The first time that she knew her mind was unfixably wrong was on a winter Sunday afternoon when she was six, or seven. She had been ill for as long as she could remember, but because she was so young she had not yet realised that she would not get better, only worse. That Sunday her father and her mother had taken her in the car for a drive by the sea. She had said she would not go and her father had laughed and said he knew she only wanted to stay by herself in the house so she could drink whisky and smoke cigarettes. His teasing was a kind of violence. He was in one of his smiling rages because it was Sunday and there would be no theatre performance that night and he would have to stay at home and be bored. They travelled up the coast road, taking the scenic route, as her father sourly said. He did not like to drive and so her mother drove. Along the way they stopped at places but did not get out of the car. In the front her parents sat gazing bleakly out across the sea to the islands lying humped in a grey, salt mist, while in the back she knelt on the seat and looked through the rear window at the cars going past on the road. In many of the cars there were children like her, morose, pale faces floating in the windows, glowering at her. In the silence at her back she could feel the deepening desperation of the adults. Her mother smoked without cease, lighting each new cigarette from the stub of the old one. Open the window, for God's sake, her father said. When they came to the end of the coast road her mother turned the car around and her father muttered something and the argument began. They argued in an undertone so that she should not hear; the vehemence with which they fought was all the more awful for being muffled. The short day was ending, and the undersides of the low clouds in the windscreen were tinged a shade of furnace pink. See, her father said to her in a false voice, his stage voice, breaking off for a moment from the argument and pointing, it is the colour of a coke fire! And he laughed his laugh. She turned her eyes from the louring sky and looked out to the left at the sea that came up to the grassy edge of the road. Long, undulant waves were washing slowly in, wave upon thick wave, unbreaking wrinkles, mud-coloured. She felt her flesh shrink, as a snail would shrink from being touched. A vast weight, the weight of the world itself, was pressing against her, so that she could not breathe. It was as if something frightful had happened and this was its aftermath, this scorched sky, these turbid, relentless waves, the savage murmuring in the front seat. And she was alone; that, above all. The hawser had fallen away, the prow had turned toward the open sea, and she knew that now she would never come back. Her father, sensing her distress, perhaps, touched a fingertip to her mother's shoulder to silence her and turned around in his seat and smiled frowningly and said her name, as if he were not sure that it was still she who was sitting there, his little girl so changed in an instant. That was the first time she had smelled the almond smell. Then the car was stopped at the side of the road with one wheel mounted on the verge and the doors open, and she was slumped sideways on the seat with her head leaning out and the air cool on her brow and warm stuff bubbling between her lips, and her father was kneeling before her peering anxiously into her face, asking her something. Behind him the night, a bank of brownish darkness, was coming in across the sea, and high up there were the tiny lights of an aeroplane, now ruby, now emerald. Suddenly an enormous seagull flashed past, very close, falling diagonally through the brumous air on stiff, extended wings, and for a second she thought its icy eye had fixed on her, in warning.
Her father. She saw him often when he was not there, a ghost of the living man. For instance while Vander was busy goughing and grunting at her that second time, mouth fixed wetly like a sea creature to her shoulder, Daddy had opened the door of the room and walked in, speaking. He was barefoot, and was wearing an old pair of faded blue baggy trousers of the kind that he always wore when he was on holiday. He was young, far younger than she could ever have known him, and sun-tanned, and smiling in that fierce way, showing his fine, sharp teeth, that he always did when he could not find sufficient reason to be angry. His chest was bare, and he had a white hand-towel draped around his neck. He had been shaving, there still remained a moustache and goatee of lather that gave him the look, in negative, as it were, of a dashing Elizabethan villain of the kind he so often played. He was talking to someone in a farther room, her mother, she supposed, telling her something, a joke, or a story that he had just remembered, sketching abstract diagrams on the air with the razor as he spoke, in that way that he had, always animated, always dominating, cutting and carving and moulding the world. The razor was tiny, she noticed; he must have forgotten his own and borrowed this one from her mother. Perhaps it was the razor he was talking about, perhaps it had reminded him of something that had happened on one of his tours abroad; it amused him to tell her mother of his adventures, teasing her, trying to make her jealous with talk of eager actresses and stage-door propositions. The light behind him was a glare of azure and gold, and there was a slash of purple shadow there, and a parrot-green something, a palm leaf, perhaps, that kept moving to and fro in an odd, jerking, agitated way. What caught all her attention, though, was the bead of blood, the size of a ladybird, on his lip, where he must have cut himself with the razor, without noticing. She had always been fascinated by her father's mouth; she liked to watch it moving while he spoke, liked to be kissed by it, those dry, warm lips, the upper one, where the blood was now, shaped exactly like the stylised seabirds she used to draw in her picture book as a child. She liked to feel the prickle of tiny bristles on his chin, liked to smell his laughing breath. He had stopped speaking now, and waited, listening, with a slack smile, his head lifted at an angle and his eyes bright, those lips a little parted, the bleb of blood seeping pinkly into the soap moustache. When no response came to the story or the joke he had been telling, because her mother, if it was her mother, had stopped listening, or had fallen asleep, the light went out slowly in his face, and the smile turned to a vacant frown, and, feeling the smart at last, he dabbed a finger to his lip, and looked at the blood and seemed puzzled, as if he did not know what it was, or how it had come to be there, on his finger, on his lip.
Body: that was a word she did not like, the sound of it, the bubbled b, the d's soft thud, the nasal, whining y.Vander at the end had spoken something in her ear, a hoarse grunt, ugly and urgent. He could break her in his arms, crush the life out of her. She supposed she should be afraid of him. He had sucked at her breast like a child, his eyes closed and his face almost smiling.
She shivered in her thin dress; the night was turning chill at last. So silent, all around, as if the entire building were submerged in the dark deeps of a silent sea. She imagined the other people staying here, dozens of them, hundreds, maybe, all laid out in their beds like so many warm corpses, asleep, dreaming, or tossing and muttering, perhaps, or perhaps sleepless, like her, as some of them must be, surely. She pictured the couples amorously clasped in each other's arms, or lying at opposite edges of the bed, rigid with wordless fury, as so often she had seen her parents, after another of their fights. There might be someone about to die at this very moment, or someone giving birth, it was not impossible, nothing is impossible. All over the world at any instant people are dying or being born, crying out in passion or in pain. Terrifying to think of, terrifying. When she was a child she would lie awake listening to the life of the house around her winding down. Her father would come in late, after a performance, she would hear him below in the kitchen rattling the crockery, or trawling across the radio stations, the volume turned loud, making a great din, for a silent house worried him, or so he said. She would track him in her mind as he prowled from room to room, switching on all the lights, pouring himself a drink, listening to a snatch of music and abruptly turning it off: she could never hear the screech of a needle across a vinyl record without thinking of her father. Or he would talk out loud to himself, or to a phantom audience, practising dialogue, trying it at different speeds and different rhythms, or, if the play was bad, making fun of the lines, declaiming them in a booming bass voice that made her grin into the dark even though she could not make out the words, only their lugubrious cadences. He would sing, too, tunelessly; he knew only silly things, songs from when he was young, or jingles from the radio. Sometimes her mother, annoyed to be woken, or perhaps feeling sorry for him, would get out of bed and go down in her night-gown and sit with him, but never for long. For all that he said about hating silence and solitude, secretly he preferred to be alone. "Oh, Cass Cass Cassy, I'm a solitary boy," he would croon, striking a tragic pose with hands clutched to his heart. Always, last thing, he would open her door an inch or two and look in, and always she would pretend to be asleep, she was not sure why. At other times she liked to have his company, especially after she had suffered a seizure, when they would sit together, at the kitchen table, or in front of the television set with the sound turned down, not saying anything, just being together. But there were times too when she would feel shy of him, or it would be more than shyness, it would be almost revulsion, and more even than that, something for which there was no word. When he had gone on to his and her mother's room and was getting into bed she would hear the bedsprings creak, and the funny, fluting sigh he always heaved; then there would be an interval, and then she would feel a change in the atmosphere, a sort of loosening, or lapsing, that signified his consciousness slipping out of gear, and she would be left to set out on her journey into the night alone.