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But I liked him. That was it. I liked him. I felt it in my muscles and my skin. I lost words around him. I liked the way he looked and spoke, the shape and sound of him.
I knew only that if we told her it would get worse. Adults didn’t understand. Adults had forgotten what it meant to be really afraid.
The alcohol beat a second, greater certainty into me; I could feel it sloshing in my chest, making my fingers clumsy.
I could feel the next day hanging in the overlit aisles, beside the deodorant and shampoo bottles.
Pretending to be someone else is like wearing an outfit that does not quite fit, the sleeves leaving red marks around the arms, the waistband sagging.
She has always known that houses are bodies and that her body is a house in more ways than most. She housed those beautiful daughters, didn’t she, and she has housed depression all through her life like a smaller, weightier child, and she housed excitement and love and despair and in the Settle House she houses an unsettling worry that she finds difficult to shake, an exhaustion that smothers the days out of her.
Love was not enough in the end, not that kind of love.
The Settle House is load bearing. Here is what it bears: Mum’s endless sadness, September’s fitful wrath, my quiet failure to ever do quite what anyone needs me to do, the seasons, the death of small animals in the scrublands around it, every word that we say in love or anger to one another.
His body is as distracting as a flashing road sign and I can’t remember what things people are supposed to say to one another.
In the years when the girls were young she had wanted to write about what it was like to house things inside her, how it was possible to be both skin and flesh and also mortar and plaster. She pitied the Settle House and the house in Oxford then, understood better what it felt like to be filled up with noise and pain, understood why the walls sometimes seemed to crumple in on themselves. After she’d given birth she felt emptied out, like a beloved house closed up for the winter.
For nearly seventeen years two threads had emerged from her body and gone out into the world, connecting her to them. It did not feel, now, as if one of the threads was cut, only that it went to a place where she could not follow.
My sister is a black hole my sister is a falling tree my sister is the sea.
One day I do not think of September for ten minutes. One day I think again about what it would be like if September were still alive, and I do not know which is worse.
If brains are houses with many rooms then I live in the basement. It is dark and quiet. Sometimes there is the noise of movement overhead, as of water passing through pipes or something slowly digested. At times there is a bright light and the place I live in is revealed. All corners and under-stair compartments, small gaps. The walls are wet to the touch. I have grown small to fit, elongated like the adders that breed in the long grass by the beach.
