by Fiona Neill
‘Please, darling, let me in,’ Dad implored, waving his fingers through the letter box to try and catch my hand.
It was a painful reminder of my lost intimacy with Rex. I blamed him for that too and slammed the lid down hard on his fingers. He yelped and snatched them away.
‘She doesn’t want to see you ever again. You’re a disgrace, Dad.’
‘Mummy and I have things we need to talk about. There are issues you don’t understand.’
‘I understand everything.’ I tried to sound as menacing as possible. I wanted him to suffer the way I had suffered since the day I saw him and Lisa in the dunes. I remembered how Lisa wound her way up his body like a snake until her mouth found his cock and his eyes closed and his mouth made weird rictus shapes.
‘What do you mean?’
‘Does she make you hard, Dad? Does Lisa make you hard?’
‘Don’t speak like that, Daisy.’
‘You disgust me.’ I spat the words out.
‘Please.’ He sounded completely defeated.
Instead of feeling gratified by his misery I found myself temporarily blinded by huge salty tears that poured down my cheeks before I was even aware I had the urge to cry. Eventually he left, head bowed and body stooped like an old man. I went back into the kitchen to tell Mum I had managed to get rid of him, and she gave a tiny nod.
After this, I went up to Max’s room to make sure he hadn’t heard anything, put my hand on his stomach to count his breaths and recited the special words that needed to be said to keep him safe. Each time I started, however, anxiety about Mum flooded through my body. How could I protect her from burglars without Dad in the house? What if she started drinking and ended up like Barney, with a tummy swollen like a pregnant woman? Or had a nervous breakdown and was admitted to a psychiatric ward and had electric shock treatment and couldn’t recognize Max and me any more? Horrible images filled my head and it wasn’t until the early hours of the morning that I felt I had completed everything in the right way and could finally allow myself to fall asleep. I think I went downstairs to count the knives in the drawer at least six times through that long night. I don’t know why I ever imagined that it would be easier when Mum knew about Dad and Lisa. I never thought the truth could be even more painful than living a lie. My instincts about that were wrong, like I was wrong about everything else.
The following evening Dad came back and sat down at the kitchen table beside Mum in that way parents do when they are trying to present a united front. But really all it did was heighten the sense of crisis. By then the crazy thoughts that Mum was in danger had become overwhelming. I had spent most of the day doing my checks, prayers and tapping, and the periods when I felt normal got shorter and shorter.
When Dad announced, without looking me in the eye, that he was going to move in with Lisa for a little while, all I could think about was the knife drawer behind him. I bit my lip until it hurt so that I didn’t cry. I didn’t want him to see how painful this news was for me.
‘I don’t see why you’ve made me miss my first football match to tell me you’re going for a sleepover,’ said Max, irritated by all this unexpected fuss. ‘At least let me come with you to show Ava my new Lego model?’
‘Explain,’ said Mum firmly to Dad. ‘Explain.’
‘Explain,’ I said to make it three.
‘I’m moving in with Lisa.’ In an effort to downplay the implications of this momentous announcement he made the mistake of sounding almost breezy, as if he was signalling his intention to go and buy Cheerios at the corner shop.
‘To help look after Barney?’ Max asked. ‘That’s so kind of you.’
Dad turned to Mum, waiting for her to fall into her usual role of emotional interpreter, but she stared fixedly ahead at a point just north of the cooker.
I pulled Max on to my knee to protect him from the pain coming his way and hid behind his hot little body so I didn’t have to witness the moment his world fell apart or conjure up an appropriate facial expression to news I had processed back in August.
‘No. We’re moving into a flat together. Barney is staying at their house with Rex and Ava. There’s a spare room so you can visit us.’
Max tried to grasp these different concepts. Flat. House. Spare room. Us not being Mum and Dad but Dad and Lisa. I felt his body tense in my arms as it dawned on him what Dad was trying to explain.
‘You’re leaving us?’ he finally asked. He sounded timid, like a toddler testing out new words.
‘I’m not leaving you. I’m just moving somewhere else. It’s not far from here.’
‘With Lisa?’
‘With Lisa,’ Dad confirmed
‘If you’re not staying here then you’re leaving us,’ Max said.
‘You can come and stay with me whenever you like,’ said Dad.
‘Will She be there?’
Dad winced and nodded at the same time.
Max shook his head violently in response. ‘Never. Not if She’s there.’
‘I won’t love you any less because I’m not living with you.’
Dad held out his arms for Max but he shrank further back into me.
‘Do you still love Mum?’
‘Of course I love Mum.’
‘Then why are you moving in with Her?’
Dad didn’t reply. Max ploughed on. He has always been a logical thinker.
‘Do you love Her?’
‘I love Mum but I’m in love with Lisa. It’s difficult for you to understand but sometimes human beings develop feelings for each other that are impossible to ignore.’ Dad had obviously rehearsed this line. He said it slowly and solemnly as if he was performing Shakespeare.
‘If you love Her then obviously you love us less,’ Max said, his voice cracking with emotion. He picked up a blunt pencil and drew a pie chart to demonstrate this. In the first drawing Dad’s love was divided into thirds. In the second a quarter was allocated to Lisa.
Dad tried to explain that love was infinite.
‘Only prime numbers are infinite,’ said Max. ‘I’m amazed you haven’t learnt that. I thought you knew everything and now I realize you know nothing. You are full of shit.’
My head felt as though it was going to explode. It was unbearable that I couldn’t protect Max. I needed to be alone to go through all my routines and wanted to bring this to a close.
‘He loves Mum but not as much as he wants to fuck Lisa!’ I heard myself blurt out.
‘Daisy!’ said Mum, sounding really shocked and upset. ‘That is enough.’
‘Well, it’s true, isn’t it?’ I shouted angrily at them both.
Although I needed to blame Dad for all of this, there was a part of me that saw Mum’s inability to satisfy him as her failure. If she had been enough for Dad none of this would ever have happened. I still hate myself for feeling this. Max started to cry inconsolably. He wouldn’t let Dad near him so Dad got angry with Mum because this wasn’t going the way they had planned. Mum stood up and said it was time for Dad to leave. She asked for his keys and at that moment I understood they would never be together again. When Max saw Dad going out the door he ran over to him and wound himself around his leg like a small boa constrictor and I couldn’t look because it reminded me all over again of Lisa wrapping herself around Dad.
‘Don’t leave us, Dad.’ He paused for maximum effect and looked up at him with his big dark eyes. ‘Please don’t leave us. We need you. We love you.’
Dad tousled his hair and unwound Max from his leg, and for a split second I saw him vacillate. He would stay for Max but not for me. I didn’t mind. I never felt jealous of Max.
‘I can’t. I’m sorry,’ said Dad eventually, all hollow-voiced, as if he was the one whose heart had been crushed.
Max was wild-eyed. ‘Every day I am going to pray that Lisa dies a horrible slow lingering death,’ he said venomously. ‘Every day, Dad. And if she doesn’t then I’ll just kill her.’
‘You don’t mean it, Max,’ said Mum, stroking his
hair to soothe him.
‘I do. I actually do.’
‘It’s really important that the last memory he has of this experience isn’t a negative one,’ Dad kept saying to Mum. ‘Otherwise it will colour his future recall of the situation.’
At this point I truly thought Dad had gone mad and we had all missed the symptoms.
‘Can you just remind me of the positive parts,’ said Mum, her voice all compressed, ‘because they’re not obvious to me right now.’
‘It’s for the best,’ I heard myself say three times as I left the kitchen to go upstairs to my bedroom.
Max told me Dad stayed for a while, frantically searching for his tube pass, passport and photos of us, as if he was fleeing a war zone, which he was. Max followed behind him in silence like a ghostly presence.
My head was full of the bad thoughts about something happening to Mum. The anxiety was of cosmic proportions. I needed to be alone to catch up with my routines. They are all I can remember of the next couple of years. The rituals became like a full-time job with overtime. It was as if the day Dad moved out full time, the OCD moved in full time.
Poor Mum. She was fighting on so many fronts. Dad was possessed by Lisa. I was possessed by my illness. Max was possessed with grief for Dad. I don’t know how she kept it together. She tried to be brave in front of us but at night when I passed her bedroom on my way downstairs to check the knife drawer I sometimes heard her crying. They weren’t hard tears but a soft, sad keen of yearning for all the lives she would now never live. I heard her once tell a friend that Dad and Lisa had robbed her of her past and future and that all she had left was the present. It sounded terrifying, like being stuck on the edge of a black hole, unable to go forwards or backwards.
Eight years later and I’m sitting in the same place at the same kitchen table doing background reading for uni. We’re studying Kazuo Ishiguro this term and although I’ve finished The Remains of the Day and Never Let Me Go, I need to nail the themes. I read through the notes sent by the English Department: class; identity; how and why memory is fallible. Dad would love the last one. I do, too, but I won’t be telling him because I can’t stand the way he’s always so desperate to find the common ground between us. Max calls it his enthusiastic Labrador mode. Slightly needy, slightly over the top. Max is good at sounding kind even when he’s cruel.
I look at the essay title: ‘No one can render their past exactly as it was – Discuss.’ I remember a sentence that I underlined in Never Let Me Go about the character’s self-awareness of the unreliability of memory and am pleased with myself when I instantly find the dog-eared page with the highlighted quote. ‘This was all a long time ago so I might have some of it wrong.’
I open up my computer, ready to use this in my opening paragraph. My hands hover over the keyboard and words start to form in my mouth. The butterfly feeling in my stomach starts up again. Everything has changed and yet nothing has changed. Since Lisa sent the letter to Mum the illness has come back big time. I tried to ignore it at first in case I empowered it with acknowledgement. But this was a mistake because instead it gained a foothold. The only advantage I have this time is that at least I understand what is happening to me. I must lack creativity because neither the obsessions nor the compulsions have evolved. The routine goes something like this:
I am convinced that something bad is going to happen to Mum.
This makes me feel overwhelmed with anxiety.
The only way I can stop the worry and prevent something bad happening is by doing all the checking, tapping and saying the special words.
They call it the ‘anxiety loop’ but ‘noose’ would be more appropriate. My mouth goes dry and my hands start to sweat and shake, and I realize I am in the throes of a panic attack so I close the screen and the anxiety subsides, although it doesn’t back off completely.
This shouldn’t be happening because after Mum and Kit left this morning I spent a couple of hours on my routines before settling down at the kitchen table to write my essay. I run through them in my head in case I missed out something: switches, front door, windows and knives; feet and shoulders; special prayer to keep Mum and Max safe. I did them all. Max seems more invincible now so I have updated the version I used to recite to give more emphasis to Mum. If I do all this properly, usually it wins me a couple of hours’ breathing space to get on with work before I have to start the whole cycle again. But not today.
I should know from experience that OCD is a hungry master who imposes more rules whenever he suspects his influence is under threat. He is omnipotent and infallible and whatever I do, it will never be enough. I understand all this and still I can’t stop. I think I’m going mad.
The small part of me that recognizes all this is completely irrational slips further away from me. I keep thinking about the chain of events after my failure to perform my routines the afternoon I went to meet Rex all those years ago. I’m not taking that risk again. I have even begun wondering whether all the extra attention I paid to Max when I was last ill, checking his breathing every night, and saying a special prayer for him, might have saved him. I crept into Mum’s room last night and noted the rise and fall of her duvet and have decided to add this to the back end of my evening repertoire.
It’s so exhausting and shameful to live like this, and I can’t face telling Mum that I am possessed again because she will be so worried. Even worse, she’ll try to stop me. I try to bamboozle the thoughts by moving to the desk in the sitting room overlooking the window on to the street. Sometimes they are distractible. I need to let the outside world in, to see if I can regain perspective. It was a technique my therapist Geeta taught me.
I force myself to look out of the window and observe our neighbours leaving the house opposite. It’s the same couple that heard all the shouting the night Dad left. He recklessly bumps down the steps on to the pavement in his mobility scooter while she herds him from behind like a sheepdog. I hear the gay couple who have just moved in next door arguing about whether or not you should peel tomatoes to make a Bolognese sauce. I envy all of them the simplicity of their lives and wonder why I have to live with the fire in my head. Other people have weird thoughts but somehow manage to shake them off. Maybe I should go back to my OCD support group? But everyone I knew there all those years ago has probably recovered and I am the only person stupid enough to have a relapse.
I try to remember some of the arguments that Geeta taught me to challenge the thoughts. Max doesn’t have to do this to stop something bad from happening to Mum so why should I? I have resisted OCD compulsions in the past and nothing bad happened. I cannot control future events with my thoughts. But instead of believing these statements I find myself writing them down three times over, so they become a ritual in themselves. What I really need is for Max to say the words. More than anyone, he had the ability to help reduce the anxiety. I miss him living at home so much.
I try to call him. Whenever he doesn’t pick up after three rings I hang up, so he doesn’t realize how many times a day I try to get hold of him. But this time he answers.
‘Daisy,’ he says, and I can hear the hint of repressed impatience in his tone. ‘What is it? I’m going to see you in a couple of hours.’
I tell him I want to confirm the plan.
‘We’ve done all this on Facebook already,’ he says flatly.
‘I just wanted to double-check.’
‘Triple-check, you mean.’
I laugh. I need him to tease me. He says that he hasn’t got much time because he’s in the middle of something. I ask for details.
‘I’ve just done a home visit with a GP. Stroke. Now I’m off to the library to get in a couple of hours of revision before I meet you and Kit. Is it something that can’t wait?’
He’s got so short-tempered recently. I try to think of ways to keep him on the phone.
‘Did you go out last night?’
‘I went to see Wolf Alice with Connie.’
‘Good?’
; ‘Good. How are you?’ he asks.
‘I’m not feeling so great,’ I say.
There is a long silence. It’s not what he wants to hear.
‘There’s nothing I can do to help.’ I can hear the shrug in his tone.
‘Please just tell me that Mum will be fine? If you say it I get a real break from the thoughts.’
‘You don’t have the power to prevent bad things from happening, Daisy, and nor do I. Even if God existed, he couldn’t do that. Shit just happens.’
‘I just want you to tell me that Mum will be fine. Can’t you do that for me?’
‘I’m not getting into that again,’ he says gently. ‘It’s not right.’
‘Think of everything I’ve done for you,’ I say angrily.
‘What have you done for me?’
‘I’ve protected you from everything. I’ve shielded you from so much pain.’
I keep pleading but I realize that he has put the phone down on me. He sends a Snapchat to apologize and says it’s for the best, which reminds me of Dad, which reminds me of Lisa, which makes me tense and so the whole cycle starts again.
I stare into the street. Luckily there aren’t many cars, because if a Vauxhall goes past Lisa comes to mind and I feel anxious and have to go through the routines again. Fortunately it’s generally all Volvos in these parts. Kit has noticed my allergy to Vauxhalls and teases me that I’m a car snob.
I check the time. Two twenty-four. In two minutes I can try Mum again. The days go so slowly when you are alone but I prefer it this way so that I can organize my schedule around the rituals. It’s going to get difficult now uni has started again. I allow myself to call or text her once every two hours while she’s at work, which means I get to communicate with her exactly four times a day until she gets home. I try to vary the schedule so that she doesn’t notice a pattern. Geeta, the cognitive behavioural therapist, was really hot on family members who got involved in my rituals and Mum will be alert to this. I never fully confessed the extent of Max’s contributions to anyone, and he never grassed me up. She picks up right away but doesn’t say anything, which means she is probably in work mode. I feel immediately better knowing that she is fine.