Chapter 1 - Home
The house looks smaller.
I’ve been told this would happen, that places shrink when you leave them, that memory inflates everything to a scale that reality can’t sustain. I read about it in my first year. Something about the hippocampus, and the way emotional significance distorts spatial encoding. I found it interesting then, in the abstract, the way I find most things interesting in the abstract.
Standing on the pavement outside 14 Crestfield Road with a duffel bag digging into my shoulder and a suitcase that lost a wheel somewhere on the train, I find it considerably less interesting.
I stand there for a moment longer than necessary. A neighbour’s cat regards me from a garden wall with the particular brand of contempt that only cats and ex-boyfriends can sustain indefinitely.
“I know,” I say, not that the cat cares.
I hear my mother before I see her. That’s always how it’s been. Faith Sullivan is not a woman who enters a room so much as she announces herself to it. A habit of noise and warmth and movement that embarrassed me as a child and now, at nineteen, makes something in my chest pull tight and complicated.
“Briar? Briar. I heard the gate... oh, you look thin, come here.”
And then I’m being hugged with the ferocity my mother reserves for reunions and spiders, which tells me that to her, both are equally significant events. I drop my bag and hug back, breathing in the familiar scent of her. Lavender and something baked and underneath it all just Mum, which is apparently its own sensory category that no amount of distance can erode.
“I’m not thin,” I say into her shoulder.
“You’re thin. You students, you all think you’re fine, and you’re all thin. I’ve made a pie.”
“What kind?”
“Chicken. I think.” She pauses. “It’s got pastry.”
I pull back to look at her. Faith Sullivan at fifty-three is a woman who looks like someone took all the best parts of warmth and arranged them into a person. Laugh lines that have earned their place, with grey threading through dark hair that she refuses to dye on principle. Her eyes are the same shade of brown as mine, but hers currently hold something that is almost definitely the aftermath of a mild crisis.
“The pie,” I say carefully. “When did you start it?”
“This morning.” A beat. “Or yesterday. The pastry was in the fridge, and I thought,” She waves a hand. “It’s fine. It’ll be fine. Come in, come in, you’re letting the cold in.”
I pick up my bag and follow her inside.
The pie is on the counter. It looks, technically, like a pie. I choose to focus on the positive.
The thing no one tells you about early-stage dementia is that it isn’t constant. It isn’t a cliff edge. It’s more like a tide. It goes out, and for whole stretches of time, my mother is entirely, completely, maddeningly herself. Sharp and funny and warm, and the illness is just a rumour, something that belongs to other people’s families and not to this kitchen with its slightly alarming pie and its cat calendar three months out of date.
And then the tide comes back in.
I spent the train journey rehearsing detachment. Observe, don’t absorb, my second-year lecturer said about clinical practice, with the breezy confidence of someone who has presumably never had to apply the principle to their own mother. I took very neat notes. I underlined observe, don’t absorb twice.
I am currently watching Faith attempt to remember whether she added salt to the pie and feeling absolutely nothing like a second-year psychology student and entirely like someone’s daughter.
“Sit down,” my mother says, pointing at me as though I’ve suggested otherwise. “You’ve been on a train for four hours. Sit.”
I sit.
“Tea?”
“Yes, please.”
“Don’t watch me make it, you make a face.”
“I don’t make a face.”
“You make a face like this,” she produces an expression of exquisite suffering that is, I have to privately concede, not entirely inaccurate. “Every time I do anything in this kitchen. I know how to make tea, Briar. I’ve been making tea since before you existed. The tea is fine.”
“I know the tea is fine.”
“Then look away."
I look away, fighting a small smile despite myself. I look at the kitchen instead . The cat calendar thinks it's still March, apparently a particularly good month for Siamese cats. The stack of unopened post I’ll need to sort through, the pill organiser on the counter that I bought and my mother called it unnecessarily dramatic. It is not entirely full in the way it should be. I file this away for later, in the part of my brain that has become, without my permission, a running administrative document.
The tea lands in front of me and I wrap my hands around the mug and take a sip.
It is, objectively, excellent tea.
I say nothing.
“Well?” my mother says.
“It’s good.”
Faith sits down across from me with the satisfied expression of someone who has proven a point. She has, in fact, proven several points.
“I’m glad you’re home,” she says, plainly, without performance, and it causes the complicated chest thing again.
“I know,” I say. “Me too.”
This is not even a lie. I’m good at finding the true thing inside the complicated thing. It is, according to my personal hierarchy of coping mechanisms, significantly more efficient than crying on trains, which I also did, but only for the first forty minutes and entirely in a dignified fashion.
Later, I unpack.
My old bedroom has been preserved in the way that parents preserve rooms. Not as a museum exactly, more as an optimistic placeholder. She’ll be back eventually, translated into unchanged furniture and a bookshelf my mother has thoughtfully added to with paperbacks from charity shops, none of which I requested and several of which are deeply questionable choices.
I know, in the same way you know things you’d rather not that he will be here. This town, this university, this particular pocket of the world that has always been both home and the place I needed to leave. He stayed when I left. Of course he did. Boys like Knox Harlow don’t leave places where they’re gods. Why would you?
I didn’t let myself think about it too directly on the train. I thought about it the way you think about a large and unpleasant piece of admin. Acknowledgement without engagement. He will be there. That is a fact. The fact does not require a reaction.
My psychology degree is, proving most useful as a mechanism for lying to myself with technical precision.
I look out the window. The town spreads below me, familiar and insufficient, lit in the flat grey of the late afternoon. I press my forehead briefly against the cold glass.
“Right,” I say, to no one.
Then I go back downstairs to eat a pie of uncertain provenance and uncertain contents, made by a woman who loves me absolutely, and let that be enough for tonight.
It will be fine.
I’m good at fine. I’ve had a few years of practice, after all, and I’m considerably better at it than I was at seven years old when fine was a word I used like a shield that kept shattering. I rebuilt it and reinforced it. I am, at this point, essentially a structural engineer of fine.
Knox Harlow is a problem. He is not the first problem I’ve had. He is not the worst thing I’ve survived.
My mother calls up the stairs that the pie is ready and that she thinks she might have left something out, possibly egg, and is that a problem?
I put Knox Harlow away in the administrative document and go to eat a probably-eggless pie and decide that this, all of this, is entirely manageable.
All whilst being completely cognizant of the fact that I am lying to myself.
