Walk to the tube station with A. He carries my large blue bag, which I later leave on the train, switches it, uncomfortably, from hand to hand, juggling heavy brainfood and too-small clothes between left and right. He says into my neck on the tube, I hate goodbyes, and I almost leave my scarf behind. The woman next to me reads How To Be A Mother, and a little down the carriage someone’s grandfather eats his lunch from a tin lunchbox, an apple and two sandwiches. A says, I bet he’s eaten his lunch from that tin since he was ten years old. It smells of ham and mustard. I have bad bad memories of ham and mustard sandwiches, of finding unchewable lumps of gristle even in deceptively harmless looking teddy bear ham, of the too-thickly spread butter my father sprinkled with salt, of the ill-disguised force-feeding policy of my primary school. Lunchbox checks and secretly dropping squishy tinfoiled bundles of bread into toilet bins with a fast beating heart. Whistling. The whistling gave me away, one time.

 

See you in a min, A says, I drop my bag, my scarf drags along the tiles of Euston station’s platform eleven. Three weeks, I remind him. He disappears and I run. Meanwhile. At home my washing has been washed and dried and folded, stacked into small piles. My father uses my room as an office. His baby, his book, he thinks, is coming along. It is wonderful, he says, surrounded by crinkled bits of paper, how far away everything is. On a yellow post-it note it says BOT in messy black marker, birth of tragedy. On another, in red, NICE, which is a mystery.

 

L invites girls round. Unashamedly they wander through the house in tight tight jeans and the wrong shades of foundation. Ocassionally they say things. Most of the time they are silent in the face of adversity, which is L’s family, and giggle a lot when they think we are not listening. What puzzles me is why, when L eats as he is ordered to and must do before he disappears until night time, expending his energy nobody knows how, the girls hover over his shoulder and watch. They never sit at the table, and they never eat.