Bink has a date! (II)

2002

So, we had invited Bink’s “date” for the weekend. 

That done, I rang our policeman friend. The one who had been our liaison officer when Bink disappeared, aged twelve. Who had then got involved the previous Christmas (2001) when, he told us, the Florence Nightingale Unit had reported Shaun for the mysterious mark on Bink’s right cheek. Or rather, wrong cheek.

I did it in that order so he couldn’t veto our invitation. (Look, Bink was just seventeen by now, right? Tell a seventeen-year-old she can’t meet up with her “boyfriend” and what is she likely to do? And wouldn’t that be a lot worse?)

Nevertheless I couldn’t help asking. “It’s not insanely dangerous, is it? I mean, he’s hardly likely to murder us all in our beds, is he?”

He deftly dodged this question, and asked about the arrangements. Boyfriend was arriving by car. After this – which we found hilarious – taking Bink to a museum for a cultural day out. Then back to our house where he would cook supper for us all.

“Good,” said my friend. “He’s not going to abandon his car, so they won’t disappear.” And a museum is a very public space, obviously. “As soon as he arrives, ring me with the number plate and I’ll run a check on it.”

Saturday dawned. Boyfriend due at ten o’clock.

Twenty past nine, Frankenstein’s monster rang. Somebody had taken a man’s voice box, put it through a mangler then a shredder then stamped on it a few times, then shoved it back in a throat.

“Ah,” Bink explained a lot later. “I didn’t think to tell you. He got in a fight and someone nearly strangled him and he can’t talk normally again yet.” Could have warned me I was going to be rung by the top-billing voiceover artist for the Hammer House of Horrors.

I directed him to our house and went to tell her.

I haven’t yet properly explained what a challenge it had become – and still is, all these years later – for Bink to wash. She often couldn’t do it at all for months on end; and when she did, it could take a long time. (I once knew her take a three-day bath. She hotly disputes this but we only had one bathroom in the Vicarage and I ruddy well remember.)

She was obviously making a monumental effort and having a shower.

“He’ll be here in about ten minutes,” I shouted through the door.

“Please can you look after him?”

“How long for?”

“Um... about half past ten?”

Great. Would that be am or pm?

Dr Frankenstein’s friend arrived, I showed him in, asked Shaun to make him a mug of tea or similar, and nipped upstairs to try and read his number plate from the window so I didn’t have to go outside with a clipboard and pen and suck the latter thoughtfully while circling his vehicle.

Now, Shaun has many fine and excellent qualities. Loads and loads. Give me a mo and I’ll be able to tell you one.

Glistening on his palate of colourful talents, however, is a very noticeable lack of the essential Flake White of innocent chit-chat and small talk which can make so many socially challenging situations go with a jolly swing. Curious omission for a vicar, but there we are. When he’s in the mood, he can be as full of bonhomie and yo-ho-ho as the next chap, popping champagne corks faster than you can dodge them. Even singing the revolting Irish songs of his childhood if you oil him well into the night. (Revolting in the political sense, as per the Revolting Pheasants of 1066 And All That, you understand.)

The rest of the time, he buries his head in a book. If you bore him for a nano-second, without even a by-your-leave or heads-up he will reach for the nearest print... even if all to hand is the copyright information at the front of a hymnbook or the translated-from-the-Lithuanian instructions for the new fire extinguisher in the vestry, and it’s in the middle of a church PCC meeting he himself is chairing.

Making tea for, putting at ease, asking about the journey of, wishing a pleasant weekend to, Central Casting’s latest offering for the part of Bogeyman to frighten the children, obviously didn’t feature that day as high on his list of things that would be more amusing than preparing the morrow’s sermon.

It was a lovely way to spend a relaxing Saturday morning.

Dashing between slightly crazed cheerful-chatting with a gravel-voiced deterrent for warning young people against getting all their surfaces tattooed, whilst surreptitiously checking he’s not nicking the spoons; hanging out of an upper storey window smilingly persuading passing parishioners that I hadn’t finally decided to give up and jump, while trying to read a number plate parked at an awkward angle for the purpose on the Vicarage drive; bashing on the bathroom door asking Bink how long she expected me to hold the fort, and did she realise quite what a complete freak her date had turned out to be; and ringing our policeman friend, who only now told me he had opted for spending the first half of his weekend teaching a bunch of thugs on exeat from Borstal how to kick a pig’s bladder around a footie pitch as a cheery brief break from stabbing each other.

What felt like about a week later, Bink emerged; the result came back from the touchline that the car was registered to approximately the right name, from approximately the right part of the country, with no murders recorded against the owner; and the two love-birds set off for a romantic day looking at nineteenth century piston engines in the Victoria & Albert Museum…

Bink has a date! (I)

2002

Bink was almost a prisoner in her own room.

(Respect for her dignity constrains me from spelling out exactly what that means. Use your imagination. Peek, for instance, into your daughter’s bedroom for the first time in some weeks, and realise with sickening and horrified pity that she hasn’t been able to use the amenities. She often couldn’t wash or clean her teeth for months, either. Our brilliant Bink was almost a caged animal.)

There were long periods – months on end; perhaps years – when she had to wear rubber gloves, even to eat. She couldn’t touch books, musical instruments, a radio; certainly not food or glasses to drink out of. I bought her audio books, but she couldn’t touch a CD player. And couldn’t concentrate anyway.

We had a lumbering computer at the very top of the house, on a little landing lined with bookshelves which we called the Reading Corner. One afternoon when the children were small I had painted the walls (those not covered with books) with rainbows and birds and happy, smiling clouds. It was a comfortable place to be.

(After we left the Vicarage and before Shaun’s post was even advertised, the Diocese slapped magnolia over every surface – C of E clergy aren’t paid enough to justify colours on the walls – and chopped down the Cedar of Lebanon I’d put in the front garden and the luscious vine I’d tended in the conservatory we built. I learnt all this at a sad time, when I was desperately missing our dear home, and mourned the new Vicarage children not being allowed to choose whether to keep our hopping library birds and dripping indoor grapes. The Diocese also pulled down and skipped the large above-ground pool we had spent our first summer building and all subsequent summers swimming in and sharing, which we had specially left spotlessly clean – with a new motor and filter – for the new Vicarage family. Having no house of our own and never having been able to buy a car, it was the most expensive item we’d ever owned.)

Bink spent a lot of time at the top of the house that year, on that family computer. Presumably wearing her marigolds. I had no idea what she was doing, but at least she was out of bed.

Because her school High Mistress had ruled against telling any of her classmates where she was when she went into the Florence Nightingale Unit, she had lost them all. She was now too ill to leave the house, and had no way of meeting new people. She had no occupation, not even reading. A computer was it, really. And although I didn’t realise this then, the only way she could talk to anyone outside her family.

One day she came and found me, smiled sheepishly, and told me she had a boyfriend. 

“Wow, Bink.” I said. “That’s great news! Tell me all about him.”

He was around twice her age, and had recently been discharged from the army. He also had several children. From different women. He wasn’t allowed contact with any of them, though. Probably because he’d put a bloke in hospital with GBH. Presumably the boyfriend of one of his exes.

And he had invited Bink to his place (several hours away) for the weekend.

And. Yes. She had accepted.

Her eyes shone with excitement and pleasure. Poor Bink! She had little enough of either left in her sad life.

Multiple choice good-parent-questionnaire. At this point, do you:

1. Scream, “You must be out of your tiny little mind! What are you thinking of? Have you never heard about meeting serial rapists / killers / psychopaths via the internet? Don’t you realise you are about to be serially raped / killed / psychopathed!”

2. Lock her up.

3. Ring the police. Then lock her up.

4. Breathe slowly, think fast, and say very carefully and kindly and as enthusiastically as you possibly can, “Bink, that’s really kind of him. How lovely. Shall we have a think about the best way to do this?”

All my girlfriends gave variants on the first three, at various levels of decibel above 100.

Did none of them have any heart? My daughter’s prospects, health, happiness, education, everything, lay in ruins at her feet. She had no friends. She had nothing. She had managed, in this terrible and lonely solitary confinement which is the worst punishment custody inflicts, to make contact with a fellow human being, and he had issued her with the first invitation she had received since the Florence Nightingale Unit ruined her life.

My friends were not going to be any help whatsoever. So I rang my kind, imaginative, compassionate and utterly brilliant mother.

And she said exactly what I’d thought.

“Invite him for the weekend.”

“Thank you. That’s exactly what I thought.”

“Obviously. What else can you do?”

“That’s what I thought too.”

So we did.

(And I rang the police. Just... you know... in case.)

Dear Diary

Spring 2002

It is eleven o’clock in the morning. I have not done any work yet today. I haven’t done any work for days, months… years if you count books, my only real work, the only work I value; what with Alex’s unhappinesses, and now this. Others find their work disrupted when babies first come along. But that was easy. Easy to find the discipline, even with three in terry nappies, one at nursery school, no car, no help, no money.

I remember when Shaun was on a conference and I wasn’t well, and I had to pile all three of them onto a tricycle to get Serena to nursery school, and then dash back to get them occupied long enough to meet a deadline: one of my first writing commissions, for a magazine. The day before I’d been issued with notice to quit the house by the end of the week. With Shaun away. His first post, as Assistant Curate in North London, was due to end and he was looking for another, and his boss, our vicar, thought it was “businesslike” to evict us.

It was possible to cope with all, then. It didn’t sap the spirit in the way that this does.

Upstairs there is a terrible, dark and brooding presence. It is like a thunderstorm waking to break.

I have been out to Starbucks to buy hot chocolate and an almond croissant. There was a time when I would have thought, I can’t afford Starbucks; but I have run out of other ideas. Besides, so much money has been poured down the drain, it now transpires, over the last year and more, that it seems futile to baulk over a few more pounds. All the savings Granny gave her in her post office account, hundreds of pounds being preserved for some special treat or project, all bled away. All Serena’s too, lent secretly to her sick sister, our Iphigenia, to appease this awful god that is poisoning all our lives.

I understand now, about the changelings left by the hidden people. She is gone. The ray of laughter and music we once knew is long gone. It went into hospital and what came back eventually, when they were done, the husk that was spat out, was this, this other, this possessed thing, this thing bewitched by the powerful doctors with their hidden arts and powers. We thought she was escaping from hospital, I thought I had outwitted the doctor by stealing her back again. What I now realise is that it was already too late.

They took her by various strategies. A friend, a close and dear friend, saying we must let her go, because she will do it again and one day she will do it for real. She wouldn’t, I knew that. But they frighten me and bully me, and I don’t stand up to them. Why, when my own child was at stake, why didn’t I? Because they came in the guise of friends. And because they threatened suicide. I know how suicide is, how much worse than accident or murder, because it nearly happened to Alex. But do you really think, I say angrily now, do you really think suicide would have been worse than this? Death would be sweet, compared with this. Death would be easy: no more awful hoping that she might come back.

A few days after she came home, after what I thought was she had come home, I went into the room, the guest room, not her room, where she was not exactly sleeping but brooding, and found a snow storm. Every page, every Indian-paper-thin page, individually torn out of her bible, the bible she was given as a baby at her baptism, and the room was white. The bible that had tormented and taunted her with her illness and God’s deafness and his unheeded promises.

She must get up, the doctor had said, the witch doctor who had to let her go. She must get up, and out, and do something, do a job or something. I was outraged, that she could contemplate labour for this child, such a bright child, who had been snatched out of her education so prematurely by these wicked doctors. I would not have it. I will not send her to work. She will finish her studies, she will. Make sure she gets up every day, the doctor said, to work or attend school or anything. I smiled, happy to agree to anything, so that she should be free.

But how? How do you get something, so solid and heavy, up and out of bed? How do you insist? Do you scream, do you steal the bedclothes, do you drive her to tear every page out of her bible?

You go to Starbucks and buy her favourite treat and pray, or leave your friends to pray for you because you have no emotional or spiritual resources any more, because all you have left is the tiniest trickle in the bottom of the vast wide empty riverbed, so dry it doesn’t even catch the sunlight any more. You hope that hot chocolate will do it, because you simply can’t think of anything any more. You plead. You go up every few minutes and plead. Your favourite treat, downstairs in the kitchen.

Two hours later, I wrap the almond croissant, her favourite, their most expensive, in a paper napkin for some use, sometime… something. I don’t know what, but something. It cost too much to waste. I pour the now cold chocolate down the sink.

I still have not done any work. Not for a long, long time, nor a long long time to come.

Snowstorm

February 2002

Our children were brought up as Christians.

Before someone asks, “Isn’t it better to let them decide for themselves?” let’s knock that naïve two-dimensional pseudo-liberal notion on the head once and for all.

1. Of course our children must decide for themselves. We all have to take responsibility for our choices eventually, whatever beliefs we were brought up with.

2. There is no such thing as a philosophically “neutral” upbringing any more than there is English spoken with “no accent”. If you bring your children up to “decide for themselves,” you are teaching them the overriding supremacy of Western relativism as surely as the Amish are teaching their children... whatever it is the Amish pass on to their children.

3. If we ourselves have concluded that Christianity is – probably, on balance – the most credible interpretation of the facts available, we have a duty to pass this conclusion on to our children; just as we have a duty to teach them that the earth is round, or climate-warming is – probably, on balance – really happening, or any other article of faith which (after doing our research as thoroughly and honestly as we can) we believe holds the balance of probability. That’s what parents are for.

So that’s how we brought them up. (Got an issue with that? Get over it.)

Bink loved our Parson’s Green church. All our children did. She played her fiddle every week in the chamber orchestra, which eventually she ran. She lent a hand with the children in Sunday School, or handed round refreshments, or helped host the Harvest Lunch, or welcomed people into the Vicarage garden for coffee after the service. She took as full a part in the church as the rest of us did.

She also loved coming on the teenagers’ Christian holidays which we led every summer, eventually going on such holidays herself.

After one such, she came home bubbling over with a deep and thrilling personal experience of God. She was all for being re-baptised, and celebrating with the church and all her friends. To my shame and lasting regret, I told her that you can’t really be “re-baptised” any more than you can be “re-married” to the same person… though we would certainly celebrate with her.

In the years to come I wondered how I could have put such doctrinal exactitude above exuberant enthusiasm. Well, there we are. (Now I think about it, I wonder why I didn’t suggest confirmation, as she was the only one of our offspring not yet – and still not now – confirmed. Perhaps I did.)

And as I explained in an earlier post, Bink packed two books to take into the Florence Nightingale Unit. One, naturally and wittily (Bink being Bink), was One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. 

The other was her Bible.

Bink had been home for a few weeks. For some reason she had moved into our guest room. Presumably because her own room had become “contaminated.” She has frequently, since, needed to discard clothes or a room or even a house for this same reason.

Dr Ratched had insisted we must get her up in the mornings. This was a bit like saying, learn to fly. Two-year-olds, easy. Sixteen-year-olds? Just try it some time. Not with a normal teenager, who simply needs the stick of being sacked from school or work, or carrot of not having the bedclothes yanked off and a bucket of water thrown over whatever remains, in order to jump joyously from bed.

But a sixteen-year-old who is absolutely, adamantly, completely, hell-bent-determined on not getting up. Or is simply too depressed and defeated to be capable. It may not be completely impossible but believe me, you can spend several hours of every day, for over a year, on the attempt. You can see my t-shirt if you like.

Still fairly early on in this dismal experience I went upstairs to embark on the daily, fatuous, enervating and prolonged exercise of trying to extract Bink from Bink’s bed so Bink could have a life.

I walked into a cloud. The room was white. I found myself in one of those children’s executive toys you turn upside-down to make Big Ben swirl with the kind of Victorian Christmas the Victorians probably never experienced.

Every single India-paper page of Bink’s Bible had been torn out. Every page ripped up into tiny little pieces. Every piece hurled into the room. Every scrap had snowed down and whitened her room with tears of scripture verses.

Year after year after year she had begged God to take away her pain. Year after year after year her prayers had fallen on what certainly seems to us mere mortals to be very deaf divine ears indeed.

I know how she feels.

And she was sweet sixteen.

Wouldn’t you weep the pages of your Bible, which had drifted down such lofty and pretty snowflake promises throughout your childhood merely for them to fall into the fire of your adolescence and melt into a wet and dripping howl of nothing?

Picking up the pieces

February 2002

It’s impressive how much damage you can do to a sixteen year old in a bare three months. Enough to sabotage the next sixteen years, at least. The Florence Nightingale Unit had torpedoed Bink’s schooling, her relationships and worst of all by a very long way, her precious and so unusually sparkling mind.

We faced a daunting battle to get back to where she had been, without even considering treatment for the OCD which had landed her there in the first place. (And she would never be able to resume the same A-level course: some things were lost for ever.)

If I’d had any idea how many long and painful years it would take... well, thank the kind Lord He doesn’t show us the future.

The obvious place to start was with the beastly little pills. The sudden withdrawal of which had made her so distressingly and disastrously demented on Boxing Night.

She was taking one a day. I’ve no idea what that is in shrink-speak: Bink would probably remember the dosage. A pill was about half the size of your average-sized squashed pea or Ecstasy tablet. No, of courses I don’t! Excuse me: I’m a vicar’s wife. (Actually, I’m not a vicar’s wife any more, strictly speaking. Perhaps I should start to live a little... Afternoon tea dances and membership of nudist colony, maybe?)

Bink’s trust in me must have been sufficiently restored, now she was home again, to have given me charge of her medication. It was in one of those blister pack do-dahs. So I took this into the scullery (we lived in a Victorian Vicarage, with all the proper rooms a proper house should have) and climbed up a step ladder brandishing a nail file.

Curious; but I distinctly remember balancing precariously up there. I deduce it was so that if anyone came in unexpectedly, I could hide what I was doing without looking the slightest suspicious...

I then took pill Number One out of the blister thingy and filed the edges carefully, so it was very slightly smaller but still much the same shape. Then I returned it to the blister pack and smoothed the foil meticulously over it. Number Two pill I filed a bit more, and returned in the same way.

By the time I got to pill Number Ten, it was so tiny it was barely visible. She was bound to notice, but so what? By the time she asked how her pills had shrunk so mysteriously in the wash I’d be able to point out that she was nearly off them anyway.

Then I hid the pack on top of a very high cupboard, so no one could come across these Russian dolls of Sertraline lined up in their little blister beds, each one a bit more roomy than the one before, and wonder whether I should be committed to the nuthouse instead of Bink.

Extraordinarily, this Cunning Plan worked. In ten days she was off the stuff, and said yes of course she’d noticed but hadn’t wanted to be on them in the first place.

Except that, sadly, it didn’t really. It only achieved the immediate goal.

Before she was on medication, Bink’s mind had been sharp, witty, extremely incisive and with an absolutely infallible memory; capable of recalling conversations verbatim, even years later. After she’d been on Sertraline for a month or two she’d become irrational, confused and apparently capable of unrecognisable fantasies and imaginings. Her mind seemed to have deteriorated from the clearest focus to an incomprehensible fog. (We went to see A Beautiful Mind around this time, and all my fears were vindicated by the numbing and stupefying effect of medication on the brilliant John Nash.)

Though the real damage was far deeper even than this.

Sometime after I weaned her off Sertraline so her battered mind could recover, she went to see our GP about something else altogether.

I liked him very much, that GP. He was a proper, old-fashioned family doctor who used to come to barbecues in our garden with his glamorous French wife, and had a very un-NICE-recommended tummy, presumably due to her lovely French food and wine. I once happened to mention, in his surgery, that any booze – other than champagne, obviously – seemed to have a detrimental effect on my sleep. Could he advise?

“Stick to champagne,” he said.

But alas, despite this jolly attitude to the good things of life, he was pill-happy. A great many doctors are. He gave Shaun Prozac for his ME, and permanently undid all the good a whacky alternative diet had done him six months earlier. (And didn’t think to tell him, far less me – what does the wife matter? This is the data-protection-obsessed NHS – that Prozac can affect your libido. We’re back to common sense again: how can less sex possibly make you more happy? Given that he thought Shaun was depressed – he wasn’t: he had post viral fatigue, commonly known as ME – wouldn’t it make more sense to prescribe Viagra??)

And he handed Bink, when she visited him, a prescription for more SSRIs.

Before she went into the Unit she would have given him a firm, “No thanks.” But she had lost her drug-virginity... and her power to resist. Sixteen and a half years later, prescription medication is still her most obvious presenting problem.

And the first thing the Priory will tackle with her... at last.

A better future

Sunday

This is Bink’s nephew.

As you can see, being half-Norwegian he’s a tough little chap. Here he is having a spot of shut-eye in the English weather after rampaging and pillaging and conquering a few hundred Angles and Saxons yesterday morning. His favourite condition for a bit of time-out in his pram is under a lovely eight inches of snow, so he sometimes has to nip back over the sea for the more no-nonsense clime of his ancestors.

(He also has a robust Viking appetite. His preference is for 99%-beef-sausages, rare ribeye steak barely-cooked on the beach, haggis, black pudding, that sort of thing. We haven’t yet offered him raw reindeer bones to chew but no doubt he’ll soon catch his own.)

Shaun and I are in South London with Serena and her family, and Alex, for Shaun’s birthday weekend. Bink couldn’t come. She can’t cope with all the stress of moving, just for a couple of days. She can’t really cope with the loneliness of being left behind, either. When one of your children has an acute but brief illness, you can put everything on hold to attend to her needs.

If you continue this policy for twenty years you can destroy everyone in the family. And not help the patient anyway.

The Christmas before last, Bink’s sister gave her a very special present: a photograph of her own ultra-sound scan.

Children are the love of Bink’s life. When she came out of the Florence Nightingale Unit, she said her love of children was the only aspect of her personality still intact. All that was left, still truly herself and not destroyed by her illness.

Bink looked at her Christmas photograph from Serena for a few moments. Her younger sister had already assimilated the information and burst into tearful shrieks of joy. The reaction we all expected of Bink.

Instead there was silence: just, nothing. Then a deep reddening of the face. Then she too burst into tears. But very different from her younger sister’s tears of happiness. Bink’s tears were pitiful, pitiful, dreadful sobs of sorrow and grief and loss. 

The (unworthy, she knew) thought which flashed through her mind like a knife was, Oh, why couldn’t they have waited? Why couldn’t Serena have waited till I was well?

Her dream had always been of all of them having babies together. Of the cousins growing up best friends, as the siblings have been.

Yet another landmark which Bink’s terrible illness has stolen from her. From all of us.

And much as she adores her nephew and wants to spend time with him, she can’t manage a weekend away from home to see him.

But this is Sunday and Sunday is a day for good news and there is: very good news.

Bink has decided, now, a date for going into the Priory. She always wanted to come with us on our family holiday to Scotland for her younger sister’s half term at the end of October. After that she will start inpatient treatment, by 2nd of November.

When she was in the Bethlem Hospital, years ago, her therapist hit on a clever way of motivating her to overcome her OCD.

“What would you like to do more than anything else in the world?”

“Take my baby sister swimming,” Bink said.

Every new thing she managed to touch, every ritual she overcame, helped bring her nearer to that goal.

So it will be this time, in the Priory. Every new victory, every tiny battle won, will bring Bink closer, not just to her nephew, but perhaps even to giving him a cousin one day.

(PS And here he is this morning going to church. It is a twenty minute walk: we were half way there when a complete stranger stopped his car, opened his boot and gave us the biggest umbrella I’ve ever seen not on a stand. All the world loves a baby…)

Couple Counselling (III)

February 2002

Shaun and I were still attending our own clergy-counselling sessions.

What had started as a joyous experience to look forward to every week was beginning to resemble the cold water you put crabs in before bringing them slowly to the boil. Hard to notice when it’s time to jump.

A few weeks after we’d started sessions, Shaun was due to preach in Ireland for a week. I was invited to attend alone.

I am, I suppose, fiercely loyal. In Shaun’s first curacy, I was surprised – embarrassed, even – at the way other young wives in the parish talked of their husbands.

“He barely knows what a nappy is.”

“I can’t leave him alone with them for five minutes.”

“You’ll never guess what he did when I went to my mother’s...”

They wrote lists saying which day the bins went out and what the children were allowed for tea. Of course their men were twerps, if they were treated like idiots.

(My salad days! I went to Ireland myself for work many years later, and assumed that the rest of my family – who all ate the eggs from the garden quite happily... until then, anyway – knew that hens need locking up at night. You learn, you learn.)

Other women spoke this way in front of me, not even a close friend, about the loves of their lives. I wouldn’t dream of talking about my relationship with Shaun without him in the room: our counsellors might conclude I actually wanted to confide in them without him there, or something equally ghastly.

So while he was away I decided to give them some family background instead. Might be useful.

I told them of the struggles we had in the early years of Shaun’s living, when he was first appointed as the parson of Parson's Green. Of his father, drinking every hour God (and Mrs Thatcher) gave; of being unable to share this strain with our new congregation; of eventually having to tell Shaun’s own father that he could no longer live under our roof.

Of Serena, being so bullied at her new school that she ended up in hospital; of how the counsultant mismanaged her treatment so badly we eventually had to ask for help to enable her to get over the hospital experience; of how the NHS psychologist misinterpreted the facts so grotesquely we feared we could lose Serena for ever.

Of Alexander, our third, being diagnosed with Semantic Pragmatic Disorder, the nearest anyone got to Asperger’s syndrome twenty years ago; of the head master of his boarding choir school not sharing this information about his Special Needs with any of his staff; of Alex being bullied so relentlessly by unwitting teachers that he nearly took his own life.

And finally of the hardest challenge of all, Bink's terrible illness, now sucking everyone in the family into its greedy and insatiable black hole... That illness which our counsellors had already decided was our fault, for some unspecified reason. (This was just before Bink went into hospital, after which everything became so very much worse for all the family and Bink herself.)

I didn’t think of any of this as especial hardship. I have a dear friend (also a vicar’s wife) who had already buried two of her children. Parents on other shores have to watch theirs starve to death. We were extremely fortunate: we had a fabulously huge (if tatty) London vicarage; four gorgeous children; no physical disabilities; all four parents still living; enough to eat (usually); work we loved passionately; lots of wonderful friends.

Nevertheless I had to tell them something to fill the hour. And there wasn’t much point in describing all the things we presumably shared with every family: joys and happinesses, holidays and mealtimes, music and laughter.

So I laid out all my precious dolls on the table, that I loved so much: my dear and darling, cherished children.

I don’t know what I expected them to say, if anything. It certainly wasn’t what followed.

“What a sad story,” she said. Kindly (she was kind).

(Really? I hadn't meant you to think us sad…)

He, not so charitable. “If you came from a different background,” was his entire summing up, “we’d call yours a completely dysfunctional family.”

They had pushed me out of the aeroplane, with thirty thousand feet to the ground. And not even Shaun there to break my fall.

I've never been able to use the word “dysfunctional” since. Not of a family. So unspecific. So judgemental.

I was devastated.

I have never understood that particular style of counselling, which I’ve now come across over and over again, which consists of telling you how utterly miserable your life is and how put upon you are. (Usually by your parents. Who can’t answer back.) I realise that the old-fashioned exhortation to pull your socks up and count your blessings can be inadequate in the face of serious mental illness (believe me, friends, I would know) but when life is simply being its normal nasty, brutish and short self, our grandparents’ counsel that self-pity doesn’t help much and it’s better to remember how very fortunate we are has a very great deal to recommend it.

It certainly works better for me.

(There even came a time when that so-negative counselling approach drove me, for the first and last time in my life, to long to end it. But that was still some way down the line: it takes quite a lot of discouragement to put me down.)

Never again – never never never again – I vowed, would I ever go to counselling alone. Never. Again. Ever.

It was not a promise I was able to keep.

We continued attending faithfully, week by week, through that winter. We continued even after I felt deeply let down. The counsellors had given us their private telephone numbers and told us we could ring them any time. Over that Christmas holiday, if I ever needed my genie to come to me in the desert, it was then. The male counsellor agreed to see us the following day to help us through.

When the day dawned, he had changed his mind. It would be unprofessional, he said, to meet up outside the session.

What? More unprofessional than giving us your number? Than telling us you’d always be there for us? Than agreeing to meet in the first place?

A few weeks into the Lent Term there came another session when we had to arrive separately: Shaun was shopping for sports kit for one of the children, and arrived a few minutes after me.

Remembering my dreadful experience the previous term – one I doubt I will ever forget – I said I’d prefer to wait for him please, but they overruled me and said we’d start without. I spent the entire hour in agonised silence, refusing to say anything and wondering what on earth had happened to him.

The receptionist hadn’t sent him up because the session had already begun.

When the three of us came down and found him, quietly reading the papers, the counsellor shredded him as if he were a fibbing, thieving schoolboy. How dare he treat them and the session with such disrespect? Like a schoolboy, Shaun said nothing in response to this tirade. He didn’t bother to say he himself had been waiting for fifty five minutes. Keeping counsel is Shaun’s particular speciality. Why waste a word when silence will do?

On the way home, though, he fumed in quiet fury. I was astonished: I hadn’t realised we could criticise our counsellors. If I could have reacted like that, with anger not mortification, I would have coped a great deal better.

Mind you, I’d probably have coped better with counsellors who practised kindness not cruelty.

Anger

Late January 2002

Bink was home again.

Except she wasn’t.

This wasn’t the Bink we knew. She went into the Florence Nightingale Unit with OCD. She came out unrecognisable. Feral. Insane.

For one thing, she was now on highly addictive medication. That this was doing her no good was evidenced by the fact that she was so very, very much more ill than she’d gone in. I’ve always estimated, by a factor of about ten.

For another, she was now understandably terrified of treatment. Even if we could find something appropriate for her condition, she didn’t want to have anything to do with hospitals or doctors ever again.

Thirdly she had now dropped – or rather been forceably yanked – out of school. She had no structure, nothing to do, and no reason to get out of bed any more.

“She must have an activity,” Dr Ratched had said. “A job in a shop, or something.” Three months earlier Bink had been half a term into A-level maths, further maths, physics and English at one of the most academically rigorous schools in the country. Was her education now over? Could she have no higher ambition than this?

It soon transpired that getting out of bed before noon was an ambition considerably higher than she could now achieve.

And her school didn’t want her back, after what the Unit had done to her.

More pressing than any of this, she was angry. Very angry indeed. Young as she was, she knew Robin had treated her appallingly. She wanted an explanation.

Robin operated from (and perhaps owned) a smart clinic in Sloane Square. 

Shaun had given Bink a hat of his, presumably for the winter. Bink has always been petite: five foot three, seven stone. Since the Unit, she wore large clothes. I see her still, diminutive figure, large man’s coat, jogging trousers, all topped with the black beanie she now wore all the time, setting off with Binkish determination from our Vicarage in Parson’s Green, headed for Sloane Square. We tried to stop her a number of times. But, unlike the Florence Nightingale, we didn’t lock her in.

The crunch came during a working breakfast for a preaching group of fellow clergy. Earnest muscular Christians, good friends, getting to grips with the Book of Romans or whatever, over bacon and eggs at our large Vicarage kitchen table.

I don’t know whether you’ve ever attended, or indeed run, a smart counselling-cum-therapy surgery in Sloane Square. Even if you haven’t, you can probably imagine that one of the items you might not put at the top of your wish-list-business-plan, as a ploy for enhancing custom, would be an obsessive fruitcake, dressed like a tramp, camping out on your smart Sloane Square steps, day in day out and all day long, frightening the horses. And all the other patients going in and out.

Whether or not it was topped by a black beanie hat. It probably wasn’t the deciding factor, to be honest, but I don’t think the beanie helped.

Now it was Robin on the line, interrupting the working breakfast. I usually answer the telephone in our house, but for some reason Shaun had taken the call.

After ten minutes, he gave me a summary.

Robin was advising sectioning.

Every so often, in telling this tale, I have to break off to deal with my own anger. I had thought it all long gone, swallowed up in sorrow. 

Sectioning is, obviously, an extremely grave infringement of anyone’s freedom: essentially, putting an innocent person behind bars, without trial, to prevent loss of life or serious harm. The one and only criterion, as I understand it, being threat to one’s own or someone else’s safety.

Never have I heard, read or seen anywhere discussed in the press the following additional criteria: that someone is threatening the reputation of your smart counselling business in Sloane Square; that you feel a bit freaked out; that you don’t like her sitting on your doorstep.

It also stands to reason sectioning is likely to have far-reaching implications: not just the immediate loss of freedom, but loss of possible future freedoms such as callings to the Church or the Armed Forces... not to mention working with children, the one consistent ambition Bink has had.

“Over. My. Dead. Body.”

I may have thought, but didn’t say, go to the frigging cops and get a harassment order, like a grown up.

“I’ll take that as a no, then, shall I?” Shaun asked tentatively.

The really frightening thing is how easy it could have been. If I hadn’t resisted, Robin could have picked up the telephone to Dr Ratched and Bink could have been banged up before anyone had even had time to think, “Human Rights.” Given the damage done to her by three months’ supposedly voluntary incarceration, I don’t even want to imagine what that might have done to the rest of her life.

Bink wasn’t then and never has been sectioned. Presumably eventually Robin had to man up.

Though Bink still believes, all these years later, that he should be prosecuted, sued or at the very least reported to the apppropriate regulatory body for what he did to her.

Perhaps now is the time to do it.

Battling for Bink's soul

Late January 2002, Thursday morning.

Everything we had been praying for, for three months, lost in one idiotic slip-up: letting Bink see Dr Ratched without us. We had no idea how she had persuaded her to go back into the Florence Nightingale Unit (then: we discovered later) but whatever it was, it was damned effective.

Bink looked utterly crushed.

“Your mother will go home and get your things,” Dr Ratched said sweetly, “while you go back to the ward. Now,” she added with an undertone of firmness.

“No,” I smiled helpfully. (But, I like to think, with just a soupçon of slightly impressive steel.) “I won’t know what she’ll need. You come back with us Bink, and we’ll pack together.”

I didn’t for a moment believe this oh-so-obvious tug-o’-war could work.

“Ok,” Bink said, and got up to leave with us.

Phew. Fifteen all.

A long match still ahead of us.

As soon as we got home Bink asked if she should pack.

“No hurry,” I said brightly. “Let’s have lunch first.”

I nipped upstairs to ring a few friends and ask them to pray.

And then a Neuro-Developmental Consultant, David Mulhall, who had treated Alexander. Alex‘s schooling was blighted by repeated and relentless requirements to perform tasks which, with his Asperger’s syndrome, he was completely incapable of. Particularly if they involved time, which Alex doesn’t really relate to. I’m still not sure what effect David’s numerous and tedious exercises had, morning and evening every day for three and a half years. Time seems to have remained a bit of a stranger, to be honest. But Alex credited David with enabling him to relate to neurotypicals, at least. (Being Alex, the exciting breakthrough came when he realised, face shining, that he could communicate with the horse he’d just been allocated for a week’s family trekking in Donegal. Perhaps it was an Aspergic horse and they were on the same wavelength. Which is kind of cool as well as significant, given that he now works in the Equities department of his firm.)

David’s treatment was costly (for a clergy family) and time-consuming. It might not help. But it was harmless. If he treated Bink, the worst he would do would be nothing.

Very much unlike the Florence Nightingale Unit, then.

He offered to see her that afternoon.

“Come on!” I said, with irritating cheeriness. “Let’s see if David can help.”

The thing about OCD is that if I’d asked Bink to go to an appointment tomorrow or next week, it could have taken her three months to get ready. If something is immediate, there’s no time for any of the rituals so you just shrug and do it. Sometimes.

He assessed her and said he might be able to help. In a flowering of kindest generosity, he offered to treat her for nothing. (And did, for the next two years.)

“Do I have to tell you how I feel?” she asked, obviously frightened.

“Absolutely not. You don’t need to tell me anything. I’ll just give you some exercises.”

“You don’t need to know stuff about my childhood? Or my emotions?”

“Not in the slightest. I wouldn’t want to.”

She could scarcely credit this. “Do I have to believe in the treatment?”

“Not at all. My exercises work whether you believe in them or not.”

Her relief was heartbreaking. What had they done to her in there? 

As soon as we got home, I suggested tea.

“Don’t I have to pack and go?”

By supreme good fortune, a friend – of whom Bink was extremely fond and with whom she had played chess every week after church, in happier times – had just rung to say he was nearby. I seized my chance.

“Nick’s coming for supper,” I said. “Roast chicken, your favourite. Why not leave it till tomorrow?”

Fifteen thirty.

I hardly dared breathe.

The next day the spell has loosened sufficiently for Bink to tell me how Dr Ratched had persuaded her.

“She’s promised I’ll see Robin.” My heart sank. We couldn’t compete with this.

In case you missed this, Robin was the therapist who had bombarded Bink with inappropriate verbal and physical affection until, understandably, he became the most important influence in her life. Both he and the Unit had promised he would continue to see her in there, but after the first visit the Unit told him it would be professionally unethical for him to continue treating her while she was their patient. Probably the only sensible thing they ever did.

How the sands of morality had shifted so it could now be either professional or ethical to promise he would see her, as bait to lure her back in, will forever remain more inscrutable than the Bermuda Triangle.

And what if Robin himself hadn’t wanted to play ball? Daft question. For one thing, he was too wet (and presumably too terrified of his previous misconduct) to object. For another, they would simply do what they did first time around. You don’t need to keep promises to loony people, silly. Any more than promises to... I don’t know... spiders or children. And, you know, staff.

Perhaps Bink bore this in mind when she made a decision I never would have thought possible.

“I’ve realised,” she said later that day. “I don’t really want to see Robin that much.”

Shaun has a superb tactic – perhaps many men have – of simply ignoring someone or something unworthy of his attention. I answer my telephone to every cold caller. I explain in meticulously courteous detail why I believe they might be mistaken in thinking I’ve had an accident which wasn’t my fault, or am owed a life-changing fortune in mis-sold PPI. At some stage during the conversation, usually when I’m mid-sentence, my cold caller hangs up without so much as a goodbye or thank you. I’ve decided to stop feeling personally hurt by this.

The trouble is, such appalling behaviour isn’t the fault of the next cold caller, is it?

For once in my life, just once, I managed to employ Shaun’s approach. (Unlike each new cold caller who is an individual in his or her own right, Dr Ratched had form.)

She had been expecting Bink back on the ward since Thursday lunchtime. Heroically, I resisted the impulse to pick up the telephone any number of times all Thursday afternoon, to give her an über-polite update. I even managed not to ring her the next day too.

Last thing on Friday, she rang us. When would Bink would be arriving? Best before the weekend; the nurses would have her room ready by now.

“She won’t,” I said. No explanation. No excuses. No chit-chat. Then I hung up.

(After saying goodbye, of course. And hope you have a nice weekend. And… um… life.)

Shaun should have been proud of me.

I’d like to say, game, set and match. We had won that tournament, at least. Bink never went back into the Florence Nightingale Unit, or saw Dr Ratched again.

But alas: seventeen and a half years on and we are still whacking vicious balls over the net from the effects of those dreadful three months.

Which is why it is now down to the Priory to help Bink win the Grand Slam.

Outwitted

Late January 2002, Monday morning.

After three long months. Three months in which I had lain awake sick with worry every night, aching to bring her home. Three months of dreading, and fearing, and being impotent to prevent, the damage the hospital was doing to her. Three months of hopeless and helpless hell.

Bink on the telephone.

“This place is awful,” she said. “I can’t stand any more. Will you come and get me?”

I had to write my Thought for the Day script for the next morning – something I find almost impossibly difficult – before anything else or my day could slip out of control down the plughole and I’d still have nothing to say by midnight. My producer and I had agreed the topic. We had discussed the line I might take. Now to the writing, which can easily go skidding off in directions you really don’t want.

“Of course! Let me just draft this script. I should be able to set off in about an hour.”

“Ok,” she said, and hung up.

Eh? What did I just say?? Write a script! What was I thinking? I must be more mad than she was...

I rang my producer (and very dear friend) Christine.

“Go!” she said. “For goodness’ sake, go! Go and get your daughter!”

There’s a phrase I’ve heard Thought producers use occasionally, to instil a sense of proportion. You know: when your mother’s just been rushed into hospital with a massive stroke and you think it would be really irresponsible to ask if you might swop your slot; if you’re tempted to stay at your desk finishing your script when your house has caught fire. That sort of thing.

“It’s only radio!” Christine reminded me.

When I reached the Florence Nightingale there were very few people around. Bink was waiting for me, all ready: no packing needed. A concerned nurse fluttered, anxiously, saying we’d better wait for Dr Ratched. The psychiatrist would need to discharge her: she would be doing her rounds soon, she was sure.

I know what that means in hospital-speak: half a day at least. Nonetheless I wasn’t taking any chances. I couldn’t get Bink out of that building fast enough.

Dr Ratched wanted to see us. Could we attend, with Bink, on Thursday morning so she could discharge her properly? We’re conditioned, aren’t we? Less now than a couple of generations ago perhaps, but when someone with a hospital badge and letters after her name says jump! you find you’ve done it before you’ve had time to work out that you were on the edge of a cliff.

Thursday morning, and we arrived a bare five minutes before our 11 o’clock appointment.

“You go in,” Shaun said. “I’ll park.”

By the time he found me in the waiting room, Bink was gone.

“Dr Ratched wanted to talk to her on her own first,” I explained. “She was called up without me.”

“You should never have allowed that,” he said ominously.

“Excuse me,” I went straight to the reception desk. “All three of us were invited for this appointment. When will we join our daughter?”

“You’ll be called.”

Five minutes later, “I’m sorry to disturb you again, but we’re wondering when we’ll be shown upstairs.”

“She’ll call when she’s ready for you.”

Another ten minutes. “My husband has an appointment and we really can’t stay any longer,” I insisted with fierce energy. “We need to go up now.” No need to add that Shaun would cancel a dozen appointments for his daughter if he needed to.

When Bink had left the waiting room half an hour earlier, she walked upstairs with a spring in her step, her head held high and her cheeks rosy. By the time we were shown into Dr Ratched’s consulting room she was curled in an armchair, foetal, grey and mute. She looked dreadful.

The psychiatrist welcomed us with a beaming smile.

“Good news,” she said. “Bink has agreed to come back in.”

Gone again.

End of 2001

We never discovered how Bink got the injury to her face. The charge against Shaun was quietly dropped.

I didn’t care. 

All I cared about was Bink’s state of mind, or lack of. What we had witnessed was terrifying, far beyond anything we could deal with. This was why we had taken her back to the Florence Nightingale, despite all the damage I knew they’d been doing to her. She had been nothing like that when we’d first taken her in, two months earlier. Yes, she’d had OCD: a very significant difficulty, making her desperately unhappy. But she hadn’t been, like, mad.

If she was that demented... I don’t think we could imagine a future at all.

The word Shaun and I asked of each other, not even knowing what it meant, was, “Schizophrenia?”

My brother is professor of nano-materials. He knew how to use the internet long before we did. A day or two after he and his family returned home to Oxford after Christmas, we received some pages of print-out.

Sertraline.

The drug Dr Ratched had put Bink on, very much against our wishes and hers. Which had “no negative side-effects” and which you could stop “at a moment’s notice, without any issues of withdrawal at all.”

And here were all the horrendous symptoms of coming off it suddenly, described on the internet, for anyone (who know how to use the internet) to read. And Dr Ratched had said there were none.

Was she ignorant or mendacious? Which would be worse?

Bink must have stopped taking her unwanted medication as soon as she got home, acting (sensibly) on the information she’d been given: that she mustn’t combine it with alcohol; and that she could stop it whenever she wanted.

She wasn‘t mad at all. She was simply exhibiting the known symptoms of sudden withdrawal. Palpitations, extreme terror, hallucinations. It was exactly as I had feared: the pills had made her very much worse.

Did no one in the Unit have any compassion at all? Could they not have thought to allay our wretchedness, as my brother so kindly had? We had been worried out of our own minds.

And of course, now we knew this, we realised with sinking dismay that we needn’t have taken her back into the Unit at all. Just stayed with her, and calmed her, and held her while the effects of the drug wore off, however many days or ghastly weeks that might have taken.

2002 began dull and leaden. Bink back in. Back on medication. Back incarcerated and beyond our reach.

We could do nothing. Except pray. Which we must have been doing almost incessantly, even though my confidence in prayer had been pretty effectively demolished when all our church prayed for Alexander a few years earlier. So it wasn’t because I had any faith in prayer left that I’d gone on praying.

Just, there was nothing else we could do.

Day after day, week after week, no change, no hope, no access. No communication at all.

Unless Bink herself specifically requested it. And she wasn’t talking to me.

It was a Monday morning in late January when I got the call.

I was writing a script for Thought for the Day, for Radio 4 the next morning. Racking my brains, as I always do, for something interesting, about an item in that day’s news, with a faith perspective, which hasn’t been said many times before. Bit of a bum brief, really.

Staring out of my attic study window at our neighbour’s roof in Parson’s Green. No inspiration there either.

When the telephone rings it breaks my attention, but it’s welcome because I’m stuck anyway.

“Hello,” said a familiar voice.

Wow. “Hello, Bink!”

Sirens

27th December 2001, 4am

My brother was heroic, that dismal early morning just after Christmas. 

I dragged him out of bed long before dawn was even thought of, to move his car. Instead, he offered to drive us. Bink in the back with Serena, her language unspeakable... certainly better unspoken: an aggressively drunken sailor crossed with a seething sewer, directing all its vitriol at the driver; intimate, possibly imagined, confidences from my niece about her parents, screamed at him with venom.

We had never heard anything like this. Bink: spiteful, cruel, disgusting even? Her brain had been hacked by some feral and malign virus; the machinery whirring completely out of control. My brother said nothing, and drove on. I have no idea to this day whether he was hurt, shocked or simply sensibly switched off.

Shaun stayed behind, my parents still undisturbed in bed, and my sister-in-law and their daughters.

And our two boys. Ben’s young life torpedoed, yet again, his Christmas holiday hijacked.

A woman had been staring, outside the Vicarage, horrified at the scene of a vocally very distressed girl being manhandled into a car.

She stayed staring.

Here is a difference between Shaun and me. If I had been left on the pavement while Shaun took Bink to the hospital, I would have considered what it looked like to this appalled passerby; approached and befriended her; explained a little – even still traumatised, as I was myself. Women are trained from knee-high to oil the social wheels.

Shaun thought it none of her business.

“Boo!” he said. The stranger squealed. Then the Vicar went back inside his Vicarage to go back to bed. Or mourn his lost daughter.

Or both.

In the limbo between Christmas and New Year London is deserted. When the children were younger they attended an orchestra course over the last days of December, and driving them along the Embankment each morning took ten minutes instead of forty. The dead time between midnight and dawn is even more so: the streets were empty.

Until sirens split the stillness, and several police cars, blue lights screaming, converged and pinned us to the pavement. I assumed they were in pursuit of criminals, but instead they invited us out of the car. My brother wore nothing but his flimsy sky-blue pyjamas, more suited to midsummer than midwinter. We should have been shivering as we placed our palms on the roof of the car: Serena remembers being barefoot on the icy pavement, while they seemed to question us for ever.

I was shaking… but completely unaware of the cold. In the strangeness I was too stunned to feel anything but bereavement.

They must have asked our business: we must have said we were taking Bink to hospital. They said they’d better do that.

“Oh, please,” I said. “Yes, please. Thank you, thank you, thank you.” Odd words, perhaps, for kidnappers.

I remember nothing about the hand-over, or settling Bink back in. Nor about getting back home. Whether we attempted sleep again; or sat together in the kitchen with cooling, unwanted mugs of tea… as we had when Bink went missing for two nights aged twelve, and we concluded she was dead.

As then, there were no thoughts left over for Serena, and how she would recover from what she’d heard. Nor for Alex and Ben, and how we would rescue their Christmas.

Serena’s godparents were due with us for the day. I have an idea we had planned a cinema trip, but we had no energy for anything. At around midday, a policeman rang. We had become friends four years earlier, when he was liaison officer at Bink disappearance. Like us, he had helped run Christian holiday camps for teenagers, and was a friend of Shaun’s previous boss and Vicar.

He would help, he assured us.

With what?

Shaun was being investigated for assault.

Oh, what? Didn’t we have enough, already? 

There was now a reddening on Bink’s face. She’d explained that her father had slapped her.

We walked the streets that afternoon with Serena’s godparents: he one of Shaun’s oldest friends from their teens, also a clergyman. Their lives had not been easy, their only child with a life-long illness, likely to die before them. They breathed kind sympathy over the surreal nightmare spinning around us. He it was I turned to a few months later when I ran a razor along my wrist.

Bink was lost to us again. Her mind had been, long before she came home. Then and over the next few days we concluded she must be a lot more deranged than we’d realised. Schizophrenic, presumably: not that we knew much about it.

I can’t remember how, but towards the end of that day we learnt more about the mark on her face now being investigated.

It was on her right cheek.

Shaun is right-handed.

Try it sometime: slapping a friend’s face without thinking. (Perhaps ask first though, if you don’t want the police at dawn.)

You will use your dominant hand.

It was completely impossible for Shaun to have marked the right side of Bink’s face. So, who had?

Togetherness

Sunday

I decided, when I started this blog, that out of courtesy to your being willing to walk with me, I would post every day so you’d know where we are.

And on Sundays we would have a break from the painful past, and dwell on some positive aspect of the present.

For today’s post, I was slightly stumped. 

Not because life isn’t good. It is. Thank you. Particularly this weekend because Alex is home, which always makes for a lot of laughs. Almost as many laughs as when Ben is home. Which is always. On account of, he lives at home. Which means we need all the laughs we can get.

Anyways.

Something I’ve learnt (pretty painfully) through the last twenty years and my mother seems to have known all her life, is that God can indeed bring good out of apparent (and indeed very real) bad. You just have to learn to recognise, and usually wait, for it.

Over the last couple of days, two of our three daughters have reacted, arguably negatively, to this blog. (Actually, three. Rose said, “I could walk to the station alone long before I was ten!” “I’ll change it then,” I promised immediately: that’s the thing about online publishing. “Naa,” Rose said. “Don’t bother.” As if my writing were the most unimportant thing in the world. Which, to my family, it is...)

I should perhaps explain a principle we drew up very early in this parenting business. I was brought up in a head master’s house, and once (and once only: most of the time I loved it) felt so resentful of our home’s being used for school business that I hid, under the sofa cushions, the coat of the piano teacher who had been giving a lesson in our drawing room. (And never confessed... until now. And overheard my parents saying the cleaner must have done it in a moment of incomprehensible absent-mindedness.) I determined that my children would never experience the same, so we established when we moved into a Vicarage that a veto of one, no matter how young that one was, would always be enough.

So if anyone in my family, at any time in the now or future, expresses this wish, my blog will cease immediately and disappear from view.

On Friday afternoon, I tried to show Bink a kind and very interesting comment from a reader... and it quickly transpired she was in a vile mood. (Bink. Not the reader. As far as I know.)

The reason followed soon after. My blog. All the things I’ve remembered differently.

“Bink, tell me!” I pleaded. “The last thing I want is inaccuracy. The truth is always more interesting.”

“How can you say that Daniel,” (in the Florence Nightingale Unit) “wasn’t abused? Her father made her watch porn when she was little.” (As a little boy, that is.) “And she was a girl long before she came in, too.”

“I’m sorry. I didn’t know. Please tell me and I’ll change anything you say.”

“It’s not your fault,” she said, after establishing this would take too long. “I said you could write it. But I also said I didn’t want to have anything to do with it, and this is why.” Maybe one day, she’s promised, she’ll read and correct everything.

Yesterday I spoke to Serena. “You sound low.”

“Perhaps I should stop reading your blog,” she admitted.

“Perhaps I should stop writing it?”

“No!” Serena was emphatic. “People need to know. There are far too many others suffering...”

“They don’t need to know at our expense,” I countered. “Our first duty – in this instance – is to ourselves.”

She was adamant, like Bink, that I shouldn’t stop the story on her account.

I have known others, as ill as Bink, who don’t acknowledge they are ill at all. How they will ever get well is a mystery... perhaps even to God Himself. Whereas Bink is extremely open. She has no truck with the taboo around being mental. None of us has.

This is a huge blessing, to her and all of us. As well as a great weapon in the armoury of health.

So yes, life – as Alex, Ben, Bink and I sat round the fire-pit till midnight last night, welcoming in the autumn – is very good indeed. Thank you.

Bat shit crazy

27th December 2001

It was the darkest hour of the not-morning when the telephone rang.

It would have been a pretty confusing call even if we hadn’t been groggy with sleep. Someone at the Florence Nightingale Unit, half an hour away in North London, was ringing us in Parson’s Green, garbling something about Bink who was supposed to be with Serena in the flat next door. 

We lurched into some clothes.

If that flat had been the city of Jericho it would have been rubble by the time we arrived. Bink was screaming the walls down. Bansheeing off them. If you’ve ever trapped a terrified wild animal in your bare hands you’ll know: I picked up a young field mouse as a small child and it bit me to the bone.

What assaulted us at the front door was a vortex of screeching fireworks. We went up the stairs into a caterwauling Charybdis. Trying to catch and calm whatever had taken hold of Bink was to embrace a water-jet.

And Serena had been coping with this alone.

It is years ago now and she has neutralised what memories she can, but still retains a few vivid details: her own terror; her realisation that this is what demon possession is; and the “men with knives coming through the window to get me.” Bink has always claimed she made them up, but I could see them in her eyes when we arrived. Serena too.

It transpired that, after we’d gone to bed around midnight, Bink had gone outside and started yelling her pain into the Parson’s Green night. Serena managed to get her into the flat but containment merely concentrated her incoherence.

The only thing which she communicated clearly was that Serena was not, under any circumstances, to call us. Serena must not ring home. She mustn’t tell Shaun or me anything. She was not to fetch us. She mustn’t she mustn’t she mustn’t.

Under no circumstances whatsoever at all at all did Bink want to see me.

So after two hours of this frenzied nightmare Serena rang the hospital.

This may sound strange to anyone under thirty, but when when we were children there was an idea – long left over from Victorians and smelling salts, for all I know – that the appropriate thing to administer when someone is suffering from hysteria is a slap. Like you say boo! to cure hiccoughs. No, that’s never worked for me, either. Perhaps sudden shock can tranquillise, or at least stop one in one’s tracks: I don’t know. Now that I’ve heard Professor Veale’s explanation about the calming effect of sudden cold (and read more about it myself) I presume a bowl of iced water thrown over the head could do the trick. Be that as it may, a slap in response to hysterics was a deeply ingrained idea, heard at our mothers’ knees.

What could we do with this shrieking maelstrom whirling round the plughole of Maggie’s flat? Nothing could contain her. In his panic and fear, Shaun slapped her.

No change. Even that couldn’t check the raging tumult that Bink had become.

We had no idea what to do. The hospital had rung us. They seemed to know what was going on. Goodness only knows why given the history, but all we could think of in that confused frightening whirlwind of howling in the most hidden part of the night was to take her back there.

We managed to steer her outside but my brother’s car was blocking ours in our Vicarage drive. He came downstairs, in his thin cotton summer pyjamas, and offered to drive us there.

The Vicarage in Parson’s Green is fairly public, even in the small hours in the deserted Christmas hols. Imagine you witnessed a slim, five foot three girl screaming in wild distress while two men bundled her into a car...

You might, sensibly, be too frightened to ask what was going on. So you might go home and do it from there.

I said that Shaun’s slap “did nothing.”

That wasn’t entirely true.

Home?

December 2001

By December Bink still wasn’t talking to me. And she didn’t want to come home for Christmas.

I was howling with grief. I apologise to my other precious offspring for all the hurt and neglect, over the years, that this represents, but a mother is only as there as the one who is off with the cuckoos.

I couldn’t see any point in any of the festivities. At all. I sat weeping at the kitchen table, kind members of our church trying hopelessly to comfort me, unable to care about food or decorations or presents or any of it, if Bink wouldn’t be home with us. 

(And yet there would come a day long in the future, and other Christmases over the horizon, when I was to look back on the end of 2001 with longing. Nostalgic for the day when we had a kitchen table to weep at, and a church to belong to. Not knowing whether Bink was alive or dead to be wept over.)

It was Serena who enabled her to come home… by telling her she didn’t need to. Thereby employing, instinctively and without any training, a technique used many years later to great effect by the best therapist Bink has ever had.

Suddenly, she could.

But not sleep in the Vicarage: my parents were staying, and my brother’s family, and she couldn’t cope with so many people. I wonder now that we didn’t have the sense to cancel them all to care for her, but we’re not in the habit of letting people down so presumably it never occurred to us.

Our dear neighbour Maggie, Shaun’s employee and lay worker, was going home for Christmas. She lived in the church flat next door, and offered us the run of it. Serena kindly agreed to stay there with her sister.

Serena was barely adult. No eighteen-year-old should ever have to go through what Serena endured that Christmas. No one should.

If you recall, the Florence Nightingale psychiatrist... I’m beginning to agree with Ben: it’s jolly cumbersome, all this “psychiatrist-this” and “shrink-that.” It would be much easier to tell this story if I named her.

We could just call her Cruella. On the other hand, even people who wreck your life have husbands and children who love them; even social workers who tear apart loving families (yes, I’ve witnessed that too) probably believe they are serving some Higher Good in some alternative universe where parents don’t care about their children… and more to the point, children don’t cry themselves to sleep every night mourning their lost parents. In her defence, Dr Ratched (for want of a better name) was elegant and lovely to look.

Anyway, if you remember, this Dr Ratched (Medical Doctor of Shrinkness) had established a couple of factoids very firmly in Bink’s mind:

1. That she could stop her meds at a moment’s notice with no ill effects.

2. That she mustn’t under any circs combine booze with the meds.

She was sixteen. It was Christmas. What would you do? Precisely. So would I.

So would Dr Ratched (MDoS) herself. Unless she’s teetotal. Which wouldn’t surprise me. (No offence to my Muslim friends, whom I respect hugely.)

We must have got through Christmas Day without incident because I don’t remember it.

Boxing Day, we have traditions going back to when the children were little and before.

In the afternoon, we play hockey. (Sorry, but there it is. Hunting, unlike the fox community, is thin on the ground in Fulham.) We bully all the neighbours to the bully-off, invite any friends dumb enough to wield a stick, and my cousins always come over (and stay till midnight). My father defended in goal well into his eighties, once skidding across Parson’s Green in the mud on his belly at an age when most people are being pushed around in bath chairs. And saving the goal. If not his specs.

And then we have a Big Tea.

In the evening, we dress for dinner and eat all the left-overs we prepared some time before Christmas, ’specially for Boxing Day. A roasted ham stuck with cloves; a Stilton big as a milking stool; game pies and cold rare beef; Christmas-pudding-ice-cream served in an ice bowl, with suspended delicate leaves and flowers trapped in its glassy sides.

And no shortage of the juice of the grape and roasted hops, to gladden the heart of man. (And to recover from freezing our knees off and remembering what a truly hideous game hockey is.)

Bink sat next to Serena, under her careful wing, and managed a situation she had expected to find very challenging. Were it not from the misinformation from Dr Ratched (MDoS) perhaps she would never have gone back into the Unit.

And then we went to bed.

Until, at around 3am, we received a crisis call from the Florence Nightingale Unit...

Instead of work

Present day.

You must be wondering what day-to-day life with a loony is like. How can it be so time-consuming, when all she does is lie in bed all day?

I realise such a rapid change of direction doesn’t fool you for a mo. Yesterday we were in the Florence Nightingale Unit and late 2001. What happened to that nail-biting, white-knuckle-ride, cliff--slide-on-our-bottoms-down-to-the-beach I left you with, eh?

Yes, well. I’ll come back to it tomorrow. Having lived through several of Shaun’s breakdowns, I’ve become much more attuned to, and respectful of, my own feeble squawks of emotional protest. I’ve learnt to be kind to myself. I need a break from being cross today.

Given that you’re all gluttons for punishment and longing to go back in there, we’ll return to the Flo Nightingale tomorrow.

So, back to living with someone who’s round the bend and why it’s hard to do anything much else at the same time.

Obviously, you have to feed her occasionally. And she can’t do anything to help with that process.

No, really, she can’t. The last time but three that Shaun and I accompanied Bink to her umpteenth tribunal to fight for her disability benefits yet again, the panel of judges asked us to comment on her assertion that she wasn’t “safe in a kitchen.” The look of instant stricken terror on our faces and the way we glanced nervously around, like Pavlov’s dogs, for the nearest fire extinguisher was enough to obviate the need for words.

Bink once managed to stop herself taking a searing baking tray out of the oven, in the marigolds she wore continuously from the age of 17 till she went into the Bethlem Hospital aged 21, with the timely thought, “Hang on. Hot dish. Need to pick up with something protective.”

So she grabbed a plastic bag. And, yes, used it.

When she was in the Bethlem Hospital, they told her that cooking was an essential aspect of every patient’s OT.

“I’m not sure you want me in your kitchen,” she warned them.

“Of course we do!” They said reassuringly. “Everyone does a bit of cooking: no exceptions. Don’t be nervous: we’ve had patients far more ill than you, who couldn’t cook at all.”

After one session – one session – Bink was excused cooking. For all time.

They put her on house demolition instead.

Anyway, you’re partially right. A lot of the time, now I’ve given up on believing I can ever help her get well myself, I leave Bink alone under the covers upstairs. It’s pretty depressing, knowing there’s a Mrs Rochester in the attic, but you get used to it. Like you get used to hitting your head repeatedly with a claw hammer.

Much of the time, though, she needs something.

The other day she was up earlier than usual. About 4pm. Looking drawn and distressed.

“Please will you help me?”

“Of course, Bink, if I can. What with?”

“The dryers.”

Dryers? Bink hasn’t been able to use our laundry for two and a half years, when she disappeared for three months after thirteen-year-old Rose changed the programme on her wash, mid-cycle, to a shorter one so her uniform would be ready for the start of term that day. Bink went into melt-down about her beloved baby sister spending all term contaminated by soap residue. My fault, somehow. Most things are. That was at the New Year.

Bink was still living elsewhere and unable to join us for the joyous week-long celebration of Rose’s confirmation, at Easter. Yet again, family incomplete.

Anyway, I deliberately have a dryer in the laundry which barely works, so everyone is forced to use sun and air.

“Next door. You know.”

Ah. The dryers.

We live next door to a care home for the acutely disabled. We hear the occasional bloodcurdling screech in the night, but we don’t mind that: we are grateful to them for doing such loving work on behalf of society. What Bink and I mind are the sound of the dryers going night and day. To be fair, most of the time no one else can hear them (except, intriguingly, my 100-year-old father) and the owners of the home are trying everything they can to muffle them.

But I have an utter loathing of mechanical noise, however almost-imperceptible, and wouldn’t have chosen our house if the dryers had already been in place. I couldn’t live (voluntarily) within several miles of a distant motorway. I won’t say, it drives me nuts. I just hate it.

It drives Bink nuts.

Yes, I know she’s nuts already. But it drives her really nuts. Scaling the drainpipes at 3am begging staff to turn them off, nuts. (I can’t think why she scaled the drainpipes instead of ringing the doorbell, but I distinctly remember this happening a few years ago.)

She can’t sleep. She can’t get out of bed. She can’t start a shower. That kind of nuts. Sometimes she can cope with it for a few weeks, if the wind is blowing the right direction. Sometimes she can’t.

This was one of those. She couldn’t stand one more minute of it. I could tell, by the ghostly pallor on her face and the shaking limbs.

Trouble is, when you’ve been trying to solve a problem for several years, there’s a limit to how much you can do in an afternoon.

Still, she begged me to go round there, though the owner is seldom available. She came with me, in her huge men’s boxers, baggy teeshirt and nothing else. And we spent the next couple of hours, with the kind and solicitous proprietor, turning the machines on and off; going up to Bink’s room and coming back again; eventually with my lugging the heavy old wooden ping-pong table we use to serve dinner to paying guests in the garden, and laying it over the exit pipes of the dryers, probably in contravention of every fire reg you’ve ever imagined; going back up to her room; finding it didn’t make the slightest difference; finally my agreeing to source an acoustics expert and the proprietor agreeing (yet again) to source quieter industrial drying machines, if they exist, next time they upgrade. 

No difference in the sound whatsoever. But a difference in Bink.

“Thank you,” she said. “It does make it less stressful, actually. Knowing you’ve tried everything, and you aren’t just doing it to drive me mad.”

This is why my novel coming out next month is my first for nearly twenty years. That is what I've spent my days doing for all that time.

While most people are being productive at work.

Power and punishment

November 2001.

As a result of this blog, Bink has been telling me more about her time in the Florence Nightingale Unit.

Apparently the staff did notice her hunger strike. By the time she’d visibly lost about 15% of her body weight. Which was how she managed to see Robin again: she told them she wouldn’t eat anything until they’d kept their promise – and he, his – that he would visit her there.

Another patient was due to be taken out by her granny. The staff chose that particular evening to keep all the patients at the table, not allowing them to get down until Bink had eaten something.

Which she wasn’t going to.

So this poor lass wasn’t allowed to see her granny. More to the point perhaps, her granny wasn’t allowed to see her… while they all sat there, waiting for Bink to do something she had made clear she wouldn’t do. Goodness knows whether the hapless grandmother had travelled ten miles or a hundred, but far more likely the latter because Bink was the only one with family in London.

This is the point at which I want to weep with rage. For the love of God, someone tell me: how does that help to cure an adolescent’s mental illness? How can it possibly be part of hospital care? To punish her – and her grandmother – because another patient is on hunger strike? 

Indeed, how was it appropriate to punish any of them at all? What was it supposed to be: a place of healing or a detention centre?

It is a while before I can say anything. “Were they angry? The others I mean.”

“With the staff, maybe. Not with me. We all knew they were being dicks. The other girl said she would have just drunk the milk if it had been her, but she didn't blame me.”

The staff backed down eventually. They had to. When Bink decides, she does: she would have sat there for days.

That’s the thing about a show of strength: it’s worth doing your calculations before you embark, isn't it?

“Tell me – exactly, in your own words – what Robin did wrong,” I ask.

“Touching me repeatedly. Professing affection. And losing my poetry and drawings.”

This is a new one on me: I’d rather have my house ransacked and every stick of furniture stolen than lose one poem or work of art I’ve created.

As a result of Bink's hunger strike, Robin visited her in the Unit. Once. She gave him everything she’d written and drawn while there. And then the Unit told Robin they were in charge of her treatment, so he sent all her work to the Unit and she never saw it again.

“Why didn’t he send it back to you?”

“Because they said he wasn’t to contact me.”

“Why not send it to us? Or return it with a letter explaining that he wasn’t allowed any more contact?”

“Exactly. That would have been enough. Because he was a drip.”

“He must have been terrified of his previous misconduct.”

“Yup. What pissed me off was the Unit repeatedly saying, ‘We know you’ve fallen in love with your therapist...’ I wasn’t in love with him at all. I just wanted him to keep his promises.”

I realise something with a nauseous chill.

Psychiatric nurses, obviously, are not trained to the same level as psychiatrists. “If you don’t eat we’ll punish everyone, so all the others will hate you.” Inappropriate, of course it is. But you can imagine it. I’ve seen teachers doing this kind of thing: it happened throughout my schooling and I survived, more or less.

Far worse to do it with someone mentally ill, of course. Though, even so...

But the bar for psychiatrists and their appropriate conduct is set a lot higher, surely.

So: they all thought she was in love with Robin, did they? 

There came a time – eventually... far too late – when we rescued Bink from the Unit. The psychiatrist, however, wanted her back in there. 

Guess what she did. It sickens me even to say it.

She promised her Robin.

Miracle medicine

November 2001.

We were not allowed to veto Bink's medication. But since we were invited into the psychiatrist’s consulting room on a regular basis, it seemed sensible to find out more.

Sertraline was the first (of many) she was put on. It was the elixir of life, that drug. Lily the Pink’s Medicinal Compound. The first genuine miracle invented by the human race.

1. It had no side effects. That’s right. Absolutely none whatsoever. At all at all at all.

2. It was also astonishingly easy to come off. The moment you wanted to. Though you wouldn’t ever want to, because it solves world poverty. But if you did. You could stop just like that. No negative repercussions or withdrawal symptoms. At all at all at all.

3. If you don’t trust us we can’t work with you.

Hello? Where did that come from? Have no parents ever asked any questions before?

Well no, I don't suppose they would. All the other adolescents in that ward came from families who wouldn't know how, even if they had the energy left over from surviving their own lives.

I happened to mention all this in passing, a couple of months ago, to a reputable psychiatrist – still mystified as to why anyone would lie so blatantly to a patient and her family – and she very kindly took the time to reply: “Ah, there is a good explanation. In the early years of SSRIs, we really thought they had no ‘discontinuation’ symptoms and were very safe to start and stop. It was only much later that they were discovered, so the doctor probably really was not trying to deceive but we would all have been unaware.”

It was good to get this explanation at last. Genuinely.

However... um... forgive my being awkward, but it still leaves two very obvious questions unanswered.

First, if the drug was so new and unknown that the body of medical knowledge didn’t yet include such basic stuff as the way it completely screws your head when you come off it, and that you can find yourself addicted to it for years and years and years, why experiment on our daughter? Have we learnt nothing from thalidomide?

And secondly, how then was it possible for my brother (well-educated but nonetheless a layman) to allay our terror a few months later – when we thought Bink must be schizophrenic, so dire were the effects – simply by looking up this drug and what it could do, on something we'd barely heard of called the 'internet'?

Be that as it may, what the psychiatrist didn’t bother to mention, to us and even more crucially to Bink herself, was that you weren’t supposed to imbibe alcohol while on it.

A couple from our church, with the hospital’s permission of course, took Bink out to Pizza Express. When they delivered her back, they were asked what she’d consumed.

A pizza. A salad. A glass of red wine.

Shit. Fan. Convergence of.

I must still have considerable residual anger over Bink’s time in the Unit: just thinking about the way our kind friends were treated roils my guts.

How about giving them information before they took her out, rather than demanding it of them when they brought her back? How about an apology for not advising them properly? How about the hospital's taking responsibility for the omission, rather than rebuking those solicitous enough to give her a generous treat, as if they were recalcitrant schoolchildren smoking behind the bike sheds?

And of course the reprimand dished out to the adults was nothing to the scolding given to Bink herself.

It’s exhausting: remembering. Anger is.

Let’s end on a positive note. A reader has just asked whether Bink get to her therapy session last Thursday?

Yes, kind friends, she did. “She’ll never make it,” Shaun had said with his customary encouraging Eeyore jollity.

But I knew she would, somehow.

As I wrote yesterday, mothers can be annoying like that. Knowing stuff without knowing how.

So give me grace to be right on this one too: that the Priory offers Bink the turning point we've all been praying for – for so many, many long years – to a glorious future of freedom. 

Wormwood bane

November 2001

“Why don’t you name the shrink, in your blog?” Ben asked. We were out for supper with friends last Saturday night.

(This is a watershed. My family never reads what I write, listens to what I broadcast or watches me on the box. Apparently, because I never tell them when I’m on... though my father takes the trouble to ask.)

“Can’t be bothered,” I said.

“With what?”

“Oh, you know: law suits.”

“I can,” Bink interjects. “And I want you to give Robin’s full name, too.” (Robin was her abusive therapist: she’s been wanting me to sue or at least expose him for a decade and a half. You’re welcome to it, Bink.)

I’ve been through all that. A few years ago, after I was told fifteen years too late that we’d been lied to about not being able to take Bink out of the Florence Nightingale Unit, I spent an afternoon on the telephone to a lawyer friend-of-a-friend. Mostly to rule it out.

All the important cause-and-effects are impossible to prove, aren’t they? I gave you my life and soul because you told me you loved me that Monday morning before the spring blossom had even begun to fall. You abandoned the career you’d dreamt of because of a question your mentor asked you when you were sixteen.

Bink lost over half her life (so far) because of what they did to her in the Unit. I know it. She knows it. You can’t prove poetry in court. 

After an hour or two of this, I asked the lawyer what he would do. 

“If she were my daughter? I’d drop it.” So I did.

It wouldn’t bring the years back, would it?

While Bink was in the Unit, I pinned all hope on one small and precious kernel. She adamantly refused to swallow anything from their chemical Goblin Market. 

Bink says one of the most frustrating things about me is the way I know things without knowing how. That she, of all people, would be liable to extreme cannabis-damage. That the friend she lived with after university would wreck her life and turn her against her family. 

Both, long before there was any evidence – that anyone else could see, anyway.

That drugs would destroy her.

I knew passionately, with every bone in my body and hair on my head and cell in whatever it is cells reside in, that she mustn’t take the meds. The therapy was unhelpful and being taken out of school was worse, but as long as she put nothing untoward in her mouth, as long as the battering barrage stayed in the mind, she would be relatively safe.

And however angry Bink might appear superficially, it seemed that she agreed with me: that she knew, as well as I did, the answer to her pain did not lie in anaesthetising it. For all Bink’s looniness, she has always retained a core of solid gold discernment. As if, deep down in the rock bed heart of her, she isn’t loony at all. Twice in her life, in her early twenties and early thirties, a respectable, well-educated-and-earning man has asked her to marry him. (A different one each time: we're not talking Jay Gatsby.) Each persistent. Each besotted. Each eligible. Each a tempting immediate meal-ticket-free-carer. And each a long-term screaming disaster. Given how vulnerable she was each time, I am impressed at the certainty which she repeatedly refused.

And of course she has not, demonstrably, despite numerous crises, killed herself. I believe Bink's soul means to survive.

So it was then. Week after week, the hospital complained that she wouldn’t take her pills. Week after week, despite my gnawing anxiety, my heart sang. Good on ya, Bink: stay strong!

Something I have learnt, to my cost, several times over the last twenty years, is that none of us is invincible. Every last one of us can be broken, under a sufficient load. Underneath the spreading chestnut tree I sold you and you sold me.

She was just sixteen, away from home, unable to sleep, denied fresh air and exercise, barely eating, her immediate peers almost all abuse victims, the adults united in putting relentless pressure on her. Just take this little pill: it will give you oblivion till morning.

She held out and held out and held out, week after week after week... until the day that she didn’t.

A few years ago I was guest speaker for a charity lunch and seated next to the president of the Royal College of Psychiatrists. I asked whether medication given to a mid-teenager could cause permanent damage to the brain. At least I got an honest answer.

“Nobody knows. There is no ethical way of conducting studies.”

And yet it is ethical to administer without knowing? Or was Bink the ongoing study?

I have often marvelled at folklore telling of Bink’s plight long before she was born. When Snow White bit on the apple... when Eve tasted the fruit... when Laura gave in to the pinching, pestering goblins and put the sweet poison in her mouth. 

My heart was lead. Almost as if I knew that the evil little pill Bink agreed to take that first fatal night could still be the cause of her problems seventeen years later.

Oh, my prophetic soul!

Music

Sunday.

(Day for good news, Sunday, always.)

Yesterday Shaun and I took Bink to look round the community she has applied to join after she comes out of the Priory. It was calm and peaceful; pretty and rural; sheep baa-ing and stream trickling; and very, very kind.

Her only reservation (mind you, they might have reservations about her... most of us have) is that it is very, very small (and the few residents a fair bit older than she is) and when Bink gets lonely she becomes paralysed by depression. (I hadn’t quite taken on board, when I found it, that she had been hoping for a large, outgoing group – similar the Christian holidays for teenagers Shaun and I used to run – where she could meet lots of other people, including some her age. Still, better than a poke in the eye with a blunt stick which is what a lot of Bink's life has been worse than till now.)

None of this is the point for today, though. Which is that Bink and I did a deal. We finished looking round the community chapel – a high barn with scrubbed brick walls and soaring beams – and emerged into the lane at 4 o’clock.

“Right,” said Bink. “Seeing as I won’t be able to drink all the time I’m living here, let’s go to the village pub for a pint and ciggie.”

“Bink, it’s tea-time, not pint-time.”

“I want a pint.”

“I want tea.”

(What was Shaun wanting all this time? Peace, probably. And a book shop. He always wants a book shop.)

“When I’ve done something challenging, I recover with a pint and ciggie.”

(Actually, Shaun did chip in – quietly – at this point, saying she’d need to get out of that habit, then.)

“Whether I’ve done anything challenging or not, I want tea. And Bink, that really wasn’t very challenging.”

Tea, pint; tea, pint... &c.

“Ok, I’ll do you a deal.”

Her deal was just plain silly, but the offer I countered with was that if I endured the pub, she would accept my gift of a music-lesson-cum-jam-session this week with our gorgeous, gifted and huge-fun friend Lottie. Singing, violin, piano, I don’t care. Lottie is brilliant at all of them.

“Then,” I explained, “when you join this community, you can play their piano, and lead their singing in chapel with your fiddle.”

She must have wanted that pint very much...

But look, she’s only got to enjoy jamming with Lottie once, and then she’ll want a lesson every week, right? Then, hurrah hooray, the house will be filled with Bink's music again!

And the great thing is, because I’m paying for her music lesson, she had to pay for my tea.

In the pub.