four, a family. D is much more to my tastes. She is observant, polite, interesting. She has a discipline about her that I like, an outward-looking beady kind of attentiveness that seems
respectful of life. D does not gaze at screens. Her fingernails are unvarnished. I tell my daughter that I like her. I want to show my approval, and D has given me the opportunity.
Yes, my daughter says coolly, she’s nice.
I ask my children what their father feeds them. Takeaways, they say. Pizza. Chicken curry from the supermarket. The tree is dead for him too, then. He was once an extravagant cook, a person who made pastry and boeuf bourguignon, who made his own mincemeat at Christmas, who made little parcels of ravioli and crimped them all around the edges. Where has it gone, that food? And where did it come from, if not from him?
I go to bed hungry and when I wake I feel a degree safer. The hunted creature, hiding, tries to make itself small. The less of me there is, the less likely it is that the arrow will find me. I cook my daughters their supper but I can’t eat with them: I fear that if I do I’ll forget, come out of my hiding place, expose myself to danger. I fear something terrible will happen. Increasingly, to eat seems to be to open the body: the fight-or-flight responses are disabled. It is impossible to eat and stay vigilant. Sometimes, over supper, my daughters argue and upset themselves. If I, too, were eating I might get angry with them. As it is, I spring to their aid. One Sunday evening, when I am expecting them back, the phone rings. I have made a chocolate cake for their return: it stands on a plate in the kitchen, beautifully iced. The phone call is to tell me that my daughter has had an accident at her grandparents’ house, where they were staying the weekend: she is on her way to casualty, has a
gash in her leg that will need stitches, so they won’t be back until late. There is nothing I can do and so I stand in the kitchen, waiting. I look at the cake on its plate. It strikes me that while I was making it, my daughter was slipping on the wet path at the back of her grandparents’ house and opening her knee from one side to the other on an edging stone. She returns with six stitches, and a scar that makes my heart jump into my mouth. I saw my own bone, she says. She eats a piece of cake, a small one: the shock has taken away her appetite. It’s nice, she says, resting her head against my arm. Aren’t you having any?
Days and nights of hunger, white and abstract, hunger and the feeling of excitement that is in fact its opposite, dread: I wonder whether the dying get caught up in something of this black romance, whether the courtship of death likewise feels for an instant like thrilling life. Sometimes, looking at my daughters, I remember that once I was pregnant with them, and the memory is too strange to tolerate for long. My body is far away now from that thickening, motionless state, is drifting and fading toward a blank vision of its own autonomy.
I sit and watch a war documentary with my daughters. We watch the old black-and-white footage of men coming across the Channel waters in their strange snub-nosed boats. We see them discharged on the beaches, watch them running up the sands like scuttling crabs. They are conveyed in squat trucks to a village just inland from the French coast, where the British are holding the line. The men huddle in ditches, their hands resting on the flanks
of big guns all webbed in camouflage. Their faces are besmirched with mud, their tin hats strewn with leaves: they crouch like savages, grinning at the camera. The village can be seen in the near distance, a pretty place with the spire of the village church rising up through the summer trees. Back in the ditches the guns are being loaded with rounds of mortar: we watch as they fire, the men holding the kicking flanks like the thighs of a lusty woman. We watch the rounds begin to fall, puncturing the sides
respectful of life. D does not gaze at screens. Her fingernails are unvarnished. I tell my daughter that I like her. I want to show my approval, and D has given me the opportunity.
Yes, my daughter says coolly, she’s nice.
I ask my children what their father feeds them. Takeaways, they say. Pizza. Chicken curry from the supermarket. The tree is dead for him too, then. He was once an extravagant cook, a person who made pastry and boeuf bourguignon, who made his own mincemeat at Christmas, who made little parcels of ravioli and crimped them all around the edges. Where has it gone, that food? And where did it come from, if not from him?
I go to bed hungry and when I wake I feel a degree safer. The hunted creature, hiding, tries to make itself small. The less of me there is, the less likely it is that the arrow will find me. I cook my daughters their supper but I can’t eat with them: I fear that if I do I’ll forget, come out of my hiding place, expose myself to danger. I fear something terrible will happen. Increasingly, to eat seems to be to open the body: the fight-or-flight responses are disabled. It is impossible to eat and stay vigilant. Sometimes, over supper, my daughters argue and upset themselves. If I, too, were eating I might get angry with them. As it is, I spring to their aid. One Sunday evening, when I am expecting them back, the phone rings. I have made a chocolate cake for their return: it stands on a plate in the kitchen, beautifully iced. The phone call is to tell me that my daughter has had an accident at her grandparents’ house, where they were staying the weekend: she is on her way to casualty, has a
gash in her leg that will need stitches, so they won’t be back until late. There is nothing I can do and so I stand in the kitchen, waiting. I look at the cake on its plate. It strikes me that while I was making it, my daughter was slipping on the wet path at the back of her grandparents’ house and opening her knee from one side to the other on an edging stone. She returns with six stitches, and a scar that makes my heart jump into my mouth. I saw my own bone, she says. She eats a piece of cake, a small one: the shock has taken away her appetite. It’s nice, she says, resting her head against my arm. Aren’t you having any?
Days and nights of hunger, white and abstract, hunger and the feeling of excitement that is in fact its opposite, dread: I wonder whether the dying get caught up in something of this black romance, whether the courtship of death likewise feels for an instant like thrilling life. Sometimes, looking at my daughters, I remember that once I was pregnant with them, and the memory is too strange to tolerate for long. My body is far away now from that thickening, motionless state, is drifting and fading toward a blank vision of its own autonomy.
I sit and watch a war documentary with my daughters. We watch the old black-and-white footage of men coming across the Channel waters in their strange snub-nosed boats. We see them discharged on the beaches, watch them running up the sands like scuttling crabs. They are conveyed in squat trucks to a village just inland from the French coast, where the British are holding the line. The men huddle in ditches, their hands resting on the flanks
of big guns all webbed in camouflage. Their faces are besmirched with mud, their tin hats strewn with leaves: they crouch like savages, grinning at the camera. The village can be seen in the near distance, a pretty place with the spire of the village church rising up through the summer trees. Back in the ditches the guns are being loaded with rounds of mortar: we watch as they fire, the men holding the kicking flanks like the thighs of a lusty woman. We watch the rounds begin to fall, puncturing the sides
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