about the respect I freely gave to others and expected back in return. I may have been a young girl from a rural area, but my parents taught me to value myself, to never think of myself as less than anyone else, regardless of my background or circumstances.