shoulder in the casual way one might talk about the weather.
I didn’t reply.
Whenever I travel on the underground, the thing that fascinates me most, is below my feet and above my head, countless other people are all doing exactly the same thing, yet each of us is completely unaware of the others’ existence. All those ordinary lives held together in the darkness. A puzzle of people. People whose lives are inexorably linked to our own, yet who will always remain invisible to us. I think about them, as I travel the Circle line all day. I search, past the smeared windows coated in the breath of strangers, past the white reflection of my own staring, and I wonder who is out there in the darkness, staring back. Just out of reach.
There’s a need for vigilance at the stations, though, so I can’t daydream too much. Wood Lane, Latimer Road, Ladbroke Road, Westbourne Park. I could recite them before I go to sleep, like a small prayer. I never used to notice the names when I was a commuter. I would drift from one station to the next without a second thought, relying on the sway of the carriage and some strange, deep-rooted sense of place to know when I should stand and begin making my way through the wall of people towards the doors. Now I follow the map. Now I silently mouth the place names along with the electronic voice. Since Cyril died, I have the quickened eyes of a tourist.
The consultant was wary of a time frame, but in the end, his caution was pinpoint. Six months. Almost to the week. Those were a strange six months, because when Cyril first became ill, we spent all our time searching for encouragement. Each evening, we sifted through the events of the day to feed our optimism. Archaeologists of hope. Once we knew he was dying, the treasure hunt was over. We were on a road of inevitability, and no matter how attractive we tried to make the landscape, the certainty of our path made each day seem less fruitful. More of an obligation to get to the other side. It’s at times like those you realize it’s only really hope that glues everything else together.
As luck would have it, Cyril was reasonably well until the final two weeks. There were days so mundane, we celebrated in the reassurance of their ordinariness. The comfort of small routines, the absence of hospital appointments and doctors who had run out of ideas, the small seed of absurdity that perhaps they had got it all wrong. They hadn’t, of course. The drawer spilling with medication told us that. The cheery ‘hello’ of the Macmillan nurse. Ridiculous things like the best before dates on tins of soup and the day the daffodils finally died away. We tiptoed around the illness for fear it would waken at the sound of our voices and grow larger. On occasion, though, it needed to be mentioned, even if it was indirectly.
‘You’ll remember where we keep the spare fuses,’ he said.
‘I will,’ I replied.
‘And that back door always starts sticking when the weather changes. You just need to push it with your foot. Right at the bottom.’
‘I know, Cyril,’ I said. ‘I know.’
We sorted out the box files. Cyril spent entire mornings at the dining room table, peering over the top of his glasses at pieces of paper, making a decision about each one and putting them all into piles. Keep. Throw Away. Undecided. It felt as though he was going on annual leave, temporarily handing over custody and giving me an opportunity to be solely in charge of our lives for a short while. Except it wouldn’t be our lives any more. It would just be mine.
After a few weeks, he finally reached the bottom of the last file. The only things remaining were errant paperclips and receipts so faded, no one would ever know what had been received. It was only at that point he turned to me, took off his glasses and placed them very carefully on the tablecloth.
‘We need to tell Jessica,’ he said.
I straightened the piles of Keep, Throw Away, Undecided. I gathered up the paperclips. I stared out of the patio doors into the watercolour of a spring lunchtime.
‘I don’t think there’s any need to tell her,’ I said. ‘Why does she even have to know?’
Cyril pinched at the bridge of his nose, where his spectacles had left the dent of a morning’s work. ‘She’ll wonder where I am, Margaret.’
‘I’ll tell her you’ve gone away,’ I said.
Cyril shook his head very slightly.
‘I’ll tell her you’ve left me, then. That’s it.’ I put the paperclips back into a box file. ‘That should do the trick.’
Cyril gave a very large sigh. ‘She needs to know the truth, Margaret. She’s not stupid.’
‘No,’ I said. ‘No, she’s not stupid.’
Feeble-minded. That was the term they used about Jessica. I was a small child, but I still remember it. Not stupid or thick or backward, but feeble-minded. Perhaps in an attempt to make the whole thing sound more elegant. No one’s fault. One of those things.
My mother said she always knew Jessica was different as soon as she was born.
‘Jessica wasn’t like you, Margaret,’ she would tell me. ‘You were the only baby I had to go by, but I knew there was something wrong, right from the start.’
Jessica was fractious, restless, loud. She refused to be comforted. She wouldn’t feed. She wouldn’t sleep. She screamed all day and all night. I would lie in bed, fingers pressed into my ears, trying to remember a time when she didn’t exist. There didn’t seem to be a week when Jessica hadn’t succumbed to one infection or another, when she wasn’t struggling to swallow, when she wasn’t filled with rage.
My parents tried everything. A carousel of specialists in distant rooms. My mother, thick with misery. My father, fingertips barely touching the edges of reason. I don’t remember much of the conversations, but I do remember one doctor smiling at my parents across the width of a desk, and saying, ‘Why not have another baby? This one really isn’t going to bring you very much joy.’
Keep. Throw away. Undecided.
Jessica couldn’t speak, but she understood. As she grew, she learned other ways to communicate. Kicks. Bites. Scratches. It would take my mother hours to dress her each morning as I watched from a doorway. There were days my mother painted her face in coats of bright optimism, and other days when she would curl up in the corner of the room and have to be coaxed back into the world again by my father.
When Jessica was five, it was decided she was uneducable. Disabled of the mind. She couldn’t be sent to school, and so the education authority thought she should be put into an institution instead. The health authority agreed. My parents, who looked after Jessica every waking minute of her life, and who were the greatest authority of all, were never listened to.
‘We fought to keep her at home,’ my mother said for years afterwards. ‘We fought as hard as we could.’
I never really knew if she was telling me, or telling some past, long-forgotten version of herself.
Jessica was sent away. It was for the best. Everything was for the best. My parents said it to each other. People said it to my parents. Doctors. Friends. Strangers in the street. For the best became attached to every sentence, like a quietening balm. A balm that soothes but never heals.
The first place was a sprawl of Victorian melancholy in a far corner of Essex. We travelled there, each Sunday. Whilst everyone else went to church, my parents went to worship at an altar of their own self-loathing. Getting there and back took the
