I want people to be proud of me.
Oh, that’s pathetic, though.
But I do, would, do want that.
If they knew, I would like the people whose opinion I care for to be happy when they consider what I have done.
And when they see what I will do.
I am my own department. My own ministry — ministry was always a better and more logical word.
He set his shoulders in the way masters had told him to throughout his school life — an old boy who still undressed and dressed in the order he had been given: socks, pants, vest, shirt, trousers, tie. He walked upright. He could manage that.
I am the Ministry of Natural History. I progress.
15:25
MEG WAS DIFFERENT now.
She was different and currently at work on forcing her life to be different. She felt, for example, that it should involve more happiness.
This was all possible, because of a difference she hadn’t worked on — one which appeared to choose her.
On the 28th of March 2014, Meg had woken at something like lunchtime inside the flat she had inherited from her parents. Waking was not, at that time, a good or a welcome feature of her life. It made her frightened and regretful. Her first experience of herself in any day was one of disappointment.
Not disappointed in who I was. Or that too, but more I was disappointed to feel I was still breathing. I was clinging on. Again. For more of the same.
The flat she was, by then, kind of camping inside contained what was left of her parents’ choice of furniture: 1970s, often brown. The place also contained her mother’s choice of decor — occasionally brown, but also cream and beige, although with a brownness about it. And then there were objects and ornaments of various types which had been somehow made existentially brown by continuing exposure to — she had to admit it — Meg.
Over time, the brown had become more powerful and convincing. It had spread. The brown grew to be this mystical shade of bloody doom that inhabited and rambled — a visible curse.
There was something about persistent drinking — home drinking, house drinking, house everything, locked-in everything — that generated brown. The sweating and fretting and regular visits of minicabs and the bottles handed over at the door by ashamed-for-you drivers — wet hands, crumpled money, no further pretence about parties, of just running a little short on reasonable sociable supplies — there was something about each little blow and cut of damage that made everything you touched or looked at become brown.
Even the air — the not-at-all thin, but unpleasantly thickened air. Like fucking gravy, like oxtail soup with madness in it — the madness of dead spinal columns and roll-eyed livestock. It had, by then, taken a shedload of effort just to peer through the interior — brown air, brown walls, brown carpet, brown remaining furnishings and fittings — or even to find anything in what had once been a passable family home.
No, it wasn’t passable, it was a good home. It was concerned, attentive, generous, with Sunday dinners and Songs of Praise on the telly when the hymns still had tunes and you could like and remember them, even if you didn’t believe in one syllable, and there had been books and unbroken crockery and no tear in the stair carpet. A decent humanity had abounded. No brown.
I never got the hang of it on my own. Didn’t feel I could belong — not until I’d spoiled it, fouled my own nest.
I suppose I was never quite in phase with it once I got beyond thirteen, but I did my best, while probably not meaning well. And I moved out in the way that people used to when children could afford to leave their parents and, fuck me, I was an accountant and that’s a profession and a success story and very appropriate for the daughter of other upwardly inclined people. My parents had bettered themselves, as they say. They did it at a time when that implied you were resourceful, not that you were bad: Mum a secretary in a university geography department and Dad a chemist, in the sense of his owning and running a chemist’s shop. (Maggie was another kind of chemist, I know.) And they didn’t have anything handed to them. The post-war world opened up for them, sure, and showed them possibilities, but they both had to fight themselves free of jobs on production lines, or some other doomed way to earn a living, a place in manufacturing. They didn’t have the hand skills or the mindsset to thrive in a trade — so they went to work clean and came back that way. No industrial illness.
Dad’s shop got squeezed out, eventually, when the street around him died, but he was eager for retirement by then — would have enjoyed it, too, if Mum hadn’t died.
Dad wasn’t why I got the interest in chemicals — and I never involved him or the pharmacy. I didn’t sink that low.
Be honest — I would have tried, but his security was too tight.
After a while, just drinking is too hard — you don’t have the stamina to match your pace of need. So you intervene with other substances. It’s quite logical. It’s not like you’re a junkie. It’s only inadvertent when you find yourself sharing the junkie world, which isn’t nice, isn’t friendly, doesn’t run at a comfortable speed for drunks.
With Mum and Dad gone — when they went … died, that’s the word — when one died and broke the other’s heart … when the other one was murdered by sadness … After that, I slid. Or else, I slid faster. I slid right out of my profession and out of my own home to deal with my debts and into theirs and thank Christ by then I was too disorganised to sell it, liquidate it, liquefy it — probably saw the writing being pissed up the wall.
So there I was defiling everything they’d left me and the air made of poisoned gravy and everything I looked at being wrong … I was wrong.
On that 28th of March, she had reached roughly lunchtime and the curtains were closed because that was how the curtains stayed and nothing was especially remarkable about the terribleness of the day. Nevertheless, she’d hit the point when her existence had become no longer possible.
Her life as she was running it — and life was all about running as fast as she could — that life never had been possible, but now it was, for the first time, truly, really fucking clear that she had no future.
There was this moment.
A golden moment.
Like a door that swings open, some remarkable door and it gapes, pauses, examines you and wants you to give a look back and see and see and see — that’s all you need do — you see how everything is golden, and then the moment’s hingeing round and it’ll shut and you’re going to be caught on the wrong side and you know that you either have to run — when you’re good at running — and you’ll get through now, get out to something new, or else you never will. That’s that.
You don’t know where getting out would take you, or what it might involve.
You do know that your only other choice is dying and that dying might be bad.
Real dying — not the daydreams — doing that might be hard.