Disastrous dope

Winter 2011

Bink has often referred to the advice I gave her that winter. Blamed me over and over. Undoubtedly because she is blaming herself far more. Which is almost certainly even more damaging.

We remember it slightly differently, she and I. Both of us, no doubt accurately, in our way.

I’ve just found a diary entry from the time, so that will have a truth of a sort.

She says she told us both, Shaun and me, that she could no longer cope off the medication that she had quit the previous Easter. And that this meant, obviously – she tells me now – that if she couldn’t cope… well, she would kill herself.

That’s what happens if you can’t cope. You can’t cope.

(Not quite, Bink. Other pretty awful things can happen when you can’t cope: not necessarily death. As we were to discover a few years later. And she was.)

Whereas I simply remember her asking whether she should, or rather had to, go back on medication.

She says Shaun gave her permission to do just that.

But she didn’t listen to Shaun.

December 2011, diary entry.

It is Saturday.

I spent two days lost. [After that visit to the doctor, when Bink was shouted at and we both went home in tears.] I did some things, I think. Rang the senior partner of the surgery. Went to see the counsellors the GP recommended. Read the NICE guidelines Serena had sent me and agreed, yes, he was talking through his a***.

These were achievements of a sort.

Emailed David Veale at the Bethlem Hospital and asked how it is that anyone gets better from OCD because surely, if anyone can, Bink ought to be able to. Youth, brains, supportive family. Trying as hard as anyone could.

Eventually, yesterday, I Googled Paul Salkovskis. Moved to Bath University. Rang the number on his page. Impersonal answerphone. Stumped. Thought for a while. Rang the department. Given the same number. Does he answer his own telephone? Yes. When will he be there? Try now.

Rang. He answered. He remembered me very well.

You can get 100% better from OCD, yes, and people do.

How?

CBT. No, she doesn’t need it every day. She needs quality not quantity.

And what about medication?

I can’t tell you your daughter shouldn’t be on medication. It wouldn’t be professional. There is evidence that CBT helps the effect of medication. No evidence that medication helps the effect of the CBT. There is some evidence that it can impair its efficacy.

There is no scientific evidence but plenty of speculation that being on anti-depressants, long term, as Bink has been, can cause the kind of problems she is reporting when you come off it.

Then is there anything to be said for medication at all?

You’re asking the wrong person. I treat with psychological methods, so I’m not an advocate of it. You need to ask a psychiatrist…

Yay, hurray, hurrah hurrah hurrah. She is right, she will get better, she should never have gone on the bloody things at all.

I knew it all along and so did Serena and so did Fleur. And so did Bink herself.

And more practically, he recommended someone in Cambridge and told me what to do.

While I was on the telephone to Paul, Ian [our doctor friend] tried to ring me several times. He too had done his research. He had found a good psychologist in Bedford, spoken to her himself, and told me how to get Bink referred.

I put a bottle of Cava in the fridge and rang Serena and Fleur, I was so happy, happy, happy.

And now today has been s*** because Bink is so f***ing miserable...

[End of diary entry.]

So, because I didn’t advise her to go back on SSRIs, Bink did indeed get desperate… and eventually turned to something much worse.

And, as I said, has blamed and blamed and blamed me ever since.

And – far worse: far more damaging – blamed herself.

Sympathy and failure

December 2011

Bink was strung like a garrotting wire that winter.

I’ve just found a diary note of the time, that her Director of Studies had sent her home half way through the Michaelmas Term, incapable of anything.

I didn’t really take this on board.

My difficulty was that, ever since I had taken Bink on Paul McKenna’s NLP week, and Alex on Phil Parker’s Lightning Process, a few years earlier, my natural optimism had become a fierce, simplistic, uncompromising religion.

Of course Bink is getting better. Is better. You’re better Bink.

Must have driven her nuts.

I suppose it was my way of surviving.

I’d done all that OCD thing. Years of it. Not being able to wash for months on end because Bink was in Clean Mode and needed the rest of us not to use the bathroom, so she could.

Going back to our local bookshop, twice a week, to change perfectly clean, new A level text books for other identically clean, new A level text books. So that Bink could consider them clean.

I didn’t want to go back there. Never again as long as I lived. It is a shitty way to be.

Not again, Bink. I’m not going there again. What good did it do last time? It didn’t make you well, did it? (Though, yes, it may have got her through A levels...)

That December, Alex came in late one night with paint on his shoes. Anti-trespass paint, since you ask. From climbing a fence after chucking-out time...

(I am reminded of a friend of ours in our church in Parson’s Green. His escapades tended to be more entertaining than edifying.

One Sunday he turned up, his face having obviously insinuated its way into the inside of a dog’s mouth. And then tried to extract itself without necessarily having the dog’s full permission.

Serena, having expressed the sympathy which she oozed so naturally as the vicar’s eldest daughter, even more naturally wanted to know what breed of dog it was. Serena recognises people by their dogs.

A guard dog, our friend said without irony.)

Anyway, I assumed anti-trespass paint would be difficult to shift: what’s the point in it otherwise? To my surprise, it came out of the stair carpet easily, with soap and water.

(And why wasn’t Alex extracting it himself, you also ask?

Alex is a specialist. He fixes my computer, telephone, email system, back-up, and all that; also my mood, lack of humour on a Monday morning, feelings of hopelessness and so on. It would be a waste to require him to spend hours or even days doing a job which would take me minutes. Given that there is so much he can do and I can’t. And that it would take a lot longer to organise him into doing than to do it myself.)

So I took a fresh bowl of soapy water, a cloth and a pair of rubber gloves up to Bink’s room, to extract last night’s paint from the newish carpet we’d laid for her in there.

Don’t! Bink said. Don’t get soap on my floor. How will you get it out again?

(Soap is dirty, to Bink. Because of the chemical action you learnt about in school when you are seven: the soap attaches to the grease, and takes away when it is washed away itself. So obviously, if it’s not taken away, used soap must be one of the dirtiest things on the planet. I suppose.)

I hate spending time on housework.

And along with every other mother in the country, specially in the run-up to Christmas, I had a gazillion gabillion gatrillion other things to do before lunchtime. I had allocated 30 secs to sponge this out of her carpet. So I could get on with everything else.

I just want to get this done, Bink. It won’t take a moment. I’ve got a hundred and one other things to do and this is just one tiny chore in my long list of things to finish so I can have a life. I’ve just done this to the stair carpet, and it’s easy. I’ll wash the soap out again with this clean water, look.

And I probably moved to do it.

So Bink panicked. Ignored me. And yelled.

Alex!

At the top of her voice, right in my ear, right through me.

Alex!!

Bink, I said, please talk to me. Don’t shout like that.

Alex!!! so loud that he would be able to hear her wherever he was in the house, and rescue her from this mad tormentor who was about to make her carpet so dirty she would never be able to live with it again.

AALLEEEEX!!

There are many victims of OCD.

As Professor Paul Salkovskis told me years ago, it is an infectious disease. I too had suffered. I was worn down by it. I couldn’t stand this terrible, banshee wailing going through me like a knife.

Ignoring me.

I could not. Stand it.

So I dropped the bowl of soapy water. Presumably to stop the screaming.

Did I know what I was doing? Could I have prevented myself?

At one level, we always know what we are doing. All of us, even Bink. As long we aren’t drugged to oblivion.

This is why Bink is still alive.

I couldn’t stand the shouting so I allowed myself let go of the bowl.

It bled, soapy, clean to the rest of us but dirty-filthy-to-Bink-soapy, all over her carpet.

She burst into a flood of screaming hysteria, which took the energy of the whole family to contain and lasted most of the evening.

Alex understood.

Her stress and mine.

He always does.

Bink meets a genius

Advent 2011 [cont...]

On that, however, I was very slightly wrong. That no one ever helps.

Remember our doctor friends, who came round the evening the GP shouted at Bink?

The very next day, they did not rest idle. I suppose when you see Bink close up, even on an evening when she is relatively sane but simply distressed more than any normal person ever gets distressed, it comes as quite a shock.

So our friend, the husband of the pair, did a bit of ringing round. And then rang me with the name of a Bedford psychologist, reputedly rather good. Whom he had spoken to.

And gave me her number. 

I rang her straight away, of course.

And happened across one of those very, very rare and precious people – Professor David Veale, Bink’s psychiatrist in the Priory, seems the same – who, despite the fact that they work in mental health, abound with common sense and compassion instead of drugs, red tape, obstructions, loony theories and worse practices.

As with so many rarely-talented individuals (perhaps slightly fewer now that heads of schools and principles of colleges are appointed from among administrators and figureheads, rather than teachers and academics) she was being promoted out of what she was so uniquely good at – helping people – into what any half-competent person should be able to do – management – and my memory is that she wasn’t really treating patients much any more. And certainly didn’t have a vacancy.

And yes, she would see Bink straight away.

Bink still regards her as far and away the most helpful therapist she has ever had.

One of the things I had discovered very quickly when Bink was admitted to the Florence Nightingale Unit, aged sixteen, is that there are some things you may have been doing for years, as a parent, thinking them perfectly normal... until you step into a world where they are so deeply shameful that you risk being a pariah for even thinking them.

Caring about Bink’s schooling, for instance.

It seemed to me counter-intuitive, when she was admitted to that Unit (and still – I can confess here, among friends – does) to take Bink out of the structure of (a first rate, as it happens) school, for which she was having to get up in the morning and use her brain and get exercise on her bicycle to attend; and incarcerate her instead in a lock-up where the only stimulation was endless episodes of the Simpsons and inventing traumas for the therapy sessions; and the only exercise, available exclusively to smokers, five minutes in every hour outside the building, filling your lungs with toxins... and then spit her out again three months later when she had no ambitions or friends or reason to get out of bed left in the world... and consider this an improvement.

But I Was Wrong. This poisonous and damaging obsession with success-disguised-as-schooling was because I was An Evil Mother and cared about nothing except My Daughter’s Grades.

So of course I also very quickly learnt not to say that I thought she had been better off when she was attending one of the best schools in the country, rather than wasting her life in wall-to-wall Mickey Mouse therapy run by people who barely had a brain cell between them. Because then they would have been tasked with the very tedious job of correcting my thought-crime… as well as confirming their own prejudice that It’s Always the Mother’s Fault.

You could have knocked me down with the proverbial, therefore, when Helen – this kind and wonderful psychologist who had already seen Bink several times by Christmas – told me the reason she agreed to see her so urgently was in order to help save Bink’s university place, and enable her not to drop out of Cambridge.

Wait... what?

A therapist who lived in the real world? Who recognised the value of education, and friends, and purpose... and even possibly a degree?

Here was a turn-up for the books, indeed.

Encouragement

Sunday

A fortnight ago Shaun came home from preaching in a neighbouring church.

(Non-denominational. This is good news. The Anglican ones ask his fee, and he shrugs and says the C of E doesn’t allocate one. The non-denominational church has the generosity not to ask...)

The minister, Shaun said, is reading your blog. He’s not well, and it keeps him going and encourages him. (My blog encourages somebody??!)

He and his wife have sent us this...

Gosh.

Wow.

Thank you!

(So I am sharing their kindness with you.)

And there were still enough of a few left alive, yesterday, to put a small vase in Rose’s room for her weekend homecoming.

This morning I had a dream. That Bink was well.

Actually, that’s not strictly true. I had a dream, which Bink wandered into, just as I saw her last weekend. With her hair in its funky crop. Probably wearing outsized men’s underwear, her summer uniform. And she was smiling in that Binkish way.

I smiled too, and woke happy.

And thought she was well.

What is well?

She doesn’t like me talking about “well” and “ill”.

I say: Bink, well is finding a job you love; and having friends; and perhaps even falling in love and having your own children one day. Well is being happy and able to do things. Swimming in the river or the sea. Playing your fiddle again. Singing.

Well is getting up in the morning because the sun is shining and life is too precious to waste.

Recently, Shaun entered this debate. Just as we were going to bed:

Perhaps this is who Bink is. Perhaps we have to accept her as she is and not try to change her. After all, we do that with Alex’s Asperger’s syndrome.

But Shaun, I made my mind up on this twenty years ago! Alex’s AS is who he is. I wouldn’t change him for the world. If he weren’t Aspergic he wouldn’t be... so many wonderful things: funny, and clever, and... yeah, ok, late.

Bink’s OCD – or whatever it is – is a miasma. (Studying Oedipus all over again, from the beginning, every evening with my father... μίασμα. How that word creeps into everything. Like the smoke that seeps, insinuating, in thin grey wafts through the bricks of our bedroom wall, when we light the dining-room fire underneath; with its two-hundred-year-old unlined chimney.) Infecting, blighting her life and all it touches. How can we compare that with Alex’s very genius?

Nonetheless, I did try to open myself to the possibility. What would it even mean? That perhaps Bink’s spirit wants to live in a house free of dog- and cat-hairs. A garden clean of hen poo. A stark, modern house, with huge walk-in wet-rooms. And no Great Dane slobber.

(No smoke slinking through the Georgian walls...)

Which is ok. Obviously.

It’s just that usually, Bink’s spirit doesn’t seem to want to live at all. It must, or she would have killed herself many times over.

But when you talk to her, she often expresses a wish that she had.

Since she walked out of her treatment centre, Bink has not managed much. She rang me, two Saturdays running, and I spent a lovely half day with her each time.

Then... nothing.

By Wednesday I was trying to keep myself out of the dumps. We’ve been here so many times before. Day after month after year of Bink’s life slipping away... and then Sleeping Beauty wakes with an unbearable pain, because all her friends and opportunities and life’s chances are several years more dead.

Last Saturday, we agreed one goal.

Evensong tomorrow. Say hello to the two members of the clergy you know, and ask each of them to introduce you to one person.

Will you reward me? Will you say, Well done! (And stop nagging me...)

Of course! I say. But surely your reward is meeting two new people?

No, she said. My reward is you telling me, Well done.

Fine, I said. That’s easy.

(And then tried not to hope...)

When the kind friend she is living with told me the following night that Bink was normal-ill, infection-ill, she had her husband have had a virus, Bink has picked it up, I experienced that sweet relief I always have when something far less poisonous has tripped Bink up. Virus is fine. Viruses stop any of us going to Evensong.

Since then... nothing. No text. No answer to the WhatsApp line her kind hostess set up for her to talk to me.

I called her once or twice, expecting no answer.

Bink, don’t sink into nothing again! There is still so much of life to enjoy... if you were released from prison, from concentration camp, in your early thirties... wouldn’t you embrace life?

The next goal to pray for was choir on Friday afternoon.

I did. Expecting nothing.

And when I had still heard nothing from her hostess by the evening, I knew she hadn’t.

I sent a text, late: I assume she didn’t make it? And that I shouldn’t mention it?

Even later:

Sorry, went out without my phone. Great day. Bink up before seven. We went out for lunch at Michaelhouse. She booked herself a shampoo at Scruffs. We were early for Chorale so she went and bought some clothes she needed. Sang. Had shampoo. Bink happy.

Oh my dear, dear Bink. The tears ran...

You did all that?

Clean hair. New clothes. A choir.

(Yes, yes, of course: this is because she can’t wash her own; they will be outsized men’s pjs; and the choir is particularly for those who have suffered mental illness. None of it quite what we imagined for the brilliant Bink of twenty years ago. But look at the trajectory!)

The greatest miracle – by far – was still to come.

She was up at seven? I checked, incredulous. She hadn’t just stayed up all night?

Well no, I don’t think so. In fact, I know didn’t, because she said she woke early...

AND REALISED SHE DIDN’T WANT TO STAY IN BED.

She didn’t want to lose any more of her life under the duvet. She didn’t want day to be night again. She didn’t want oblivion, or unconsciousness, or an end to the pain.

She chose light, and life, and day.

(Sorry: photography has never been my thing.)

Well is getting up in the morning, because the sun is up and life is too precious to waste.

Waste

Advent 2011 [cont…]

When do you decide it is worth complaining? How much of your life do you pour out, trying to improve the system?

So much has been done to Bink over twenty years, her illness exacerbated by so many appalling so-called cures and treatments and helps, it would impossible to know where to start. Or stop. 

(Now I think about how he behaved, I myself, too, suddenly want to prosecute Gatsby. How dare he? Do that to her? You wouldn’t treat a cat, a dog like that... But as so often, a human being may have less protection. Is there a law against ruining someone’s life?)

Nevertheless, on this occasion I thought it worth saying something.

GPs should not shout at patients.

If I complained at Reception, I’d be given some pointless, time-wasting Patient Feedback Form, which would blast a several-hours’ hole in my life and of which no one would take the slightest notice.

Besides, Bink still needed help.

So I asked for a double appointment with the Senior Partner, for Bink and me together. Foolishly assuming he would want to know that his first mate had just behaved towards one of his patients like a surly yob on the street.

He didn’t even listen. No attention whatsoever. Didn’t make a note of it, or show the slightest flicker of interest...

I gave up. If he wanted to run his surgery like a cock fighting arena…

So we moved on to Bink’s needs.

And why, he turned to her sternly, have you brought your mother with you?

What? You, too!

Bink said nothing. She was barely well enough to answer courteous and kind conversation, let alone field a fresh foray.

She’s ill, I said. Slowly.

Very, very incredulously.

And extremely – if silently – furious. This, a doctor?

That’s what it means. Mental illness. That you can’t do stuff. For yourself. You need others to help.

That’s. Why. We’re. Here.

(Ye gods. She’s EFFING ILL.)

Don’t. Just don’t show how angry you are.

Don’t sink to their level.

After a few slightly more civilised questions, he said he would call the Crisis Team. They would visit that very same day.

Result! Perhaps he did deserve his Senior Partnership after all.

I’d never heard of the Crisis Team. Why had she never been offered this before?

I asked him. He smiled, somewhat smugly. You have to be Senior Partner to know these things.

We left, mollified.

More important to get help than lodge a complaint, isn’t it?

They did indeed call round that same afternoon. One tattooed. One dyed. Both large and listening.

We sat round the kitchen table, all four of us – occasionally other members of the family walking by and chipping in – for a good two hours.

We gave them tea, and cake. And talked and talked... How many years Bink had been ill. The treatment she hadn’t been given. What it meant in daily disabilities. How painful it was.

She wasn’t sure she could stay studying at Cambridge…

What hopes we had, at last, of a team that came out the very same day! That prompt, they must be efficient.

Why had this never happened before?

When Bink and I had told them everything we could, how depressed she was, the continual panic she was in, how much she needed help; when they had nodded and listened and sympathised; when we’d all had numerous mugs of tea and they had eaten all our cake...

They got to their feet, and thanked us, and prepared to make their goodbyes.

And?

And what?

What can you do? How can you help? What is available for her?

Nothing.

Nothing?

Nothing.

Nothing will come of nothing! Speak again…

You said – they quoted her words back at her – you don’t think you’re at imminent risk of taking your own life.

We’re the Crisis Team.

There’s nothing we can do.

If you’re not a suicide risk.

Where do you start?

Why didn’t you ask that the moment you walked in?

Why have you spent two hours eating all the cake in the house. Wasting our entire afternoon. All that emotional energy. Getting our hopes up. Bink’s time and mine. All the things we could have been doing.

Your time, too. Tax-payers’ money.

HOW CAN YOU BE YOU SO STUPID?

Much more to the point, how did that Senior Partner get to be a frigging doctor at all, let alone in charge of a surgery, WHEN HE HASN’T A CLUE WHAT THE CRISIS TEAM IS FOR?

What’s the point?

How much of your life do you waste complaining?

If they had studied for a year how to fly-tip as much guilt and failure as possible over Bink’s head, to make her life even worse, they couldn’t have come up with anything more effective.

All that evening she berated herself. Giving the wrong answer to the trick question.

If only I hadn’t said I wasn’t suicidal! Why did I say that? Why didn’t I say I was about to kill myself?

They might have helped me...

Forget it, Bink. They wouldn’t.

No one does.

Friends and doctors

Advent 2011

By the end of the Michaelmas Term of Bink’s second year at Cambridge, when she came home for the Christmas holidays, she was no longer coping at all.

With anything. Let alone Cambridge.

Before we arrived in Bedford, in 2009, Shaun’s boss’s extremely supportive and caring and utterly wonderful wife gave us lots of help and advice, for moving in. (More like a vicar’s than a head’s wife, Shaun kept saying... somewhat surprisingly given how well he knew my mother, also a head’s wife.)

She told us that a particular doctor in the area had a reputation for being good with mental illness. (And, as it happened, was a Christian, along with his doctor wife. Whose mother – co-incidentally a retired-vicar’s wife – was one of the first people to befriend us in Bedford, when Bink took Rose to church on that first Sunday.)

This GP it was, who had put Bink on his favourite cocktail (why does it sound so lethal of drugs... and so glitteringly attractive when served in a dinky upturned-cone-glass with a paper umbrella perking out of it, brought to your hammock by the pool?) which put her to sleep for twenty hours a day throughout her first year.

Then failed to tell her that was why.

Bink’s main complaint, of all the drugs she’s been on, is that doctors don’t tell you. They don’t come clean about the side-effects. They don’t say what will happen if you double your dose because you are desperate. They don’t tell you that the IBS you’ve been consulting doctors and hospitals for, for ten years, is probably caused by your SSRIs.

In particular they don’t tell you that you will go complete stark batshit crazy if you ever try to come off them again.

I know, I know. GPs now only have an average of fifteen and a half secs per patient allocated for each consultation... But that’s not Bink’s fault, is it? If they haven’t got time to explain the stuff, they shouldn’t dish it out.

Likewise, if they don’t have time to research their advice...

So Bink and I sat in that GP’s surgery.

And asked about alternatives.

Therapy, for instance. 

Nope. She’d only be entitled to four sessions, max. After a waiting list of months.

So we had to move onto his favourite subject of meds again. Seeing as he said there wasn’t anything else.

Ok, I realise at this stage we’d probably been in his room for our allotted 15 1/2 secs... And it may also have been true (Ben told me afterwards: they attended the same church) that one of his children was having an off-day.

But even so...

When Bink asked him a perfectly reasonable question about how she could know the side effects of what he was in the process of prescribing for her, he slammed his fist down on the desk.

Gave her his attention from his computer for a moment.

And almost shouted:

Get out, Bink!

Just get out!!

No, not “almost”. (Just sounds so awful, that a doctor shouted at a patient.)

He did shout.

Over and over, afterwards, I asked myself whether he could possibly have been joking. Did he think he knew us well enough? Considered himself our friend?

Was it supposed to be funny?

By the time we had biked the few minutes home, not just Bink but I was shaking with sobs.

Poor little Bink, utterly distraught. More than beside herself: several removes away.

So of course, I rang Serena.

Bollocks, Serena said straight away, and looked up the NICE guidelines. She was right, naturally: she always is. As ill as Bink was, with her medical history, she was entitled to at least twelve sessions of therapy.

Immediately: no waiting list.

Didn’t know or didn’t care? Or just didn’t like therapy… Given how cheap pills are.

I collected myself.

Come on, Bink! I rallied.

We’ll have friends over. Who would you like to see?

Thus it was that I rang a couple, less than half a mile away. Both doctors, as it happens.

Lit a fire. Opened a bottle.

And they came round and spent the evening with us.

Cheered us up.

And reminded us that some – maybe even most, if you give them more than fifteen and a half secs – doctors are goodies, really.

White knuckles and sickening see-saws.

Today

A few months ago, I met a trader in a funky investment company.

How we met is an amusing story all of its own and not really relevant to Bink’s story. One day, when we need a diversion, I might regale you with it. He makes me laugh a lot... which I admit is not the primary purpose of a trader... but it’s a good start, isn’t it?

The first time I dipped my toe in, I followed Alex’s advice of seven years ago when he first told me about bitcoins: Don’t hand over more than you mind losing, Alex said. So I didn’t.

Next day, my modest sum was half as big again.

Coo.

Fast forward a few weeks, and my trader insisted I learn how to trade myself.

We’re opening this, he said, and when its value reaches that, I want you to sell it yourself.

EEEK! I said.

(Or words very much to that effect.)

Easy, he said. When it gets to n, you press x.

Fine, I said. Ok, I said.

(Eeek.)

And watched figures like a hawk for the next week... instead of writing the next novel.

Know what?

Its value plunged like a hawk, too.

My little investment went whoosh! as if it had seen a mouse in the corn.

My new friend has made a terrible mistake, I thought. Last time he got it right, but not this time...

Which rather surprised me, because he had struck me as pretty smart.

Following week, same hawk, whoosh up again... with a fat rodent in its claws.

Help, help, help.

What was I supposed to do, again?

I pressed x furiously, over and over again. You know, like buying the same product twenty times the first time you shop online because it’s not on your doormat yet.

And the next morning asked if I done it right.

Well, he said.

Good news, he said.

And... bad.

(What I like about my trader is not just his sense of humour. Not just that he seems a complete and utter genius with money… which is kind of what he’s for. But that he is even more insanely optimistic than i am. Maybe this is why he’s so good at his job. It’s certainly why we get on so well.)

The bad news is that you didn’t succeed in selling your trade.

The good news is that it went up more.

Infallible character judgement wins out again. My trader is very clever indeed: he wanted me to learn patience and faith, and that what goes down can bounce back up again.

If you just keep cool and don’t panic.

So now I look at this confusing moving chart thingy every morning, with its incomprehensible blobs and blocks and candles pistoning furiously, and it’s like riding in one of those horribly sickening fairground doo-dahs that churns you up and down and throws you all over the place, and your parents suddenly wish they hadn’t been looking admiringly up at you from the ground...

Oh look: today I can buy my longed-for seaside house!

Oh, whoops: today we’re bankrupt Shaun do you mind if we sell up and are homeless again sorry it seemed such a good idea at the time...

Oh no wait, hang on: now we can buy two seaside houses!

And so it goes. Up and down, up and down. Dead exciting.

And huge fun, because it’s only money.

And because, actually, I have enormous trust in my trader and I can see that, nauseous though the ride is, the trajectory, since we started doing this together, is very much on the up...

A bit like life, as the vicar said.

Or as I said to Shaun, when he stepped on the scales.

That’s amazing, I said. You’ve lost half a stone.

Only today, he said gloomily. Tomorrow it will have gone back up again.

Don’t know if I’ve ever told you what it’s like, living with Shaun. AA Milne wanted to use him as a model for a donkey, but no one would have believed him so he had to opt for something more cheerful.

You want to look at the trajectory, I said pompously.

Just as if I were the vicar-person in this relationship...

So this is what I need to keep telling myself.

Look at the trajectory.

Loving Bink is a lot more nauseous than fairground rides or weight swings during Lent or even oil or gold prices.

I keep saying to myself.

So... she hasn’t been out of bed for a week... Or whatever it is. Rung home. Washed. Opened any letters. Left the house. Last Saturday we spent a lovely evening together… since when she’s ignored all my messages.

But a year ago she was addicted to Lorazepam.

Five years ago she was living with abuse. Couldn’t even speak, when she came home.

Look at the trajectory.

Keep cool. And try not to panic.

Tennis. And tears

Michaelmas 2010 to Midsummer 2011.

So, Bink started at Cambridge all over again, aged twenty-five… but she had always looked many years younger than her years.

My father’s college. My father’s subject.

Ben went up to Cambridge at the same time, having done several years’ singing and music and bass guitar.

Alex had started all over again too, at Bristol. Fabulously sympathetic tutor; infinitely more understanding of his Asperger’s Syndrome than at Cambridge… which, as he said, was Cambridge’s problem, not his.

Rose moved schools, with a generous fee reduction thanks to Shaun’s job in the brother school. And Serena to London, new church, new job, new life.

My father more settled.

And Shaun...? like a wild teenager: congenial and clever boss; appreciative pupils; playing soldiers in the CCF every so often and sleeping under the stars. Loving it all.

Nothing could go wrong for us now.

Right?

Over the next few months, Bink asked our GP half a dozen times why she was sleeping so much. Even I asked him twice.

When you have five children, you don’t go in for possible, potential problems. You have enough, without.

So I didn’t realise she meant eighteen to twenty hours a day. Throughout her entire First Year. At Cambridge. Whilst trying to do a degree.

Even after studying the set texts with my father the previous summer, even with Bink’s capabilities, it’s hard to enjoy your time at university if you’re asleep for most of it.

Why the GP didn’t tell us will forever be a mystery.

Bink asked me just the other day, as we were sitting by the pub fire. Hard to work out whether, Didn’t know, or Didn’t care, is worse, isn’t it? He’d put her on it all: changed her to a cocktail of his favourites, as so many shrinks and doctors do.

It was a fellow undergraduate who told her. At Eastertide.

It’s the meds you’re on.

He was a university man himself, that GP. Must have been, to be a doctor, mustn’t he? Could he really not remember what it was like, student life?

Or did he think, if you have a mental illness, all you are fit for is zombiedom in pyjamas? Vegetables drugged into disablement: who cares? Keeps them out of the way, doesn’t it?

Obviously, he wasn’t going to help her.

So she helped herself. Over the course of six weeks, reduced all meds to nothing, and began to recover her life.

My memory of that midsummer 2011 is glorious. And desperate. Both.

Bink wanted to invite friends home for a post-exam houseparty. Any restriction on numbers? Of course not, Bink! All your friends are welcome.

That was when she told me she’d invited her entire cohort of fifty or something.

I wouldn’t normally welcome refusals... but I was quite happy with the final tally of a dozen or so.

She received her results for Part I. She had missed a First by a quarter of a mark.

A quarter.

You’re having me on, Bink: there’s no such thing.

I know, she said. They must have made it up, ’specially for me, and shaved it off my final mark. They couldn’t have me getting a First, could they? Not knowing anything.

Two of her essays came top of the whole university.

On a few hours a day. And next-to-nil knowledge of either language, in Cambridge terms.

It’s a shame, though, she said. A First means you get invited to a posh dinner and offered a really swanky room.

She came home before her guests.

You can help me get everything ready, Bink!

What do you want me to do?

(When, before or since, has Bink been well enough to offer? Not often, that’s for sure…)

You could start with the tennis court.

So she spent the afternoon with the line-marker, trundling up and down the grass.

In the years afterwards, I couldn’t believe such happiness.

The glorious weather. The togetherness of it. Bink able to do something as practical as mark out a lawn with white, wobbly lines.

So helpful. So able.

So happy, the two of us. Making scones for their welcoming cream tea.

How I longed for that time again, over and over again...

And when all her friends, her year group, fellow classicists, turned up full of youth and laughter, fun and frolics, bags dumped in the hall, bodies jumped in the pool, wow you have tennis! Hey, Bink…

Who should be tagging them... but Gatsby.

He was in his forties. What place did he have, with all these carefree First Year undergraduates?

The place he always had.

In a secret corner hidden away with Bink, most of the weekend, comforting her aching, awful, immobilising tears, while all her First Year friends enjoyed themselves in the sun.

And never knew.

Seeming such a saint. Helping so much.

Don’t you see?

We didn’t. Not really. I was uneasy – already, even then – but it took me a few years to work it out. In detail.

She had to be in tears. Because otherwise we wouldn’t have needed Gatsby.

I’m not saying he did it on purpose.

Just, he needed to be needed.

Just… it would have been interesting to know what would have happened, what happiness she might have had, if he hadn’t happened to be there at all...

Six impossible things before breakfast

Summer 2010.

We have a friend, Simon Scantlebury: career coach.

We met when I booked him during Shaun’s breakdown of 2008. In a few sessions he turned the crippling and debilitating doubt you develop if you cross natural self-criticism with four years’ employment-abuse, into a confident certainty that he would get the very first job he interviewed for.

Which he did.

As part of his method of stiffening the sinews and summoning up the blood, Simon developed a quaint and amusing little theory that I can achieve the impossible.

He once made me write all the ridiculous impossibles I’d swung in my life into a list of twenty-one (this was before I got Bink a place in the Priory) which he now waves in front of his other hapless clients to encourage them to do the same. He insists I do it with a combination of sheer brass-neck-cheek and the insane belief that, this one time, I might just get away with it.

He claims I said this, once.

It’s all myth, of course.

I do it by ringing up absolutely everyone I can think of – instead of writing the next novel – and boring and annoying them into helping me find a solution.

(Simon’s favourite is: educating five children privately, on a clergyman’s income. I’ll tell you how it’s done, if you like. The children were at an awful school, Serena about seven, her teacher finally pushed me over the edge and I thought, This can’t go on. So I rang, in turn, the heads of all the posh schools in SW London, asking if they’d like to educate my children for nothing. The first nine thought I was completely barking, and politely hung up. The tenth said, What did you say her IQ is? Bet Wills and Kate never thought of that…)

That year, 2010, Bink expressed, more often than anything else, her wish to return to Cambridge University. 

She had degraded in 2008 with a breakdown. Degrading gives your college the option of taking you back when you are well again.

She hadn’t yet been able to persuade them that she was.

(And her college hadn’t suited her anyway. Because we’d been homeless at the time of her interview, she had lost the medication she’d been taking. Because of this, she was suffering severe withdrawal and anxiety. Because of this, she was in a state of extreme shaking confusion. Because of this, she couldn’t hear anything she was being asked by her interviewers. And because of all this, she was pooled, and found herself at a college which didn’t really suit her at all.)

So she didn’t just want to return to the university. She wanted to switch to a different college if possible. Which is technically impossible. Without applying all over again.

When I have a problem to crack, I tend to try everything, however silly. (As evidenced by the above.) Say to the most casual five-minutes’ acquaintance at a party, don’t suppose you can help with this can you? (Now I think about this, my parents did the same.)

Serena had said, I think you should read classics, Bink. You did complain about the English course being wishy-washy.

Classics is much more precise. As is Bink. Very. 

After all, Serena said, you’ve just covered all the New Testament Greek syllabus with Grandfather.

Thus it was that someone rang me back, in late July 2010, and said his college’s Director of Studies had just happened to tell him that someone had suddenly had to drop out of the Cambridge classics course, so there was an unexpected vacancy for the following Michaelmas.

Would Bink like an interview? In, like, a day, or something?

I don’t know anything! Bink said.

Come on, Bink, we urged her. You have small Latin and less Greek. Give it a go!

(I’m being a little disingenuous here. Bink had done Latin A level in 2005. And Greek GCSE in 2001. And, I can’t quite remember whether this was so, but after they’d covered the New Testament syllabus, it would be just like my father to have started on Classical Greek with her.)

I’ve forgotten it all... she wailed.

But she turned up anyway.

And came home with a place at Cambridge.

Again.

Different college.

Different subject.

Really quite smart, Bink is, when she’s remembered to put her head on the right way round.

It wasn’t until a couple of weeks into the course, the following Michaelmas, that her Supervisor said,

Gosh.

You weren’t making it up, Bink, were you?

You really don’t know anything...

Past pain: present paralysis

Today

I was planning to resume the story of Bink’s life in 2010 today... but instead have decided to tell you why I am late with my post.

After all, what is the point of a blog if it’s not… well, a present log?

So: where does mental illness come from?

Genes. And circumstance.

Bink was dealt some pretty s*** genes. A mental miasma lards through my family history. We didn’t really notice it until we were living with it, but now it’s as clear as day. So some of these angry little gene-thingies must be bouncing around in my head too, somewhere.

(Actually, I know nothing about genetics whatsoever so perhaps it’s like female ginger cats or the wrong green eyes or whatever it is which can leapfrog generations and jack-in-the-box out whenever you least expect. Be that as it may...)

Bink also beats herself up – or beats us, usually me, up; probably a lot less damaging but absolutely no more helpful – about incidents in the past which from time to time some therapist or other convinces her have contributed to her illness. Her current torment derives from the fact that, in order to get off the SSRIs, she took tiny traces of cannabis (5 grams in total over eighteen months) which she is sure is responsible for the loss of the last six and a half years of her life: years which should have been glorious.

In vain does one point out to her that she came off the stuff as soon as she realised what it was doing to her, which is a lot more responsible than most people manage. Or that being abused on a daily basis is possibly even more damaging than cannabis. Or that there is no point whatsoever in dwelling on the past.

She is in agony about it, and it’s hard to see how to move her on.

Therapists and their ilk often say, she must have had some trauma in her childhood. And then go on to say don’t feel guilty because she must have been predisposed anyway. Neither of which are in the slightest helpful either.

So, coming back to why my post is late this morning…

Generally speaking, I enjoy pretty robust health. Physical and mental, both. But I have experienced enough depression – what I would call “circumstantial depression” (give me a winning Lotto ticket or a well-daughter or my dear first agent alive and well and back in my life, and I’ll be fine) – to have a tiny bit of understanding into what Bink goes through.

In her case many hundreds of times more debilitating and devastating and just plain awful.

Oh dear… now I’m beginning to feel pathetic, faced with confessing the utterly trivial reason why today’s post is late...

Yesterday, as reader Diana discovered when kindly solving my Very-Teensy-Weensy-Bit-1st-Wld-Prob Pavlova Dilemma, Shaun was licensed to a new parish.

A new beginning!

A lovely fresh departure for the Atkins clan! We have a church again!

In that very tentative, understated and not-wanting-to-put-the-slightest-pressure-on way of his, he happened to ask a few days ago if I’d like to be there for the bish to do his biz. Which is the nearest Shaun ever gets to saying it would mean a huge amount to him if I were.

I did all the right things. I thought, anyway.

It wasn’t unexpected or sudden. I changed into a swooping spring skirt I like. I bicycled there towards the lovely sunset and along the river Ouse, so I wouldn’t be cooped up in a car and polluting the atmosphere. 

(True, googlemaps hasn’t the slightest idea how long it takes to bike six miles, and my lovely long skirt isn’t ideal for that particular bike – the romantic nearly-floor-length coat Shaun gave me, even less so –my folding bike is rubbish anyway, and worst of all my iPhone battery is clapped out so my satnav ran out before the journey did – and as always I got lost even with said satnav half a doz times – so I was just a tad late and missed half the service... but it was a lovely journey.)

As soon as I was in the pew and the bishop welcomed me half way through his sermon and we started singing one of the songs I’d chosen myself (and the band even got the very tricky rhythm right) and I could completely see what Shaun meant about what a lovely church and congregation it is... I just wanted to cry and cry and cry and disappear and when I prayed all I could say, over and over, was that I was sorry, and I just can’t do this church thing any more and I’m really sorry, sorry, sorry. God. Sorry.

And the first moment of relief I experienced was after the service was over during tea and cake when I felt a reasonable period of time had elapsed and I could escape to the loo and be alone... And breathe. Calmly. Deeply. Alone.

I also see what Serena means. It’s not the memories of the awful church we went to in Oxford, which treated us so badly, that hurts.

It’s going to a lovely church. And remembering the church we loved so much in Parson’s Green.

And lost.

It’s realising how much I would enjoy starting up a choir in this dear village church (no idea whether they actually want one: but most churches don’t say no to a choir if you offer to do all the work) … and haven’t the heart any more.

I don’t often feel like this. Not now. Not since we left Oxfordshire.

But it helps me understand.

Waking up throughout the night: four; six-ten; turning on the Today Programme; realising I’ve overslept and it’s nearly eight-thirty; asking Shaun please, please can I have a cup of tea but not being able to answer when he says is that conventional tea or Lenten tea; not wanting to write my blog then or now or ever again; having a dragging headache that isn’t exactly pain but certainly isn’t any energy at all... unable to do anything... helps me understand.

It helps me understand why Bink didn’t manage the one very simple goal she and I agreed for her yesterday.

And just spent the day in bed.

With a migraine.

Glass a little full...

Sunday

It may sound curious to be encouraged, when my daughter is in her early thirties, and:

1. Unemployed. Currently – in her own mind – unemployable.

2. Depressed. Riddled with guilt and regrets; desperately unhappy about her life and how she got here. Having spent all her adolescence, youth and prime-of-life mad, isolated and then abused.

3. Unable to dress in anything except a hoodie and joggers: unable to shower, clean her teeth, wash her own hair...

Et cetera and so on and so forth...

Obviously I’m sad about all the above. How could you not be?

If your son crashed his car and lost his legs, would you be sad? Or would you, rather, be deliriously happy that he lived. If he had been in hospital for twenty years and emerged... in his wheelchair, yes, but alive!

I have seen Bink more, in the last eight days – to sit down and talk to properly – than I can remember in a very, very long time.

Not just because she’s been in hospital since mid-October.

Bink looks well, my hairdresser said. (I have the best hairdresser in the world, incidentally. Bink turned up while I was there so they could wash her hair.)

Bink looks good, our friends said.

Bink’s got her sparkle back! Shaun said.

Why? She was astonished. We were sitting by a cosy fire in a far-too-expensive pub. I feel terrible. Is it because I’m off the Lorazepam?

Maybe, Bink. You’re no longer dead behind the eyes and half crazy.

(So we talked about her GP a bit. The person who put you on that stuff should be struck off, I said.

It wasn’t just one .

The surgery should be closed down then. And Bink has now re-registered with the same surgery...)

Six months ago, Bink had her hair shaved off to within a whisper of her scalp, it was so knotted and tangled and difficult for her. (This always makes me sad: Bink never looks more stunning than with golden hair down her back, as at Serena’s wedding.)

Four months ago, a fellow-patient dyed Bink’s hair aggressive bleach-blonde. And her eyebrows. Bink can carry off most looks, but for once she looked her age. Not sixteen. More like a woman in her thirties. (Like the cleaner we had when I was a child, who looked so old to me.)

Three months ago, it showed her dark blonde roots, and she looked like a recovering addict.

Now, Bink’s hair is grown out into a funky panda crop... and she looks, well, Bink. Her fine, elfin face flashes and sparks out again from inside her mad, multi-coloured hair.

She came with us to a concert on Wednesday, then to our friends’ house for half the night. Fun. Good company. Eating all the biscuits we couldn’t eat because of Lent, and glad to be with people.

Most selfishly of all, she is talking to me.

It has not always been so. When she was with Gatsby... Well, you can steal a person as you can steal jewels or a car. And far more devastatingly. 

I want to prosecute, she said. All that abuse.

Bink, forget it. Not worth your life.

Write a book, instead.

I want society’s vindication. I want someone, a court of law, to say: yes. This shouldn’t have happened to you. It was wrong.

You will get vindication. Society will do that for you. Write a blog. Contribute to this one. People will support you and care.

Forget the law. It takes your life and gives nothing back.

Writing would lead to something...

We talked so long by the fire, by the time we ordered, the kitchen was shut.

Thank you, she said. For coming to see me.

Bink, I love you, I didn’t say. How could I not?

Twice, now, she has said I’ve really cheered her.

* * * * *

Now here’s a thing.

Lent, and so on...

Last night, I ordered tomato juice. It is an expensive pub, yes, but at the end of the evening Bink said, even for this pub, over six quid is a lot for a glass of tomato juice.

So I took it up with the bar, and after a lot of examining and calling of staff, it transpired they’d spiked it with vodka.

You asked for a spicy tomato juice. Most people mean a bloody Mary, they said over and over.

Well, I didn’t mean a bloody Mary. I meant what I said: a hot spicy tomato juice. Suppose I’d drunk three of them, and then driven home!

(Or suppose I was Muslim. Or recovering alcoholic...)

You tasted it and said it was fine, they said.

I tasted it, and agreed that – most unusually – you’d put in enough tabasco and Worcestershire sauce even for me. I’m not going to taste a shot of vodka under an explosion of chilli, am I?

Somewhat grudgingly, they gave me back £2.50 – totally not the point – and no apology.

This morning, we’ve just had a group check-out of our house, and they’ve done what I love houseparties doing: gifted us their left-overs.

Half a bottle of vodka is fine; it will keep till after Easter.

But look: I’ve just opened the fridge! What on earth am I going to do with my favourite pudding, now that we’ve given up carbs?

Look on the bright side. Always.

1. They might not have left it at all. (We’ll find a use for it.)

2. I got a free shot of vodka. (That I didn’t want and couldn’t taste, but still.)

3. Bink is alive...

Addiction

Lent

Bink recently finished an Addiction Treatment Programme, on which she learnt a very great deal about relying on – and breaking – different forms of habit. 

When we lived in a vicarage we had one or two homeless friends, and quite a lot more acquaintances. Once we learnt to weed them out from the conmen (yet again, the C of E falls its clergy: a simple twenty- to forty-page booklet on moving into a vicarage would have saved us several years’ learning, hundreds of hours and rather more bob: I eventually offered to write it for Diocese but they said they couldn’t pay me) we learnt to see the world from the point of view of the homeless.

It’s not a pretty place.

Never, ever, ever say to me – not that you would, not you; but people do – Don’t they choose that lifestyle? I’ve heard they prefer to sleep on the streets. There are loads of hostel places, just sitting empty. I pay my taxes already: I’m not going to give any more...

And here’s a particularly unfeeling one: They’ll only spend it on booze.

Oh yeah?

Let’s just examine this for a moment...

Try sleeping out. In this weather we’ve got now.

Don’t know what it’s like where you are, today, but here in Bedford the sky is like wet cardboard. And the ground is like, well, wet cardboard. And the cardboard is like wet cardboard. And wet cardboard might very likely be all you’ve got to sit, and sleep – and live – on.

Even just nipping out to the corner shop, less than a minute away, if I don’t put on my lovely toasty wool-and-cashmere coat which I bought on eBay a few months ago, I very quickly wish I hadn’t gone out at all.

And when I say, Try sleeping out in it, I don’t mean for a night. I don’t mean a charity stint of half a week.

I mean, try living like that. For several months.

No books. No radio. No telephone. No tv except what you can see through a shop window. Before someone kicks you on.

Maybe a dog, for protection and companionship. Which will exclude you from a lot of hostels. And halve your food. But still probably prolong your life-expectancy.

Nothing. To do. In your life. At all.

What would you look forward to? Wouldn’t you welcome a drink to warm your belly and soothe the loneliness in your mind?

Around about the time of our homeless period, we were staying at my parents’ house by the seaside (since we generally go there late-July to mid-August, it must actually have been just before our homeless period, which ran from August 2005 to April 2006) and as I walked through the singingly blue Norfolk sky, back from the shops to my parents’ front garden, I realised...

I was spending every day looking forward to a drink at the end of it. That’s what I was focusing on. That glass of wine, or whatever it might be, savoured as soon as sun and yard-arm had kissed goodbye.

I could no more envisage enjoying a day without a drink to round it off, than I could imagine a day without food, or breakfast without tea. Of course I could deprive myself if I had to – just as I could deprive myself of these other comforts. But it would be a day to be endured, waiting for it to end so I could get back to a normal day tomorrow.

Now, you can criticise me, if you wish. Call me weak-willed or addicted or anything else you like. But actually, it didn’t really have anything to do with whether I was strong- or weak-willed. 

It was to do with needing something to get myself through. Along with a lot of other things which no doubt helped me get through: friends; a good book; sex; and, yes, tea.

Despite all these to help me and under it all, I was pretty miserable. Worried. Wondering what on earth tomorrow would bring. Would it be any better than today? Where would my children live...

And at the end of every day, having endured another day, I earned my reward. For getting through.

Thus I, we, had got into the habit of drinking every day.

(And we never even had to sleep on the streets.)

When Shaun had his breakdown and I took him to the best doctor we’ve ever had, in September 2008, on about the third or fourth visit I told that genius of a GP that I was concerned we might be drinking too much. Every evening, I said we have a drink or three. Sometimes more.

She looked at me with that friendly, kind, quizzical, slightly amused blonde way that she had, and she said:

Goodness, Anne, don’t you think you have enough to worry about?

I suggest you go home, relax... and have a lovely glass of wine.

Was I amused? Shocked? Relieved? I’m not quite sure.

(She’s not the only GP to have advocated alcohol. Our GP in Parson’s Green, when I told him red wine occasionally gave me a headache, advised me to drink champagne.)

In the years afterwards, I’ve wondered whether it was even responsible.

So I tried giving up alcohol Lent after Lent after Lent. Sometimes I only lasted a few days. Sometimes I got to the end, more or less, limping, taking Sundays off, as is theologically justifiable.

Guess what?

This year, Shaun and I have given up booze (and carbs, as I said before, but really very strictly: we’re hardly even drinking tea, because of the milk in it) ... and it has been almost effortless. I’ve barely missed it. Certainly haven’t wavered on Sundays.

I’m not even sure I want to go back to drinking, not much: I sleep so much better without it.

What has changed? I certainly haven’t woken up suddenly strong-willed, have I? Not very likely.

And not missing something can’t have much to do with willpower, can it?

My life has.

We have our own home. I have written my fourth novel after a twenty-year famine. Bink has had some treatment at last. 

Life must be looking up.

It seems from where I’m looking now, that my addiction – as such it is, if you struggle to quit something, even though you never get drunk: as is an addiction to ciggies, even if they never kill you; as my mother was, on her own admission, to coffee – wasn’t so much to do with me. As the circumstances I found myself in.

Seems that fabulous GP was right. About that, as so much else.

I did indeed have enough to worry about.

So next time you see someone huddling in the rain, nursing a bottle of cider if he’s lucky, and feel temped not to give him anything because he’ll only “spend it on drink”, may I respectfully suggest you ask yourself what better could he spend it on... if someone’s fed him and he can’t afford shelter.

More to the point, what on earth you would spend it on...

If there were absolutely nothing else in your life, or your day, to look forward to?

Teacakes and tenses

19th January 2010

Many years ago, my mother read a newspaper article: about a vicarage, housing three generations, which caught fire. 

She was almost in tears. Very unlike her, no-nonsense mathematician and all.

The grandparents were rescued. The children, not.

How can they have imagined for a moment, she asked me, distraught, that the grandparents would want to go on living? Alive, instead of their grandchildren?

No one would want that.

Of course, we didn’t know the circs. Don’t suppose the firefighters dithered, deliberating. Old people? Kids? Let’s get the wrinklies out first. Come back for the little ’uns if there’s time.

And I suspect my mother was being slightly rose-tinted about absolutely every old person in the world. Not sure the Kray Bros would have insisted: suffer the little children to be saved, while we face the fire.

Nevertheless this was, not just her philosophy, but so deeply and passionately held a priority that she could barely keep from crying, over a family she’d never heard of.

When my mother died, Bink was distraught.

I ate sweet things. No sweet tooth, me: hardly touch cakes or puddings. But that week, it was all I wanted. Apple crumble, hot buttered toast, chocolate ginger biscuits. A week later, I stopped as suddenly as I’d started.

Serena baked cupcakes all week. Never before or since: plate after plate after plate.

Ben didn’t go back to Ireland. Stayed a fortnight, till the funeral and more, despite his music tutor’s protests that it would make him look unprofessional. (Nonsense. They’re Irish. The cathedral would have been shocked if he’d returned any sooner.)

Alex apologised to my cousin Fleur that he wasn’t more upset at her funeral: I really lost Granny some years ago. When she lost her maths. And her memory.

Rose was, I suspect, slightly baffled.

Shaun said she was only here a few weeks, and yet her spirit filled every corner. The house empty with the loss of her...

And Bink? Bink was utterly distraught. Weeping, frighteningly, uncontrollably. As if the heart had been torn out of her.

Unfinished business, said Fleur. All those years when she could have been well with her.

I was taken aback at the rage of my father’s grief. He convinced himself my mother had died shouting and thrashing – she never did the like in her life: why would she in death? Apart from those few hours in hospital, I was with her all the time. She was calm, as she always was.

A week after her funeral we laid her – only my father, Shaun and I; and the parish priest – in her tiny little coffin of ashes, deep in the Garden of Rest in the parish churchyard. 

And for the rest of the winter my father was tormented, as the rain soaked the dull earth, and the wind whispered cold over her, and he couldn’t protect her and keep her warm.

Always, he said, I’ve cared for her. Fed her and sheltered her and looked after her.

(Well actually, Daddy, throughout our youth she was doing that for all of us! But nevertheless…)

For the rain it raineth, every day.

I can’t remember what happened to set Bink off that early January, 2010. The triggers are always so trivial.

We were used to it. If you ever can get used to that kind of thing.

It was early in the morning – perhaps through the night, indeed – and Serena and I trying to contain her. She had got the wrong side of the bathroom door and we knew she had a razor.

(Bink is multiple-scarred, hairline whips like shoals of tiny silver fishes, on every limb.)

We also knew, if we called an ambulance, she’d be livid.

We did anyway.

She was.

Later that day she escaped – not that she’s ever been sectioned – and the police and ambulance searched and scoured the streets.

She was found, taken in, we invited to see her.

In a ball under a desk, mute and rocking. For hours. All you can do, I now know, is tell her you love her. Repeatedly. There isn’t anything else.

They kept her in for several days. “For observation”. Why, I have no idea. We could have told them she was nuts: we’d been observing for long enough.

They weren’t going to treat her, were they?

They never do.

The day she came back was 19th January. My mother’s birthday. When she should have been ninety two.

(Would have been, if Serena had been listened to.)

I was surprised my father was so shocked. I suppose he’d never been on hand to witness it before. We’d lived with Bink’s illness so long... you sort of assume others know.

We can’t have this, my father said. I’m going to help.

Every day, New Testament Greek, no argument. Even Bink can’t take issue with my father.

And from that day, every day, starting on my mother’s birthday, he taught her Greek... till they covered the entire syllabus in about two months.

And I kept thinking of that vicarage on fire.

Why would you rescue the grandparents?

With my mother gone, my father was free to look to Bink’s needs. 

My mother didn’t do much by mistake.

She hung on several years through dementia and fragility till we were housed and safe. She would not leave till my father was under our roof.

Love kept her going, several years beyond her time.

Why would she stay now?

If she could make space for Bink in my father’s care.

So she made a bargain with Heaven. And my father taught Bink New Testament Greek.

But...

9th October 2009

Most unusually, uniquely, I had double-booked.

Wednesday 7th October. Agreed to speak at a fringe meeting at the Conservative Party Conference in Manchester. And also to be at a dinner in London, preparing for a law debate a few days later. I felt a complete idiot. Never done that before, made a muddle of my diary. The conference event was at five. If I was the first speaker... dashed to catch a train... at the dinner by 8.30. Ish. Shaun also due in London, St Paul’s Cathedral with the choir. My father would pick Rosie up from school.

But my mother had earache.

It’s a legitimate reason to cancel, I thought: no child-care. The event in Manchester was unpaid. But the previous year I had cancelled: same event. (Shaun in the depth of his breakdown... guilt, guilt, guilt. I never cancel. Two or three times in my life, perhaps. Really stupid reasoning: same conference, but different group altogether.)

I couldn’t two years running. Pathetic. I rang the head’s wife and asked her to have Rosie.

I’d got a new telephone and hadn’t yet got the hang of it. It seemed to be out of battery. As soon as I arrived in Manchester I borrowed one and rang home. On the train to London I did the same. When I got to the dinner, the first thing I did, ask for a telephone.

If I’d had my own, I’d have rung home every half hour. Talked for twenty minutes. Known what was going on.

My mother had collapsed into Hamlet’s basket at four. Serena carried her into the kitchen, light as a feather she was, and rang for an ambulance.

My father remembered the previous winter. When my mother was in hospital for a week. And he was on his moped every morning, eight o’clock, in the snow, all day, home at eleven at night.

He didn’t remember they’d saved her life.

Serena is medically competent, read Biological Sciences, knew what my mother needed. 

But she was in her twenties. How could she overrule a grandfather in his nineties?

She would have told me, if I’d been there. And I would have overruled him.

My father sent the ambulance away…

I got in just before one in the morning. 

As soon as I reached the landing, fourteen hours on the go... It’s all right now, dear. Anne’s here. Anne’s home.

The relief in my father’s voice was frightening. This was my parents. What could I do?

Now, I would know exactly what to do. Now, I have saved my father’s life at least half a dozen times. Thanks to that time.

(Oh, Mummy, if only I’d known!

I’m so sorry... For ever, all my life, I will be.

So sorry.)

Serena had known.

I helped my father help my mother to the bathroom.

She was sick several times.

The next morning I could hear my mother’s heaving breathing from the landing. My father had nursed her for years. Knew what he was doing. Of course he did. Nothing to be alarmed about.

(Perhaps it was probably already too late...?)

I called a doctor.

The following morning, Friday, I made my mother a mug of tea and held it while she drank. All the way down. Years since she had drunk a whole mug of anything.

She looked at me. Smiled.

“Thank you.”

Have I imagined that the last words you ever speak can sum up your character? Your whole life?

Thank you.

Same doctor. Reluctant to suggest hospital. Asian: he understood family.

So was my father.

A neighbour called. She, I, the doctor, gently insisted.

My father went with her in the ambulance.

I should have gone with him, with them. He remembered it all wrong. For years, he remembered it all wrong.

I stripped their bed and washed the sheets. Draped their sheepskin mattress topper in front of the fire. Folded my mother’s clean and dry nightie.

All ready for her. Clean bed. Clean sheets. Clean, dry, folded nightie. All ready to welcome you home again.

Last year I took at from the laundry, still neat and tidy and folded as it was that day, and gave it to my sister.

You wear nighties, I said.

Six o’clock. Nurse rang. Would we like to visit?

Is she still alive? I know these hospital tricks.

Yes, she said. She is.

My mother wouldn’t die. Not just after moving in. We’d given her a new lease of life, dinner parties, friends, company. She was eating again, even drinking wine occasionally. Alert as she hadn’t been for ages.

She wouldn’t leave us. Not my mother. Not now we could give her what we had strived so many years to give her.

And a six year old granddaughter to read to.

I had said to Shaun, over and again, This is how it should be. It’s outrageous that old people live alone. My parents see more people in a day, a week, now than they have in the past six months. Look at the good it’s doing them.

Shaun agreed. 

I honestly believe we’ve given my mother another five years. I don’t think she would have survived another winter.

He came in then from work, the side gate, with his bike.

We’re going to the hospital. To see my mother.

Do you want me to come?

Yes. Please.

Come on Rosie. You want to see Granny, surely? Serena knows stuff. That no one else knows.

Shaun, Serena, Rosie and I, with my father in my mother’s little hospital room.

She couldn’t talk. She looked at us with her clear, kind, tired blue eyes.

There was nothing to do.

I rang Ben, singing for the year in Dublin’s Christ Church Cathedral. The overnight bus was full. Just get on it, Ben. Talk yourself on. They’re Irish.

Missed it by minutes. Would take a flight the next morning, get home almost as soon. 

Alex in Bristol, far harder to reach: didn’t have his telephone with him. My cousin, doing his MA there: can you find Alex? His girlfriend, in the Chemistry lab: can you find Alex?

Bink in Cambridge.

No. She didn’t want to come home. It would upset her.

Oh Bink, you can’t protect yourself from everything! Some things, you can’t protect yourself. You can’t not be upset. Sometimes.

My mobile shrilled. I stepped outside. My agent: book contract. Good. Thank you, yes… but perhaps this isn’t the time...

I glanced through the window. Serena beckoning, urgent.

My father quiet in the corner. Rosie reading. Shaun, doing the crossword perhaps?

Only Serena, holding my mother’s hand.

Yellow. Suddenly yellow. Parchment. Teeth bared. Unrecognisable.

(But Mummy... we were just getting everything ready for you.

We were just ready.

Your rooms... your silver butter knife... your spring bulbs...

Your platinum wedding next summer! All your friends and pupils...

To be happy together at last.)

What’s the point?

What is the point of protesting?

Happiness

Late summer 2009

My parents moved in with us in late July 2009, before going to the seaside for a month. Late August, they came to live with us properly. We were still in a state of complete chaos, boxes everywhere, curtains to order, paint, carpentry, dust, everything in disarray.

“We should have got straight before inviting them here,” Shaun said more than once: it was undoubtedly stressful for them. Perhaps, but we didn’t realise it would take so long. We had spent the summer holiday doing nothing but unpacking, painting, stripping, reconstructing. Still so much to do.

Never mind. My mother, the easiest person in the world, sat happily in the sun in the garden, or in the conservatory, near the wonky fountain which we had put in the pond and which I spent hours getting to the right height, right flow, right fall.

On 5th September we had a housewarming. Far too soon, far too expensive, far too much chaos. But Serena and my father were both unstoppable, and their energy made it happen. The previous owners had left behind a new marquee, still in its box, and Ben and Alex erected it in the garden. Ben put a superb band together. We sang family madrigals, as so often before. The Turtle Dove. The Silver Swan. Goodnight Sweetheart. All our old favourites, some the same as the ones Ben had organised in the Manor House. We had a piper from the school, who piped in dinner. A harpist from Bedford School, superb, in the conservatory. A family of guests made a chamber group. Bouncy castle, fairy lights, fun fun fun.

The following Saturday we had a tea party for all those friends of my parents, and Rosie’s, who hadn’t been able to come the week before. Lovely sunny afternoon. I spent the whole day in the kitchen, baking. I rebuked myself as I did so. I should be in my study writing, not indulging myself playing housewife. I still wasn’t writing, and I didn’t know why.

I had my own study, spacious and comfortable. I had done far more to it than I had intended over the summer. Taken up the schoolroom synthetic carpet and stripped and waxed the floor. Blasted out the blocked up fireplace: Ben and a builder friend had spent several hours one evening, smashing out the chimney with sledge hammers, arriving finally at supper at nine o’clock, black as sweeps, having at last found the flue. Bought three matching old wooden bookcases on Ebay four all my dearest books, my First Folio: ah, then I felt at home! And my Plato and Chaucer and Dickens and Browning... All my friends on the shelves.

Still, I wasn’t writing.

It worried me, but nonetheless I spent the day in the kitchen. Bread, chocolate cake and madeira, fruit and chocolate scones with clotted cream, cheese scones dripping with butter. My own kitchen, for the first time in my life, happier than I could remember being, balm for the battered years. My parents’ friends sat at a long table on the terrace, fountain playing, having tea in the sun. Rosie’s friends ran around the lovely large garden and played. 

My parents, my father especially, thrilled at the home baked tea.

The following week Alex invited a dozen Cambridge mathematicians for the weekend, sleeping all over the house. Again, I cooked and cooked. So happy to have a home, space, again. Breakfast, lunch, dinner, even home made tea again. They didn’t really seem to notice, but I did it for Alex not his friends. He noticed. They had barbecue dinner with my parents and talked maths to my mother, what she could remember.

My father took her to School Chapel, to our parish church, made friends. He and I went to choir together. I helped him unpack, things which my parents hadn’t used for thirty years, their silver butter knife and jam spoon, laid out in their kitchen upstairs. It was good to spoil them, pamper them. He said he hadn’t felt so smart for years, like living in the Ritz.

Late September, at last after much searching, I found a ceramic window box that would fit outside their kitchen window sill, and bought cyclamen, violets, lots of different spring bulbs to come up in different weeks. My mother would love those, I knew. I spent the afternoon planting it, and again felt guilty that I wasn’t writing. Well, I wasn’t, that’s all there was to it. The only thing my life lacked to be perfect, my writing restored. That and Bink’s full health.

My mother sat at their table in their kitchen, loving the window box. The violets waved in the breeze, and she said, “I do love living here.” Every day she said it.

“Just as well,” I said. “It would be hard to go back.”

By day, she sat in their little sitting room downstairs, or in the conservatory, a book on her lap, seldom read because the concentration went, a few years ago. “What can I do to help?” Always, offering to help.

Nothing, my father would say. There’s not much she can do, now. Oh, but this wasn’t true. Rosie could help too. They sat together, at the kitchen table, shelling peas or chopping vegetables. Our neighbour bought an ironing cloth, so she could iron Shaun’s numerous smart work shirts, sitting down.

Nothing could shatter our joy...

New friends. (And old enemies.)

Saturday

Stay for supper, Helen said.

I was surprised Bink hesitated. (I didn’t! No one has to offer me supper twice.) Left my ciggies behind, she said.

But after we’d said goodbye and gone for baccy to the corner shop, she desiderated: I wish I’d had the confidence to stay.

I was astonished. Bink? She was always the most sociable, most outgoing of the bunch. Made friends in two secs flat.

Not any more, she said. Now, she finds new social situations, meeting people, very anxious-making.

She really, really liked Helen and James – as I knew she would: Helen is funky, ex-rock singer, well cool; James fiercely intelligent – but she was still very tense, with people she barely knew.

I wish... she said. 

They had repeatedly urged her to drop in again, just on spec, again. It’s a half hour walk along the Cam from where she is staying. Twenty minutes by the straightest road.

I haven’t the confidence, she confessed. I’d need to meet them again once or twice, with you. I wish we could have stayed.

We’ll go back! I said.

No, no... I still feel anxious.

But Bink. You make friends faster than anyone I know. Fellow-patients in loony bins. Tramps. You’re always helping people.

That’s not proper friendships. Lasting.

How long as this been the case?

Since Gatsby.

You, reader, haven’t properly met Gatsby yet. You will.

Gatsby knew Bink for ten years. The first five, approx, were ok. Ish. But then she started to blossom and flourish and bloom. And from being a friend, twice her age, spending time with the rest of us... Gatsby went and darn fell in love with her.

And did what many a man does when he falls in love – why not, in a way, except that he was twice her age: well, that’s enough of a why not, I suppose – he asked if she would marry him.

Funny thing about Bink is, however nuts she is, she somehow manages to retain remarkable core sanity deep down. Like, she’s never killed herself, for instance.

Gatsby was wasn’t the first man mad to marry her. Seeing her well and beautiful, it’s somewhat surprising there haven’t been two dozen.

(The first was extremely eligible... though he too, older: thirty, to her twenty-one.

Just think how much better my life would have been, she said recently. If I’d married him.

Only up to a point, Lord Copper. Yes, you’d have half a dozen children by now, and be living in a messy, noisy, friendly vicarage on no money and it’s hard to believe you would have got so ill. But on the other hand you’d be married to that prat.

Yes, she admitted. I’m not sure it would have lasted.

Then you wouldn’t have been better off, Bink. Marriages that don’t last, don’t leave you better off.)

Similarly, she had the sense to turn Gatsby down. Repeatedly, in fact.

At which point, Gatsby made the classic error. Worse than error, really. Abuse.

Instead of saying, fair enough, and walking away with a broken heart, Gatsby said – to this by now extremely ill young woman – You are part of my family anyway.

They even had a becoming-part-of-our-family ceremony, Gatsby and his two children and Bink, with a necklace he gave her to seal the deal.

Makes me want to be heavingly sick.

And those years with Gatsby were more hideous than anything I’ve described so far. By some and more. Serena keeps asking when I’m going to describe how bad it got. Because, as she has pointed out, you the reader can’t appreciate the good times, now (yes, these are really good times, believe me) if you haven’t seen the bad.

I want to tell it in order, I defend myself. And I can’t remember how bad it was, not really. (I can, says Serena.) 

And the real truth is... call me a coward... if something has been that painful... well, why would you go back there?

For your reader you would. Fair enough. And I will. I’ll get there. If I’m still going, which I intend to be.

But for now, I will give you just enough of Gatsby to understand this one point.

Of course that happened, Bink. Gatsby did that to you. I could see him doing it. I could see the cogs whirring.

What? What did he do to me?

He was twice your age. Without a hundredth of your looks. And actually, not your brains. (Yes, he has a double first from Cambridge. And directorship of a company. On one level not stupid. But not clever in the way Bink is clever.)

If you had been well, Geek Gatsby wouldn’t have had the tiniest chance with you, Bink. You wouldn’t even have known him, in your circle of friends, if you’d been well when you were at Cambridge. That’s how it works: beautiful people attract beautiful people. You would have had so many dozens of exciting, wonderful, talented friends your own age…

He had to make you ill, so you would be his.

Are you saying he did this on purpose? Worked it all out?

No, no, no: not at all. Most of us aren’t clever or wicked enough to do that sort of thing. Simply, it was in his interest for you to be cut you off from your family and have no friends and become more and more vulnerable and screwed up and isolated and dependent on him. That’s the only way he could ever make you part of his life.

And then I gave her an example of Gatsby doing just that. Making Bink more helpless, as he did year on year. With us helpless to rescue her. That’s how the law works. Vulnerable adult or no. (Look at families trying to rescue loved ones from cults.)

So of course he made you cripplingly anxious around other people. Because then you needed him the more.

How did it all go wrong for him then? she asked. Did he go too far; make me too dependent?

It imploded, I said. It was always going to. You’re much too powerful for him.

(Even ill, Bink’s fires of energy consumed him, consumed them both.)

By this time we were sitting by an unlit grate, in a warm and friendly place, our dinner ordered, Bink treating me to a frighteningly expensive steak.

How come you have so many friends, you and Shaun?

Work. Activities. Church. Churches are a great way to meet people. Such an eclectic mix. And the whole point is to care for each another.

So we looked up the service times at Helen’s church.

Sometime after ten, I got up to go: an hour’s drive to bed. I’d been with her for five hours. First time in two and a half months.

Thank you, Bink. That was really good fun..

Yes, she said. First time I’ve enjoyed myself for as long as I can remember.

How long? I pressed her.

Since we were all in Scotland together? Two and a half years…

And the physical pain? I asked. Did the walk by the river take it away; and meeting new friends?

She smiled.

I so wanted to hug her.

But I was probably too dirty. Or too clean.

I usually am.

Absconding

Saturday

It was two days ago, when Bink told me why she quit.

Or, as she put it to the friends I’d just introduced her to (a clergywoman and a university lecturer: nice, respectable people, you know):

I’ve just absconded from rehab.

(I have to admit, that does sound quite... no, no: not cool at all. I didn’t mean that. At all. But it is quite an attention-grabber, isn’t it? Bink’s always been one for that.)

If you remember, the way we’d parked our relationship on Friday night was not sunny. Bink was annoyed with me, as she so often is, for urging her to make plans in order to make her life better.

(I’d also had to tell her some tough news, not suitable here.)

Ben had been brilliant, explaining so much better what I had bodged... and after a long conversation he said, if you want us to come over tomorrow, ring before the Rugby.

So, obv, I didn’t expect to hear from her for weeks. Cross with me as she was.

Next day, Saturday – minutes before the Rugby – Bink on the telephone.

Could I help?

(Confession: my heart skips a little when Bink says this. Not because I want to spend my dotage helping my adult children, not at all. But because if you see someone that low, you can’t help wanting to help her up.

Years ago, in London, a member of our church said, You’re the solver, Anne. In your family. Aren’t you?

I hadn’t thought of it before. But I supposed this was true. Not because I want to be. I want to be the writer, not the problem-solver. I’m impatient to get off the problem and back to my study. So, present me with a problem, I don’t play the sensible long game, like Shaun: listen patiently, hour after hour, nodding silently and exuding sympathy whilst no doubt thinking of the Rugby score and the crossword and next week’s sermon. All the while presenting as the lovely sympathetic priest and all.

No. I do that really irritating thing – exactly what I want any therapist or counsellor to do for me, which is why I so hate therapy or counselling – and offer a solution.

My life stinks, says Bink. Yes, I say, it does a bit. So get off your rear-end and do this and that and the other until it isn’t quite so putrid.

See how annoying it is?)

If I can, I say. Of course.

I’m in pain all the time, she says. Back-ache; jaw-ache. I need medication. I’ve come off the Lorazepam too fast. These symptoms are unbearable. Can you get hold of a doctor for me?

I can call in all the favours from all my doctor-friends... but have you tried Professor Veale’s far less dangerous solutions? Icepack on the head. Aromatic oils. Music.

He said that?

I wrote it all down in my diary at the time. Can I suggest my own? Go for a walk along the river.

I can’t ever rest, she said.

You know what, Bink. Maybe you’ve rested too much, this last decade. Maybe rest is the last thing you need. Maybe what you need is to get out, fresh air, exercise, work... and get dog-tired like the rest of us. Then you won’t have any difficulty resting. When you actually need rest.

Can you come and see me? (Just a twinge of disappointment, when she heard Ben and Shaun weren’t free: not me, she really wanted.)

Oh, and can you get me an appointment with a hairdresser? I haven’t been able to wash for a very long time.

And are you coming? Shall I try and clean my teeth while I wait for you? I haven’t been able to do that for a long time either. I couldn’t wash at all, in the treatment centre.

An hour and a half later, I had insured myself on Ben’s car, she’d had a shampoo for a fiver (first quote, £39.50, Toni & Guy) and I said, Come on then, we’re going out, along the river. (I’d brought Shaun’s fleece for her. It had to be a very dirty coat, or at least one which could go in the wash afterwards, because she’s in Dirty Mode. In DM, she contaminates everything. In CM, everything contaminates her. And no, that’s right, of course you can’t. Win. That’s why she’s mad.)

You remember that thing we all used to do, when we were younger? Before everyone had mobiles and students locked their doors and all security was in decaduplicate? When we used to drop in on each other, unannounced? Like, just call round.

That’s what we’re going to do, I said.

Wondering as I did so, whether it was the worst breach of modern etiquette short of texting during a Royal Wedding.

And all the way along the river we discussed all the things I’ve been trying to discuss with Bink for months, stressing her every telephone call. But this time it wasn’t stressful at all because we were walking along the river and it was organic and she led a lot of the conversation.

(Memo to self. Bink is like Alex. Never, never, ever attempt to have a conversation with either of them, over the telephone, any more profound than: Alex, how do we get the internet going again? Or Bink, um, hello.)

And they were in! My friends Helen and James were in. I could see they were in because I could see their seven-year-old through the window, playing the piano. 

But of course, this being the twenty-first C, after we’d rung and knocked at the door half a dozen times I had to ring Helen anyway, and say, We’re at your door.

And she went ooh! and they welcomed us and put on the kettle and I said Helen this is Bink and James this is Bink and Bink this is Helen and James, and James said, as you do, Hello Bink. What are you doing with your life? (Or some such.)

And Bink said. As you do.

I just absconded from rehab.

Maternal instinct

Sunday

You must be used, now, I hope, I expect – you’re obviously on-the-ball – to the mood swings which go with Living with Legion. Despair, hope, despair, hope... usually ending with despair, but hey, it’s Sunday; let’s look on the bright side.

I’ve also mentioned maternal instinct. Stop me if I’ve told you this before – I was telling somebody the other day, but I don’t think it was this blog – about the birth of Serena’s baby. Classic case in point.

Christian (son-in-law: keep up! what was I saying about being on-the-ball?) rang, a Friday night it was.

We’ve been delivered of a large boy.

Now, at this point, the conventional thing is to open the bubbly and ring all your friends and hang out the bunting and find yourself several inches taller. (Shaun said he woke two inches taller the morning Serena was born, so if our vine keeps sprouting presumably eventually his head will hit the ceiling.)

Instead of which, I was plunged into despair. More accurately, depression, not a word I often use: negative associations in this household, and all. This once, it does the trick.

Couldn’t remember when I’d felt so miserable. And ashamed with it, of course. Because it’s not how you’re supposed to feel.

My cousin and bestie, Fleur, said, It’s because it’s such a tectonic life-change: you’ll get used to it. She didn’t quite say, you’re such a selfish bitch that instead of joining in your daughter’s joy you are now feeling old, because she’s very kind and loving, is Fleur. But I’m not quite so dumb I can’t interpret.

So there we were, or I was: gloomy, guilty and dejected.

All night long and into the next morning.

Know what? That euphemistically “large boy” (9 lbs 5 oz) nearly killed my daughter. (She says he didn’t. Just, without modern medicine her health and lifestyle would have been very seriously compromised for the rest of her life. Humph.) Didn’t know until half way through Saturday that, after being delivered at home, she was rushed into hospital. Twice, eventually.

No wonder I was mis. And not guilty at all, m’lud. Loving, caring mother. So you can shove that accusation in your e-pipe and pretentiously puff it.

Serena, of course, sensible scientist she is, poo-poohed my sixth sense. Telepathy? Humbug! You could tell something was wrong because all the signs were wrong. You would normally have expected me to ring and tell you all about it.

That’s ok. I don’t mind having my magic explained to me.

One day some clever scientist geek – and his team: that’s how scientists do these things; chummy lot – will pin the Nobel on his lapel or whatever one does to Nobels (turned mine down before Mr Nobel had the bother of offering) telling us how it is that your dog knows, before you do, that you’ve decided this is the last drink and you’re going home now.

And tells the whole neighbourhood.

The point is this is what maternal (or indeed canine) instinct is. Knowing gubbins no one else knows, even if you don’t know how.

Remember I said a week ago that, for some mysterious reason, when Bink walked out of her treatment centre and burnt her bridges behind her, I slept like a log?

In the wretched days afterwards I thought, how dangerous this is, this blogging business: writing about it as you go along. What a prat have I felt since, deep in the dumps as I have been.

No future, no plans, no treatment centre to go back to. Looking pretty dismal, it has been.

Well there is still no future, no plan, and it’s scary stuff, this. Bink could easily slip back into the abyss from where she is now.

But as she bought me supper last night – YAY! I have been allowed to see Bink for the first time since Christmas! Of which more tomorrow: this post is quite long enough – she explained to me:

I was so desperate. I had to do it. It wasn’t easy: finding the courage and energy to leave. But it was that, or sink into a place where killing myself was the only course left.

And, um, I think I know the answer to this Bink, obvious question really, but why didn’t you tell them?

They wouldn’t have let me leave. They had me virtually on one-to-one: someone following me around all the time. 

Ok, I get that. And thought as much. But why didn’t you tell us? Would have saved a great deal of nuisance and time and worry. And incidentally, since you ask, yes, I was very fed up with you indeed the next day: refusing to answer my calls. Read my face: serious annoyance. But anyway...

Um... she said. I’m not quite sure.

And she put on that quizzical so Binkish face, which makes you want to kick and hug her both. But quite a lot more of the latter.

I think perhaps it just didn’t occur to me... Maybe...?

(And then, just to be cruel and serve her right, I showed her the video Priti had sent me, postage stamp size on my telephone, of her card and cake and choccies and flowers, delivered on her birthday… and she said, Oh! If only I’d left an hour later: I would have got it all!

Five minutes later, I said. Priti arrived as you left.

Oh, she said. I’m so sorry!

Good. That’s that then. Not that we’re quits: not by a long way. But anyway.)

Towards a new future

2009

I confess, I am struggling to remember the past, in such turmoil about the present.

(More prosaically, the book I wrote on what we went through – the publisher went bust after signing me – ended with the events of 2009, so I will soon be relying on memory alone.)

We threw ourselves into our first ever own home with the joy and enthusiasm of the long-famished. Just as it can happen that everything seems to go wrong for you in a logical progressive collapse, so – far more surprisingly, perhaps – the reverse can be true. Dominoes defy gravity and help each other up.

The house had six bedrooms. Just enough: my parents; Shaun and me; older daughter; two more daughters; two sons; guest room.

I asked Ben which he wanted.

What point in asking? said Eeyore. Serena always gets the best.

Just choose, Ben. Everyone choose the one you want, and let’s see how it pans out.

I knew the answer, of course. My parents were allocated the huge bedroom, over the garden. Shaun and I, one of three overlooking the street: I have to face East and be woken by the sun, non-negotiable. The next biggest was the one the boys would have: they had shared a bedroom all their lives.

The cellar, Ben said. 

The cellar? It didn’t quite have an earthen floor, but it had no light whatsoever and was only fit for potatoes. And wine, if we’d had any good enough.

Yes, and I’d like the attic, said Alex.

The attic. Uh-huh. Also no floor, ceiling, windows or anything fit for habitation. Just a few rickety beams: miss one and you’re in the room below.

You see Ben, I said triumphantly. No one wants anyone else’s choice.

(And you see, too, what happens when you share a bedroom for two decades. They couldn’t have got much further apart. Not without one of them moving into the hen house, which Serena had made in Oxfordshire and the poor removal men had to lift intact over a seven foot wall: took six of them.)

And I had so looked forward to having a real potato-cellar.

So all that summer, all of us (plus a French au pair Serena found, now a brilliant lawyer and life-long friend), up and down, in and out, excavating, hammering, sawing, filthy fibreglass yellow insulation creeping under everyone’s skin in the baking heat under the roof, all of us working together. Except Bink, is my memory. Presumably she spent the time looking after six-year-old Rosie. While the au pair got fibreglass under her skin.

After a summer of serendipity (the morning I gave up ever finding a second-hand eBay window for Ben’s cellar – and yes, Shaun was absolutely right: dig down there under the gravel and I bet there was once a window into Ben’s room, under the ground two hundred years ago – and started ordering expensive bespoke, Shaun and the boys found a window which fitted, in the hedge at the bottom of the garden… Ben was most miffed) Alex had a room and Ben had a room, we had ripped out the dance studio and had a dining-room and drawing-room, had taken out the island and breakfast bar to make an old-fashioned kitchen big enough for all of us to sit in at once, and I was on the case for Bink’s room: there was one bedroom with a plumbed-in loo, smack bang in it with no walls or door around, most eccentric thing you ever saw. But I was wise now to what none of all the professionals who interfered in our lives had bothered to tell us in Parson’s Green, that you can apply for a disability grant if you are seriously screwy enough, as Bink most certainly has been for a very long time. So she would have an en suite loo and shower in her room.

And at the end of August, my parents moved in properly, after their summer by the seaside.

And the saddest thing happened to us ever, happens to most of us, which I will never get over till the day I die, not ever...

Today

Bink rang last night, to find out how Serena was after her bike accident on Wednesday. So lovely when she does that: something so normal, sisterly and normal. I nearly asked why she didn’t ring Serena herself... but you know: don’t kick a horse in the teeth when it gives you a gift and other misapplied sayings. (Never trust Greeks hiding in wooden horses &c.)

And of course, within minutes I’d stressed her by asking too many questions how are you what did you do today are you taking any meds what do you want to do with your life would you like to join this choir I’ve found for you why on earth do I do that no wonder she never rings back.

Sick with worry. We’ve been here so many times before.

No plans. No ambitions. Nothing to do except nothing.

Never goes well...

Keep Karma and carry on

Today

Well, I’ve failed Lent already, anyway.

Serena always said it will be too challenging, giving up carbs AND booze AND tea all at once. Make yourself ill, you will.

I started off so well, as well. Wednesday morning, bright and early, took Shaun a mug of bile-green tea. And left the room before he could throw it at me.

So obviously, only two days in and I’m back on the drug I am so addicted to.

Only three mugs a day, though, Serena said, if you are giving up carbs. THREE? How am I going to survive on three mugs a day? Easier to restrict Ben to three gins a day.

Right. One before getting up. One for breakfast. One at teatime. If Ben can do that with his gins, I can with my tea, surely?

We nearly wobbled on the booze as early as Ash Wednesday.

Our last night at Serena’s house, lovely fresh cod ordered from the butcher for our first evening of fasting... and two minutes after Serena had left the house for a couple of hours’ work in the early evening, she was rat-tatting the door again, blood all over her face and hands, bike wheel spinning in the lethally raining darkness in the middle of the road, front light bleeping hideously at the sky.

Ambulance, hours in Casualty, can’t stitch that love, Shaun and I putting the bairn to bed and tidying the house and laying the fire and eventually, around ten, starting the supper anyway. Then Alex in from the hospital, where he had stopped on his way home, thank goodness because Christian (type one diabetic) was having a sugar crash having not eaten, and it transpires that the worst place to suffer a life-threatening condition is in a hospital...

The hospital chocolate vending machine (life-saver if you are diabetic) being broken. Of course.

11 o’clock, candle and fire lit, cod and asparagus on the table, big jug of sparkling water, and Serena says, Do you think this is a reasonable excuse? To break Lent?

Absolutely not!

Serena, if I broke Lent every time I had a traumatic evening... well, I often do. Several times a week. At least.

Which is why I’ve given it up now.

Possibly for a lot longer than Lent, given that Bink’s been on an addiction treatment programme, and presumably not a drink since Christmas.

I mean, you know, if she ever comes home again…

She rang me.

As it happens, a few minutes before Serena rattled the door with blood pouring down her face and into her fingers.

For once, I had to risk not being able to speak to Bink again for another fortnight, and tell her I was hanging up.

But I managed to get hold of her again.

It is balm. It really is. Just hearing her voice. Why, when she sounds so fragile and lost and broken, I don’t know. Perhaps because I have missed so much of Bink for so long... Gone through so many arid journeys when she hasn’t spoken to me at all.

(Like when the boys first went to boarding school, aged eight and ten. I would think of them all day long, every minute and busy moment whatever I was doing, like a girl missing her lover. Occasionally they would make it to the call box…)

She feared I would be cross with her!

What?

For walking out. After all you did to get me there.

Bink... how many times do I have to tell you? I just want you to be WELL. I don’t care what route you take, or how you arrive, once you have.

Yes, ok, I admit, it is frustrating, a bit soul-destroying, to spend many hundred hours, many months thinking and research and other people’s help, on a solution for you... and it turns out to be the wrong one. But if we – sorry, back to therapyspeak: if you – find your way in the end... how could I care?

(And yes, all right, being brutally honest, I was pretty p****d off with you last weekend. Walking out without telling us. Disappearing so I had to spend all my mountain walk tracking you. Yet again. Then you refuse to speak to me all weekend because I “stress” you. What do you think you do to me?! Though I didn’t actually get around to saying any of this, because I forgot, in fact. But yes, since you ask, I do get angry with Bink. Sometimes. When I’m bored of being broken-hearted.)

Perhaps it’s a mother-thing – other mothers, feel free to tell me in the comments – or perhaps it’s just my personality: my gift, the curse my wicked fairy godmother cast on me in my cradle, is that I simply can’t get discouraged. I just can’t do it. Can’t do giving up.

I try. Every so often, my soul tries, in self-defence.

That’s it now: I’m giving up. I’ve had it. I’ve had enough of my life being ruined by this. And everyone else’s too.

(I say to myself.)

Call yourself Robin? I don’t love any Robins, in my life. Call yourself Robin (I vow) and you can walk alone.

Walk out of treatment? Refuse to return my calls? Only make contact because you didn’t recognise Shaun’s number, and got me by mistake?

That’s it. I can’t do this any more.

And then she rings, and immediately, immediately, I am full of hope again. We will get there, Bink. You, and we beside you.

We will get you to your dreams. Or die trying.

So back to Lent and giving up things and drugs and addiction.

Bink is doing better than me, anyway.

She is not back taking anything. Except lots and lots of Ibuprofen, because her back is agony.

Your back, Bink? You’ve never had backache before.

Lorazepam is a muscle relaxant, she explains. Now I’m off it, the tension in my back is really painful.

Ibuprofen’s ok. I can do Ibuprofen.

Just before we hang up, though, I say, panicking, Don’t overdo it, will you? (I know nothing about Ibuprofen. Can you kill yourself, on bucketloads of it? Or worse, get addicted??!)

She laughs.

All right, she says.