Back home. Have been surprisingly productive, editing the novel manuscript and my father’s Nietzche commentary. The first is awful beyond words, and painstakingly slow, every highlighted terrible phrase and accompanying suggestion a frustrating drop of tiny tiny improvement in a sea of bad words badly put together. And the second is mostly over my head, but pleasantly mechanical, the act of reading but not absorbing. Read Heart of Darkness for the dissertation, underlining things so exuberantly that Len, his giant headphones swamping his small head made all the smaller by his tiny haircut, looked over in a concerned sort of way.
He asked suddenly whether it was bad that he’d told his French teacher to ‘visite ma tante’. Because, he said proudly, he sent me out. He did the washing up standing with his legs comically splayed, his tiptoes avoiding the little flood he swept over the stainless steal edge of the sink every time he dropped in a new plate. He closed his eyes with distaste as he scrubbed at the pasta burnt to the bottom of the pan. ‘I can’t believe,’ he said, ‘I once said I wanted to be a girl so I could do the washing up.’ And have long hair, he said when he was five, to keep his ears warm. I’m sure he has forgotten too that his favourite colours were once pink and purple, that he cried at a labrador with a stick, that he made a habit out of falling out of bed, that he wore mine and Chrissie’s hand-me-down cardigans to school.
The boy is floating miserably about London, at a loose end with no money and the prospect of next term already looming threateningly. No-one likes this dispersal of people to various corners of the country, and being home the walls press in, especially if the lodger’s round, forbidding wife materialises demanding pernot and lemonade and speaking down her nose. And sleeping in till 2pm is the worst feeling, knowing in an hour it will be dark and the day over again.
But here things are surprisingly peaceful and the walls not too close, especially with everyone but me and my father going away to Germany next week. We will put up the Christmas tree and go to Wales for a few days, and I will visit J in Liverpool, not a nightime visit this time, and no sleeping under kitchen tables, but a day trip, with coffee and catch-up and maybe the Tate and shopping. I haven’t seen her since summer, before I went to India, and she stood on my doorstep with the deceiving angel-faced A, who made an unexpected return. She will talk just as much as ever, and she will be a little thinner, her hair a little crazier.
