‘Same as ever.’
‘I’m sure she thinks we’re the worst parents in the world. You’re an uber-career woman and I’m a… I’m a…’
‘A man?’
‘That’ll do it.’
We both laugh.
Mrs Logan looks after Emma, our three year old, on Tuesdays and Fridays. Now that I’m lecturing at the university we need a full-time nanny. I’m interviewing on Monday.
Emma charges to the door and wraps her arms around my leg. Mrs Logan is in the hallway. Her XL T-shirt hangs straight from her breasts covering a bump of uncertainty. I can never work out if she’s pregnant or fat so I keep my mouth shut.
‘I’m sorry we’re late,’ I explain. ‘An emergency. It won’t happen again.’
She takes Emma’s coat from a hook and thrusts her bag into my arms. The silent treatment is pretty normal. I lift Emma onto my hip. She’s clutching a crayon drawing- a scribble of lines and blotches.
‘For you, Daddy.’
‘It’s wonderful. What is it?’
‘A drawing.’
‘I know that. What is it a drawing of?’
‘It’s just a drawing.’
She has her mother’s ability to state the obvious and make me look foolish.
Julianne takes her from me, giving her a cuddle. ‘You’ve grown in four days.’
‘I’m three.’
‘Indeed you are.’
‘Charlie?’
‘She’s at home, sweetheart.’
Charlie is our eldest. She’s twelve going on twenty-one.
Julianne straps Emma in her car seat and I put on her favourite CD, which features four middle-aged Australian men in Teletubbie-coloured tops. She babbles from the back seat, pulling off her socks because she likes to go native.
I guess we’ve all gone a little native since we moved out of London. It was Julianne’s idea. She said it would be less stressful for me, which is true. Cheaper houses. Good schools. More room for the girls. The usual arguments.
Our friends thought we were crazy. Somerset? You can’t be serious. It’s full of Aga louts and the green wellie brigade who go to Pony Club meetings and drive four-by-fours towing heated horse floats.
Charlie didn’t want to leave her friends but came round when she saw the possibility of owning a horse, which is still under negotiation. So now we’re living here, in the wilds of the West Country, being treated like blow- ins by locals who will never entirely trust us until four generations of O’Loughlins are buried in the village churchyard.
The cottage is lit up like a uni dormitory. Charlie is yet to equate her desire to save the planet with turning off the lights when she leaves a room. Now she’s standing at the front gate with her hands on hips.
‘I saw Dad on TV. Just now… on the news.’
‘You never watch the news,’ says Julianne.
‘Sometimes I do. A woman jumped off a bridge.’
‘Your father doesn’t want to be reminded…’
I lift Emma from the car. She immediately wraps her arms around my neck like a koala clinging to a tree.
Charlie continues telling Julianne about the news report. Why are children so fascinated by death? Dead birds. Dead animals. Dead insects.
‘How was school?’ I ask, trying to change the subject.
‘Good.’
‘Learn anything?’
Charlie rolls her eyes. I have asked her this same question every afternoon of every school day since she started kindergarten. She gave up answering long ago.
The house is suddenly filled with noise and industry. Julianne starts dinner while I bath Emma and spend ten minutes looking for her pyjamas while she runs naked in and out of Charlie’s room.
I call downstairs, ‘I can’t find Emma’s pyjamas.’
‘In her top drawer.’
‘I looked.’
‘Under her pillow.’
‘No.’
I know what’s going to happen. Julianne will come all the way upstairs and discover the pyjamas sitting right in front of me. It’s called ‘domestic blindness’. She yells to Charlie. ‘Help your father find Emma’s pyjamas.’
Emma wants a bedtime story. I have to make one up involving a princess, a fairy and a talking donkey. That’s what happens when you give a three-year-old creative control. I kiss her goodnight and leave her door partly open.
Supper. A glass of wine. I do the dishes. Julianne falls asleep on the sofa and apologises dreamily as I coax her upstairs and run her a bath.
These are our best nights, when we haven’t seen one another for a few days; touching, brushing against each other, almost unable to wait until Charlie is in bed.
‘Do you know why she jumped?’ asks Julianne, slipping into the bath. I sit on the edge of the tub, trying to keep contact with her eyes. My gaze wants to drift lower to where her nipples are poking through the bubbles.
‘She wouldn’t talk to me.’
‘She must have been very sad.’
‘Yes, she must have been.’
3
Midnight. It is raining again. Water gurgles in the downpipes outside our bedroom window, sliding down the hill into a stream that has become a river and covered the causeway and stone bridge.
I used to love being awake when my girls were sleeping. It made me feel like a guardian, watching over them, keeping them safe. Tonight is different. Every time I shut my eyes I see images of a tumbling body and the ground opens up beneath me.
Julianne wakes once and slides her hand across the sheets and onto my chest, as if trying to still my heart.
‘It’s all right,’ she whispers. ‘You’re here with me.’
Her eyes haven’t opened. Her hand slides away.
At six in the morning I take a small white pill. My leg is twitching like a dog in the midst of a dream, chasing rabbits in its sleep. Slowly it becomes still. In Parkinson’s parlance, I am now ‘on’. The medication has kicked in.
It is four years since my left hand gave me the message. It wasn’t written down, or typed or printed on fancy paper. It was an unconscious, random flicker of my fingers, a twitch, a ghost movement, a shadow made real. Unknown to me then, working in secret, my brain had begun divorcing my mind. It has been a long drawn-out separation with no legal argument over division of assets- who gets the CD collection and Aunt Grace’s antique sideboard?
The divorce began with my left hand and spread to my arm and my leg and my head. Now it feels as if my body is being owned and operated by someone else who looks like me only less familiar.
When I look at old home movies I can see the changes even two years before the diagnosis. I’m on the
