October 2013, Wednesday

A dismal day. One of the worst of our lives.

The only one of us properly awake was Ben, who sleeps through anything. The rest hadn’t slept since Monday night.

We sat in a row, on plastic chairs, being polite to Gatsby whilst wishing him far away. Bink was out of sight, being assessed in a room somewhere.

I asked after his troubled daughter. Thinking, why aren’t you with her. Knowing the answer full well.

Eventually we were called to go in and see her.

Gatsby got up too.

Why didn’t we say, excuse me but no? We are her first of kin. We would prefer to see her alone.

English manners. How long it takes us, as children, to learn them: how much longer, to unlearn again when we need to.

The interview was blistering.

Bink. Two nurses. Shaun and me. And Gatsby.

They asked about Bink’s situation.

Gatsby jumped in. She’s just graduated from Cambridge.

Her medical history?

Gatsby answered this too.

Her whereabouts?

Gatsby again.

And so it went on.

I chipped in occasionally, when I could be quick enough.

Shaun listened, as he does.

Listening, to be honest, being the hardest part. The only comfort having Gatsby in the room was that some of Bink’s invective spilled in his direction too.

I’ve never witnessed such hatred. Not even when she was in the Florence Nightingale Unit, aged sixteen.

What was it you wanted to say to your parents? the nurse had asked kindly.

I don’t want to hear from them. For twenty years. They didn’t listen to me for twenty years so that’s how long they aren’t allowed to speak to me.

I had no voice, no say in anything for all that time.

They can’t have a voice for that time either.

Dear Bink. Your illness had dominated our family for twenty years.

No voice?

Your older sister, your youngest brother, no voice at all.

My writing silenced all that time.

No voice at all.

Serena and Ben weren’t even in the room but I could hear their hurt in Bink’s lacerating accusations. They had truly had little voice in our family life, for all the screaming of Bink’s dæmons.

So we sat and took the punches.

To meet us, you’d think Shaun the phlegmatic one. Inscrutable. Unflappable. The rock, as I believe I’ve said before.

I am the Tigger. The spontaneous, emotional one. What you might expect of a mother, perhaps?

And yet I was the one who let it wash over me. She’s ill, I said to myself. This is not the dear, loved and loving Bink. This is no more our daughter than a cancer might be, or a possessing devil.

Whereas Shaun was cut to the quick.

Many years later, she apologised. Blamed the advice. She was in a terrible state; may have said she didn’t want to see us; too much anger.

And the psychiatric nurse told her to talk to us anyway: that we would want to hear.

I suppose I would. Would prefer anything – loathing; vitriol – to being cut out of her life. Isn’t that what a mother is for?

To absorb the blows…

It has taken me some time to write this post. I’ve had to keep coming back to it.

It is only now, five and a half years on, that I fully face the implications.

Could we have done anything? Could we have rescued her? And with her, the next five years?

The nurses asked where she would go after discharge.

Gatsby jostled in. She’s living with me.

They were far too professional to tell Bink what to do. The steer, however, was obvious. You need to be where there are plenty of people to look after you. Lots of company.

Our house is never short of people.

We were eventually vomited back out into the waiting area.

You should go now, Gatsby said. She really doesn’t want you here.

Thing is – I have discovered this over and over again – until you have to fight for survival… until you are forced to... well, it’s rather a rude thing to do, isn’t it? To fight back?

That’s how I was brought up, anyway.

How polite I was, when Alex’s head master drove him to near-suicide when he was ten! How much more assertive I have been over Rose’s probably-far-more-bearable unhappinesses at school twenty years later...

How deferential we were, when Shaun’s employing church put my children out on the streets! It was three and a half years before I was cornered and frightened enough to win the compensation which provided our present home...

So it was with Gatsby. Reading the recent post about the April Fool that year, Shaun said what he should have done was punch Gatsby in the face. You don’t, though, do you?

(Sure: you would face prosecution for a crime. But perhaps our moral crime, not fighting him, was worse?)

And perhaps, if he were before me now, I would tell him what he did to her and us. Or perhaps I wouldn’t be bothered: they say he’s a broken man.

We meekly filed out of the hospital and went to the car.

We shouldn’t have left her, Serena said straight away. It was wrong to leave her. She said it several times.

If she’d put it in the present – if she had said, we mustn’t leave her now: it is wrong, not it was – would we have turned around? We were only a few paces from the hospital door.

Why didn’t she scream it and shout it and make us turn? Because that isn’t Serena’s way. And because Serena, too, hadn’t had any sleep.

Would it have made any difference?

Could we have rescued her?

I can’t bear to write any more.

I was so, so tired, I couldn’t think at all. None of us could.

Except Serena.