I begin refilling the glasses. “What is adolescence if not a state of biochemical lability and aggression, huh?”
My joke elicits a flurry of laughter from the table. The mention of aggression seems to have taken it a bit too far for you, though, and I notice that you are staring at the tablecloth to avoid meeting anyone’s eye.
“Might as well enjoy it while it lasts, I say.” Jeremy is off again, the Merlot clearly swimming in his veins. “You get to my age and realize that you are as unable and unaggressive as it gets. It’s one foot in your slipper, one in the grave.”
Jeremy’s reverie is cut short by a heavy thud against the front door.
“Last-minute guest, eh?” My postdoc laughs. “I always admire someone with their metabolism trained on the dessert course.”
“Eleanor,” you whisper, willing me toward the door before she bursts through it.
I am out into the hallway like a shot, just as Eleanor finally figures out which key works the lock. Her hair has fallen over her face, and when she shakes it back, her pupils are wildly dilated, her eyeliner smeared under them, from the time of day or from tears, I can’t for the life of me tell. Her arms appear to be twitching, her breathing slow and shallow.
“Evening, Eleanor.” The door may be closed, but I’m scared of what they might be able to pick out. Through the walls I can hear you talking at top volume. I am not the only one concerned with keeping up appearances.
“Got guests?” Eleanor’s speech is slow and slurred. I grab Eleanor’s biceps, half pulling, half dragging her up the stairs and into her room before we are found.
“Don’t want your friends seeing me?” Eleanor reclines on her single bed and begins undressing herself.
I am uncomfortable, all too aware this is your remit, Mags, and yet I can’t bear for you to see Eleanor in this state.
“What have you taken?” I hiss. My stomach drops. I wonder if Eleanor can hear my heart thundering in my chest. There is no parenting manual on earth that prepares you for the shock of seeing your own child strung out. I catch a glimpse of her Jeffrey, the bear I bought for her when she was just days old, teetering on the shelf just above her head, and feel sixteen years of my life collapsing into this one moment.
“This is important, Eleanor—tell me what you have taken.”
“Bit of this, bit of that.”
Eleanor is down to her underwear by now, and I pray she won’t take off anything else. Her clothes reek of smoke. I find her jeans, rummaging through the pockets in case they yield some more coherent answers. Nothing. A disintegrating tissue and some small change. Good to see my taxi fare has been spent on illicit supplies instead.
“I don’t want your mother seeing you like this. Get into bed.” Eleanor is fumbling with the duvet cover, and I end up stepping in, tucking the quilt around her in a way I haven’t done for nearly a decade.
I go to turn off the light.
“Why don’t you say it?”
“Say what?”
“You’re ashamed of me, Dad.”
Downstairs, I can hear the front door open, the air kisses and gratitude and exclamations that “we must do this again—soon!” Eleanor always has been so perceptive.
“We’ll talk about this tomorrow.”
We wash up in silence that night. I can tell that you are torn between wanting to know and knowing you aren’t able to bear that knowledge, not yet. That night, you cry yourself to sleep. I can feel the cold dampness when I remove my hand from under your head the moment I can feel your breathing slow into sleep.
Carefully, I extract myself from you and make my way down the hallway to open Eleanor’s door. All these years later, and the fluorescent stars we stuck to the ceiling in one of my mock astrology lessons have yet to come off. By her choice or by the strength of their design? I wonder as I lean down to check that she is still on her side, still breathing.
I settle on the floor and prop my head against one of the display cushions that has fallen off the bed. I reach for Eleanor’s hand, which dangles off the side of the mattress. A fetus with a single unruly limb. It is cold, clammy. I look up at the stars, all the time holding the one that fell to earth for us.
“I’m not ashamed of you. I never have been. I never will be,” I whisper.
I wish I’d said it to her face.
Chapter 11
When the doctor arrives, it is early evening and I am on my feet, shaking some feeling back into their numbness and assessing how much change I have in my pockets to spare for the vending machine. After days of going without, my stomach has started rumbling with such ferocity that I wonder, hopefully, if it might wake Maggie.
“I’m glad to find you here, Professor. Although you are most diligent with your visits to your wife.” He glances at the camp bed with its rumpled blanket but decides not to mention it.
“Forty years of marriage requires more than diligence,” I mutter, somewhat more darkly than I intended.
“Of course. I couldn’t presume to know.”
If ever there was a time to allude to his inexperience in this regard, at the bedside of my critically ill wife is not it. He senses my hackles going up.
“Apologies if that was taken the wrong way, Professor. What I meant to say is that your dedication to your wife has been remarkable. You have barely left her side.”
I am too spent to give a smile, or anything else for that matter. I have no intention of being cruel, really I don’t, I never do. The sad reality is that often our behavior will do it for us, unwilled and unwillingly. My silence is the very best example.
“Look, I know we spoke this morning about how Mrs. Hobbs was somehow behind where we were hoping she would be at this stage in her treatment. As you’ll remember, with your consent we agreed to keep her sedated for another twenty-four hours.”
“And?”
“Well, before I leave for the day, I’d like to set up a time to discuss some treatment options, some other decisions.”
“What options? What decisions?”
“As I say, if we could fix a time tomorrow . . .”
“Now is good,” I say, heat flushing up the back of my neck.
“Er . . . well . . . if you would prefer now.” He checks his watch; another person on a deadline. “Take a seat, please, Professor.”
“I’m fine.” Instinctively, I cross my arms. I am defensive, but of what I can’t quite work out. I know that if I sit down, there is a strong chance I will never get up again.
“As I’m sure you are already aware, the longer your wife is under sedation, the higher the risk of damage to her brain should she recover.”
Should? I double over. The doctor nudges the spare chair out from behind him and spins it round for me. I press my hands into its back until I feel the plastic edge cutting into my palms.
“Professor, do you . . . ?” He gestures at the chair.
“No . . . no . . . Please carry on.”
“It means that we are wary of keeping her under for much longer. When we stop the medicines that are inducing her current comatose state, it may take a number of days, perhaps weeks, for her to regain full consciousness. However, I have to stress that there are no guarantees. We recommend that you speak to one of our trained support staff here who can talk you through your choices, should Mrs. Hobbs not wake.”
“Whether I turn off the life support, you mean?”
“That is one option, indeed. I don’t know whether you and your wife ever discussed what you would wish to happen in this situation?”
Does anyone? Hardly the most romantic pillow talk in the early days, is it? DNRs and donor cards. Then the comforting complacency and routine of the middle years. I would know what my partner wants, wouldn’t I? I can’t bring myself to reflect on the last six months, the absence of all discussion, even of the most pressing issues.
“Professor?”
I have been quiet too long. He is clock-watching; unlike me, he has other places to be. Selfish as it may sound, I don’t care about wasting h
is time. It is mine I am worried about. I glance at my watch. Six p.m. Fourteen, maybe fifteen hours before he is back. Surely I can be finished by then? The magnitude of what I have left to say is enough to floor me, but I cannot waste what little time I still have peeling myself off the foot of Maggie’s bed.
“I won’t turn her off.” My voice is quiet but determined.
“I can appreciate that. In some instances, it is, however, the best option for the patient.”
“I will not give up on my wife. I will not.” My voice is rising, in volume and in pitch. I have not felt this sort of anger, raw and clawing at the back of my throat, for years. I know that it emanates from something more than this situation, but I cannot rein it in.
“I have paid my taxes, lived within my means. Maggie worked for forty years for the NHS. I will not turn her off to save money or meet targets. I will not give up on her!” I am nearly shouting and wonder how long it will be before reinforcements arrive, a male nurse, perhaps, or a security guard if they can spare him. “I will not give up on her!”
The doctor begins to beat a retreat toward the door. There is no panic button that I can see. I am safe this time.
“Think about it, Professor.” He threads his index and middle fingers into the pocket of his shirt, still as neatly pressed as the first day I met him. He produces a small card and places it on the spare seat by the door. “It isn’t in your wife’s best interests to delay. I’ll be back tomorrow morning with your wife’s support team, and we will need to make some formal decisions then. You know where I am should you need me in the meantime.”
When I am convinced that he has disappeared far enough down the corridor, I pick up the card. Emily Morris—Senior Family Liaison Officer. I throw it back down and make my way round to Maggie. Time is running out. Everything else can wait.
“I meant that, Maggie. I’m not giving up. I never have. Not with Eleanor, not these last few months either. I’m sorry if you ever felt that was the case. I do not give up on my family, and I am not about to start now.
“I just hope you won’t give up on me, Mags, when you hear . . . why I stopped speaking, what happened, why I just shut down. Please, Maggie, please, hear me out.”
We talk about the winds of change, but that night was a gale-force storm. I think we would both agree that things had been far from easy in the year running up to the exams, in the sleepless weeks after, but from the dinner party onward we were dealing with something else entirely. We were clinging on to the Eleanor as we knew her like a plastic bag in a hundred-mile-an-hour gust, our knuckles white with the exertion of keeping hold of just a piece of her fragile form in our lives.
The next day, she didn’t emerge until well into the evening. I went in to check on her around midday, a glass of water and a piece of toast in hand. Eleanor was curled up, facing the wall. I so desperately wanted to ask if she was OK, obviously, but also what the hell had happened last night? Did she remember any of it? What she had said? I sat on the edge of the bed, lowering myself as slowly as my thighs could manage so the mattress didn’t sink. Most of her hair was thrown forward over her face, but a single auburn curl trailed down from the nape of her neck and over the duvet. I went to run my finger over it, the way I had a million times before. As a toddler to get her to sleep, as a child when she needed comfort. The second my finger made contact, she flinched.
I headed back to my study but I couldn’t focus at all. Was she sick? Had there been some falling-out? Maybe she was ashamed that I had seen her in that state? I had a horde of possible answers but none that felt likely to have caused this extreme a response. You had gone out—to see Edie, I imagine—so I was left alone in my confusion.
As I sent a fleet of pawns to the slaughter and the computer dealt me out checkmate after checkmate, I tried out a hundred openers in my mind for a second attempt at a conversation, sifting through them for one that wouldn’t push Ellie further away. Every time I heard the floorboards creak, my heart raced. She was coming down, finally. Then the loo flush, and the door bang, and that horrible sense of déjà vu that brought me back to the early days of our relationship and made me wonder if I was messing up as a father as badly as I had done as a husband.
Eleanor emerged eventually, after you had gone to bed. I was fixing my late-night cheese and pickle, and she appeared like a specter, her outline momentarily illuminated by the fridge light. I knew this might be my only opportunity.
“Hey, Eleanor, how are you?”
For a second, I wonder if she hasn’t heard. She sets the tap to a low flow and fills her beaker to the top, greedily lapping up the excess.
“Ells?” I am cautious about coming too close. “Are you OK?”
The moonlight streaks across the metal sink, casting a triangle of light on the floor tiles but keeping Ellie in the dark.
“Ells?”
“Do you mind?”
“Mind what?”
“Just—please?”
It was only after she left the kitchen that I realized she hadn’t so much as looked in my direction.
All night that exchange ran through my dreams on a loop so intense that when I woke up, four, five, six times, restless and bashing at the alarm clock to check how far away morning was, I couldn’t understand how next to no time had passed at all. When I drifted off, my mind zeroed in on that moment just before she stopped speaking. What was that quiver in her voice? Was it a thimble of upset? A shred of regret? I would have preferred anger. Whatever it was unsettled me far more.
I hoped you would have more luck. I gave you the bare bones of that night—the drinking, the slurring, the heady daze that I worried might be something else. At one point later that week, I was rooting in the cupboard under the stairs when I heard the word “therapist” and the mention of “something we could do as a family” drifting down the corridor from her bedroom above. I could feel the blood rush to my face. I’ve never been a talker, have I, Mags? And really, I couldn’t think of anything worse. But for Eleanor? There were no lengths we wouldn’t stretch to, no depths we couldn’t plumb to make things OK for her again.
There was still a month to go until she started college. It should have been a relief when she stopped going out until all hours. But with the sea change in behavior that followed the night of the dinner party, even that would have been preferable to Eleanor holing up in her room, sleeping or pretending to, or staring out into space. Something had shifted that night, and we were both coming up blank in terms of hard explanations for what on earth it could be. We tried all manner of things, didn’t we, Mags, to coax her out? Talking, imploring, bribing. Everything we tried was met with, well, nothing. It went beyond inertia. That would suggest she was at least resisting something, when in fact the worst of it was that there was no pushback at all. She was being smothered by an unknown darkness, suffocated so that all the curiosity and the focus that made Eleanor Eleanor had been snuffed right out. I’ve never felt so helpless, Mags.
She made it to the sixth form. But it was just a holding pen for her. Obviously they noticed things were bad, because a session with the counselor was mentioned at the college. You put us on separate waiting lists outside of that, definitely two that I knew of. But somehow nothing came to fruition. That was the most animated Ellie ever was back then—begging us not to make her go. Why did we give in to that, Maggie? Why did we back off? I have always been a softie, a “pushover,” whatever you want to call it. You were the firm one, not me. I often wondered if it became a matter of principle to you. You wanted to fix whatever was going on with Eleanor yourself, that much was clear. But at some point, surely, we had to admit that it wasn’t possible? I just wish we had come to that realization sooner.
Often I’d get home and her rucksack would be in the hallway, but there was no sign of her; no coat, no shoes, no mess on the kitchen table to suggest she’d fixed herself a snack. All that time she’d been holed up in her room we had prayed for her to get out, and now she had and we had no idea where the hell she�
��d gone in the evenings. Once she started to miss supper, I went out to search. You were frantic, I was frantic, but it wasn’t doing any good, the two of us staring out of the living-room window as if our desperation alone would be enough to conjure her up.
I had to be doing something, so I made my way round the neighborhood. I didn’t ask anyone—that seemed too . . . final, I suppose. Admitting she was lost at a point when we were still telling ourselves that she would find her own way back to normality. No, I just sought out the signs, Mags. I loved the very bones of her. I told myself that meant I would catch her by a whiff of her shampoo, an artfully discarded tissue. A hunch would do. In reality, it seemed too much Poirot had addled my mind.
With no tip-offs to go on, I would try the meadow first, the benches we used to sit and picnic on. I tried down by the shops, in them too. I went into the abandoned cricket pavilion, once interrupting a session round a homemade hookah pipe. I trailed round the circumference of the adjoining sports field, even though the floodlights had broken and I had to resort to the torch on my phone. I went up and down every aisle in Tesco, as if she might jump out at me from between the cereals and the soft drinks.
By the time I got back, I would be exhausted. Sometimes, if I was out for a few hours, she would have made it home of her own accord. Others, I’d return and there would still be no sign of her, not until the early hours. As I waited, my head would pound and my ankles would be puffed up, like two sausages about to burst their casing. How much longer can I keep this up? Once, as I eased my shoes off in front of the monitor in the study, my elbow caught the mouse and my screensaver flashed to life. It was the three of us at her birthday supper the year before last, a selfie that was ninety percent Eleanor, ten percent us, only half of each of our faces in the shot, grinning away at what we could already guarantee would be a terrible composition. With just one glimpse, I knew I would carry on my search as long as it took. I would never give up on Eleanor.
After a few weeks of false starts, I found her hangout: down by the canal, near Jericho. Her back was to me, but I would have known it anywhere. I’d been faced with it enough times over the past few months. I was cautious of causing a scene and made sure I was hidden by the undergrowth, moving slowly in the late-autumn gloom. She was alone. I couldn’t tell if I should be relieved or not. She had a handful of pebbles and was absentmindedly skimming them into the gap between two moored barges. None of them bounced, not like they should, not like how I taught her. It took everything in me not to come up behind her and curl her hand in mine to help her find just the right angle. I watched for a minute or two longer while her efforts sank, and then headed home.
The Silent Treatment Page 10
