Now
Greg has this theory about trapped grief and how it’s partly responsible for my mutism.
He’s probably right.
Years ago, when my mother died, I was physically unable to talk about it, as if there was a blockage in my throat.
Liv and Sam used to say, ‘You should talk about her. You should tell us how you’re feeling.
’
But every time I shook my head.
‘I can’t.’
And it was true, I couldn’t.
Because to talk about her was to start crying, to feel the pain of absence, and I didn’t want to do that.
I knew a better way.
Block it, box it off, bury it.
Pretend it hasn’t happened.
So, Greg says, I was learning the patterns of mutism and dissociation even then.
At first my father tried to talk to me too.
He’d assumed, I think, that something of our tight-knit triumvirate would continue, that I’d return home in the holidays to our house with its squeaking front door and the apple tree my mother loved whose blooms we now took as an insult, and we would talk and cry and try to keep her memory alive.
This, after all, was what he did while I was away at university, crying with his friends and visiting her grave on an almost daily basis for more tears.
He placed a framed picture of my mother and me on my bedside table, the kind of photo that kills you with its portrayal of incidental love.
We’re sitting on the deck of our beach hut, me slumped on my mother’s lap, her arm around my waist, the other hand raised towards my father with its glass of beer.
Cheers, the photo says.
I looked at that photograph for a long time, burning the image onto my brain: the faded red of my swimsuit with its white frill, my father’s blue-checked shorts, my mother’s cat’s-eye sunglasses.
Then I put it away in a cupboard.
‘I’m sorry, Dad, it hurts too much to talk about her,’ I said, stonewalling every attempt at conversation.
His brow would wrinkle and he’d do that buttoned-up frowning thing he does whenever he tries not to cry.
Soon, indecently soon in his case, we chose the same route to escape: I carved myself into a life with Sam and he married an American, an art dealer who was ten years younger than him.
There was never any question that Carrie, as he calls her, would move to England.
And although he drove to Bristol and took me out for dinner to say, ‘Carrie and I would love it if you came with us. You could finish your degree in New York,’ that dinner was really goodbye.
We used to phone each other every week or so for casual information swaps, nothing personal, nothing dark, and Sam and I stayed with them a few times, getting high on yellow taxis and takeaways in cardboard cartons.
But really the relationship was reduced to labels, like those paper figures Daisy used to cut out.
Here’s a father. Here’s a daughter.
Let’s find some clothes for them to wear.
It’s never too late to grieve, Greg tells me, explaining yet again the five stages of bereavement.
I’m stuck in the first one apparently – denial.
He makes a lot of sense, this psychiatrist who is probably only a few years older than me.
I am all about denial.
He uses a technique where he tries to get me to inhabit a difficult memory.
Sam has chosen my memories for me since I don’t speak, and it happens that today’s trouble spot is bang on.
Greg describes the twenty-four hours when I rang and rang my parents’ house but there was never an answer.
Sitting on the stairs with the phone on my lap, ringing the same number again, and then again, and then again, as if I was deranged, as if these two people who had been the centre of my world were simply choosing not to take my call.
Eventually I got hold of my father.
‘She’s gone into the hospice,’ he said, his voice breaking on the word.
Hospice: even its consonants seem to contain sorrow.
A tear breaks free, a solitary one, and Greg is far too professional to comment.