Home: The Story of Everyone Who Ever Lived in Our House. Julie Myerson

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‘I didn’t think I’d float’

      She asks me if they ever forced me in. I tell her 1 don’t think so, they were very patient.

      ‘I think it was me. I was very difficult,’ I tell her, and I laugh then because I remember other things.

      ‘What?’

      I explain to her how, in the same bungalow, my father had a workshop full of chemicals to do with his work (he had a small, two-man plastics factory) and that he once put some polystyrene in a beaker and let it set. Later I tiptoed into his workshop and secretly licked it because it looked exactly like the froth on beer. He then mentioned to me that it was poisonous and I didn’t dare tell him I’d licked it, but I was convinced I was going to die.

      ‘What did you do?’ Jo asks me.

      ‘I went and sat in the garden with my dog and waited to die.’

      After the session, I drive Chloë to tennis practice and we discuss the way fear can affect your body.

      ‘I used to be very scared of the shower,’ she tells me, ‘but I don’t give it any thought now.’

      ‘Hey, I remember that. You used to scream and scream.’

      She giggles at the memory.

      ‘And then one day you just didn’t.’

      ‘Mmm, I suppose.’

      ‘But do you feel we helped you? Or did we make it worse? Did we used to get cross with you?’

      ‘I can’t remember,’ she admits happily.

      I still remember every moment of the indoor swimming pool. The sunshine wavering over the bright blue water and making juddery patterns on the turquoise tiles. The ominous odour of chlorine, the white ledge you clung to, the decorative dried starfish on the wall – an emblem of terror for years afterwards.

      I turn right down Nightingale Lane and ask Chloë how she got over it, the fear of the shower. Does she remember?

      ‘I suppose I just realized it wasn’t very rational,’ she says, inspecting a scab on her knee.

      Doreen Webley is a couple of years younger than me, gentle, quiet, neatly dressed in white shirt and long denim skirt. She comes through the hall and says she doesn’t remember it being so narrow. I apologize for all the boxes piled by the door.

      ‘It might be that or it might just be that I’ve got that bit wider,’ she laughs.

      We sit and drink tea at the kitchen table. She talks quietly, haltingly, but she offers information without my having to ask questions. I’m impressed by her directness. In the end I put my pencil down and just listen.

      ‘I came in the summer of seventy-eight. I was sixteen. I didn’t know my Mum at all – she’d left me in Jamaica when I was two and I hadn’t seen her since. I’d been pushed from relation to relation over there, but the aunt I was living with got fed up with me and decided it was time my Mum had me back. So I was sent over here. I’d been in the middle of O levels in Jamaica so I had to try and find somewhere to carry on. My Mum couldn’t get me into school anywhere so I enrolled at Vauxhall College and managed to get a few passes.’

      I ask her what her Mum was like to live with and she gazes down at her tea. ‘To be honest, we didn’t have a very good relationship. I think she resented me being here.’

      ‘And your Dad?’

      ‘He lived nearby. But I didn’t meet him at all till I was eighteen. He was OK, his house was a bit more relaxed. I went round there a bit but my Mum got jealous if I went too much.’

      ‘But she didn’t really want you here?’

      Doreen shakes her head.

      ‘To be honest, my memories of this house weren’t all that happy. I was on my own a lot. I had a lot of chores to do. My Mum used to shout at me if I didn’t get them done quick enough. She took in sewing and she spent all her time here in this kitchen we’re sitting in now. There was a window over there and she’d sit in a chair and sew. She was really just biding her time, I suppose, waiting – to sell the house and go СКАЧАТЬ