by Sarah Moss
I got up, suddenly sickened by the dirt ingrained in the plastic chair under my thighs. There were the usual posters about cutting down on sweets and fizzy drinks, not smoking around babies and phoning the number below if you were worried about your drinking. There were the usual racks of leaflets about conditions that aren’t the one you thought you had, reasons why your occasional headaches or digestive troubles might be symptoms of fatal disease. Rose was reading The Worst Witch, as if for the first time, and Miriam, although holding a novel that called itself an ‘eco-thriller’ in one hand and an apple in the other, was watching the scrolling text on the screen over my head. Ten reasons to get a flu jab, five ways to lose weight, call this number for help giving up smoking. Preferable, Emma would say, to a healthcare system invested in profit from your sickness, and I would, almost always, resist the desire to point out that a wide range of alternative systems are associated with better results and indeed fewer smokers, drinkers and fat people.
‘Miriam Gold – Goldsmid?’
Goldschmidt. My father changed it back from Goldsmith, which his parents had considered safer for a would-be American family in the late 1940s, and I, for once, used my cultural capital, my inherited double exile, to insist that my children should bear my name. There are, after all, plenty of Wilsons. Somewhere in my ancestry, I like to think, running through my veins, is a real goldsmith, a man in a long coat and a yarmulke hunched over small confections of gold and bright stone in the back streets of Vienna.
Dr Ruthven. Shorter than me, dapper, pink cheeks and thick grey hair, suit and tie, though they’re not supposed to wear ties, or sleeves below the elbow. He stayed behind his desk, holding a file of notes and continuing to read them when we had occupied the row of plastic chairs against the wall. Rose resumed The Worst Witch. There was no window in this room either.
‘Right,’ he said. ‘So. Chalcott wanted you to see me. Seems to think Miriam had an anaphylactic episode.’
Mimi’s eyes widened.
‘She was in cardiac arrest,’ I said. ‘Secondary to respiratory arrest. She needed CPR and an AED.’
‘Well, some kind of funny turn, I gather. Not unusual in girls of that age, I must say.’
Mimi looked at me again. Say something, Dad, stand up for me.
‘Dr Ruthven,’ I said. ‘I don’t think there’s any question – I mean, surely the notes—’
He lifted his hand. ‘And then Rose had a transient wheeze. I’m a little surprised at your GP for making the referral. Still. Any more trouble from Miriam?’
‘Not since she was discharged. But she was in for two weeks and most of that—’
‘Right. And just the one episode for Rose.’
‘Yes, but it was sudden and seemed quite—’
‘So what did you think I would be able to do for you?’
‘I’m worried it might be genetic,’ I said. I glanced at the girls: Grandma drowned when she went swimming alone in big waves, long ago when Dad was only a couple of years older than you are now, Rose, and it was very sad but after a while you can remember people quite happily.
He sighed. ‘Asthma is very common and yes, it does seem to run in families. Do you ever have trouble with your breathing, Mr Goldschmidt?’
‘No.’
‘No allergies or hayfever?’
‘Hayfever. But nothing like Miriam’s—’
‘There we go. Asthma’s not dangerous when it’s properly controlled, and it’s not hard to control. But we certainly wouldn’t diagnose it in – Rose, is it? – on the basis of one event. Carry an inhaler, that’s my advice. Anything else?’
Last chance.
‘Mim, would you mind taking Rose out? Just for a minute?’
Dr Ruthven sighed.
Mimi raised her eyebrows but ushered Rose out and closed the door.
Dr Ruthven looked at his watch.
‘I’m sorry. I’ll be quick. My mother drowned while swimming in the sea in her mid-thirties. She was sober and a strong swimmer, also a known asthmatic. One daughter, also a known asthmatic, very nearly died of exercise-induced anaphylaxis. The other one had an asthma attack while swimming. Do you see, Dr Ruthven, why I’m worried?’
He leant back. ‘Your GP is the person to see about anxiety, Mr Goldsmith. I’m sure she’ll be able to help you. Not my bag, I’m afraid.’
I should have gathered the tatters of my dignity and left. I should have thrown a chair at his head.
‘I was just wondering if there’s a connection. If Rose is also at risk.’
He turned his chair back to his computer screen, called up the details of the next patient.
‘Clearly there’s a connection, but we can only go on clinical observation, and my clinical observations are that your daughters are well. And now if you don’t mind—’
‘Yes,’ I said. ‘Sorry.’
Stop fucking apologising, you wimp.
Everything felt fragile again on the train home, all the work on the new normality jeopardised. Hospital visits would become normal, I thought. It is simply not possible to live in a state of acute fear and shock for more than a couple of weeks, and so the mind finds a path, a story, a way onwards. Shock is by definition transient, even when the shocking thing is here to stay. I remembered the other families in the waiting room, their narratives also broken. I used to think that there were ordinary families, like us, and then there were the families on the news to whom terrible things happened, an ordinary enough reading of the world, well designed to protect from fear, the same distinction made by the people who say they can’t imagine what we must be going through. Oh yes you can, exactly what you would be going through under the same circumstances, but it’s quite understandable that you don’t want to imagine it. I looked around the carriage at the late commuters with their phones and newspapers, one or two sleeping open-mouthed with their heads against the dirty windows. Fifty people in this carriage, sixty, and some of them would be carrying horrors no-one wants to imagine. Missing children, suicides, incurable degenerative diseases of the mind and body. Violence, addiction, road accidents and house fires. Many of us, in fact, have learnt to sicken at the sound of sirens, for one reason or another. There is a large overlap between ordinary families and those to whom terrible things have happened. It is possible, necessary, to be both.
start again
The girls went back to school, and on the first day I went running again. It had been too long, of course; by my age, you can’t stop running for three months and expect to return immediately to your usual routes, north out of town past the Victorian villas and then the inter-war semis with their Tudorbethan beams and front gardens paved over for parking, out across the fields and up the hill from which you can see sunlight on the corduroy contours of ploughed fields and the spires of village churches rising from stands of beech and yew as in the fantasies of Tory politicians and junior aristocrats in the trenches of Flanders. Down the lane – 50 mph and no pavement, to be attempted only between rush hours and by daylight on days when death feels unlikely – towards Old Millerton, where the fruit trees spreading their skirts across old stone walls are perfectly groomed and the very drainpipes kept freshly coated in shades of business attire, as if the Queen were daily expected. There is a fourteen-year-old boy buried in the graveyard there, three years dead and fresh flowers changed twice a week because what else can you do, what other service can replace the washing of socks and the cooking of dinners, the nagging about untidiness and the need to pack schoolbags the night before? On, anyway, over fields now raw as a fresh cut but in summer high with wheat rippling like water troubled by wind, fields bounded now by the kind of red-brick houses that manifest plastic conservatories in which nothing is conserved but sofas and pink toys, round the back way to the canal, along which you can run as far as you like, mile after mile, the city one way and Oxford the other, until thought falls under the rhythm of feet and lungs, until there is only the pacing of the mind.
Not today. I’d been cold on the schoo
l run, had worried about Mimi’s refusal to wear a coat and the disappearance of one of Rose’s mittens. My running jacket was still on its peg, under an accumulation of winter coats. The last time I’d worn it was the morning Miriam stopped breathing, barely an hour before the phone call, and it still smelt of the sweat of that innocent body. I put it on, laced my shoes, took the earbuds out of the pocket. So sweat some new sweat. Start again.
algorithms for seeing
He had sketched a vaulted roof, its geometry dictated by his mathematical grid and its presence somehow natural, mandated by the fact of an English cathedral. When he and the engineer, Ove Arup, came to discuss the roof, he realised that he hadn’t thought about it properly. It was decorative and structural and that wasn’t enough, not for something that was going to last five hundred years. He played with his ideas and nothing sang to him, not until he separated the structural roof from the decorative vaults, like the inner and outer walls of a tent. Then he began to see the vaults taking the geodetic form of the fuselage of Wellington bombers – he must, I thought, surely have known that a new consignment of Wellingtons remained grounded at a nearby air base on the night of Coventry’s blitz because the Air Force didn’t want to risk exposing their base or losing their new kit? Too expensive, Arup said, and how are you planning to integrate the columns?
Then he saw a photograph of a fly’s eye in the National Geographic magazine, magnified in a way that would have been impossible before the war, part of the new vision of the world enabled by the technologies of war. Yes. Organic facets, the mathematical juggling of light and shade. Algorithms for seeing.
Now the concrete columns had to change, had to say something that would connect the marble floor with the flies’ eyes above. They ran the sums again, and found that now each column carried surprisingly little weight. They could taper towards the floor, like table-legs. (I am not worthy so much as to gather up the crumbs under thy table, murmurs the liturgy in my ear, but only say the word and I shall be healed.) They could be star-shaped. But he didn’t want concrete landing on marble. Some punctuation at the meeting point. Glass spheres. Light made solid, sand and heat made liquid, and the astonishment of seeing a cathedral apparently standing on glass, on light, on nothing at all.
But no glass manufacturer could guarantee a lifetime of five centuries. Bronze, then, after all.
all just fantasy and self-congratulation
Emma came home early, while I was cooking and also testing Rose on her eleven times table and also trying to make sure that Mimi was doing her homework without making it obvious that I was trying to make sure that Mimi was doing her homework, because then she would have diverted her energies from homework into arguing about whether she or I had more invested in her future and therefore more responsibility for decisions about doing or not doing homework, and whether homework was in fact principally a technique of social control for the unruly energies of teenagers, intended to keep them from taking to the streets in protest against the manifest injustices of modern Britain with busy-work backed up by the threat of detention, which is probably a violation of habeas corpus anyway, not that teenagers in this country have even the eroded and partial human rights still just about accorded to adults of the right colour and in possession of the right passport. She was lying on her front on the floor with her neck at a horrible angle, propped up on her elbows and still somehow able to type on the laptop staring her in the face. Sit at the table, I wanted to say, you’ll ruin your back, you’ve got a perfectly good desk upstairs, but I knew that at the same age I too had scorned furniture as the manifestation of middle age.
‘Nine elevens, Rose.’ I had sharpened the knives that afternoon and was able to chop the garlic fast, like a chef.
‘How’s it going, Mimi?’
‘Fine. Geography.’
‘Ninety-nine. Why do elevens do that?’ asked Rose, who was fiddling with Mimi’s knitting needles in a way that was going to cause trouble.
‘Dunno,’ I said. ‘Eleven twelves.’
Mimi rolled her neck. ‘Ow. Because we work in base ten.’
‘Tell her later,’ I said. ‘Get your homework done. Rose, do you have anything else?’
‘History. We’re doing the Mayflower.’
I sliced open the peppers and pulled out their hearts. ‘Are you now. Not the Blitz or the Victorians?’
The Victorians were primarily concerned with fashion, writing on slates and wholesome toys like hoops and spinning tops. Don’t mention the Empire, child labour, working conditions or the rise of socialism and the trades unions.
Mimi looked up. ‘Let me guess, the Mayflower was a lovely old wooden ship chartered by brave men in funny hats and their wives in pretty dresses who had heard about a beautiful country across the sea, a place where red apples glowed on the trees in the day-long sunshine and corn sprang from rich ground. They sailed across a bright blue sea whose waves were only high enough to please the children with the ship’s movement, and soon came to a wooded coastline where they built sweet little log cabins. After a while some interesting Noble Savages with feathers on their heads—’
I added the chopped peppers to the pot. ‘Don’t tell me you’ve been reading Rousseau.’
‘Who? No, Edward Said. You told me to, remember?’
‘Go on,’ said Rose.
‘Oh God, can’t you even recognise a parody? I was joking, Rose. It was more like, a bunch of religious fundamentalist nutjobs whose ideas threatened the equally fundamentalist nutjobs running England and most of Europe at the time pissed people off to the point at which—’
‘Mim, don’t use that language in front of Rose, please.’
‘Fine, you tell her.’
I stirred the vegetables. I was making a kind of pasta sauce.
‘OK. So in the sixteenth century, England was ruled by the King or Queen, and the King or Queen had a lot more power than the Queen does now. One of the ways for the monarch to stay in power was by working with the Church, because in those days everyone had to go to church every week and everyone who wanted to be allowed to live in peace either believed what the Church told them or pretended to believe it. So the Church supported the monarchy and the monarchy supported the Church, and between the two of them, almost everyone was under control, partly because the Church and the King also owned a lot of the land.’
‘Still do,’ said Mimi.
‘Do your Geography, Mim.’
Rose fiddled with Mimi’s knitting again. ‘I liked Mimi’s story better.’
Mimi looked up. ‘Yes, of course you did, because I was telling you a fairy tale and everything was pretty. That’s how it works. It’s like liking sweets although they’re really bad for you. It’s like all the fucking baking—’
‘Mimi—’
‘It’s the idea, Rosie-pose, that if you give people pleasure they won’t go looking for truth. You’d rather have a story about shiny apples and long dresses than listen to Dad talking about monarchy and power. Most people’d rather watch posh girls twiddling around with pastry than learn about what the food industry’s doing to our generation. There’s no point in history if it’s all just fantasy and self-congratulation.’
So she does listen to me. Even if she then appropriates what I say.
‘It’s like – sorry, Dad, but it’s true – it’s like Dad and his Arts and Crafts stuff and now the Festival of Britain Cathedral gubbins, it’s just ways of not thinking about how crap things are now.’
Jesus.
‘No, Mimi, it’s ways of thinking about how things could have been different. Understanding why they’re crap now. If they are.’
‘Yeah, could have been different. Not could be.’
‘How’s the Geography?’
‘Nearly done. Only I can’t find flights from Turkey.’
‘Flights from Turkey?’
‘She asked us to plan and budget for a round-the-world trip. We have to say why we want to go where we want to go and then research the countries.’
‘So I’m doing post-conflict zones, and then I thought by the time I’m old enough to do this Syria will be post-conflict, probably, I mean if only because the Russians—’
‘Tell me you’ve not been working out how to get to Syria. Not on the same computer on which you were looking at nuclear whatevers whenever it was.’
She looked up. ‘Yeah.’