I Am, I Am, I Am: Seventeen Brushes with Death

by Maggie O'Farrell

I did try. I remember trying. I remember thinking that I mustn’t get riled, I mustn’t lose my temper, that I must above all stay in control. I would look at myself in the mirror and arrange my features into a calm smile and say the word good-natured to myself. I must have read it in a book. This was what I wanted to be, what I knew I ought to be. This was what nice children were: good-natured. But then I’d be told to wear a certain jumper, which was an offensive mustard colour, the neckline of which scratched and itched at my skin in an unbearable fashion and it would be boiled potatoes again for tea, and how I loathed their floury edges and their solid starchy interiors. A glass of milk would be waiting at my place-setting and I dreaded its drinking, the sinister silky coating of it as it passed down my gullet, the jaundiced swirls of cream on its surface, the pearlescent bubbles at the rim. I would be thinking all these things and then something minor, something innocuous, would happen—a comment or a look from my sister, a foot jostling against mine as I was trying to read, a page of maths homework that seemed endless and impenetrable and yawning—and there I would go. A breaking sensation somewhere in my chest, a flood of heat to the head, a sudden screech, perhaps a stamped foot. Control lost. A nature not good at all.