None of us liked our father, except Serena, who was a little flirt from an early age. I don’t think even my mother liked him — of course she said she ‘loved’ him, but that was only because you’re supposed to when you marry someone and sleep with them. He had a fused knee from some childhood accident and always sat with his leg sticking out in front of him. He wasn’t a bad man. But he sat and looked at us shouting and laughing and fighting, as though we were all an awful bore.
Or maybe I liked him then, but I don’t like him since — because after Serena he got a job managing a pub and he started sleeping over the shop. So that’s another one, now, who never comes home.
For three weeks the bedroom was thick with the smell of Chanel, we did not speak, and Serena did not eat. She fainted during her maths exam and had to be carried out, with a big crowd of people fanning her on the corridor floor. All of June she spent in the bathroom squeezing her spots, or she sat downstairs and did nothing and wouldn’t say what she wanted to do next. And then, on the fourteenth of July, she went out and did not come home.
We waited for ninety-one days. On Saturday the thirteenth of September there was the sound of a key in the door and a child walked in — a sort of death-child. She was six and a half stone. Behind her was a guy carrying a suitcase. He said his name was Brian. He looked like he didn’t know what to do.
We gave him a cup of tea, while Serena sat in a corner of the kitchen, glaring. As far as we could gather, she just turned up on his doorstep, and stayed. He was a nice guy. I don’t know what he was doing with a girl just out of school, but then again, Serena always looked old for her age.
It is hard to remember what it was like in those days, but anorexia was just starting then, it was just getting trendy. We looked at her and thought she had cancer, we couldn’t believe this was some sort of diet. Then trying to make her eat, the cooing and cajoling, the desperate silences as Serena looked at her plate and picked up one green bean. They say anorexics are bright girls who try too hard and get tipped over the brink, but Serena sauntered up to the brink. She looked over her shoulder at the rest of us, as we stood and called to her, and then she turned and jumped. It is not too much to say that she enjoyed her death. I don’t think it is too much to say that.
But I’m stuck with Brian in the kitchen, and Serena’s eye sockets huge, and her eyes burning in the middle of them. Of course there were tears — my mother’s tears, my tears. Dad hit the door jamb and then leant his forehead against his clenched fist. Serena’s own tears, when they came, looked hot, as though she had very little liquid left. My mother put her to bed, so tenderly, like she was still a child, and we called the doctor while she slept. She woke to find his fingers on her pulse and she looked as though she was going to start yelling again, but it was too late for all that. He went out to the phone in the hall and booked her into hospital on the spot.
Ninety-one days. And believe me, we lived them one by one. We lived those days one at a time. We went through each hour of them, and we didn’t skip a single minute.
I met Brian from time to time in the hospital and we exchanged a few grim jokes about the ward; a row of little sticks in the beds, knitting, jigging, anything to burn the calories off. I opened the bathroom door one day and saw one of them in there, checking herself in the mirror. She was standing on a toilet seat with the cubicle door open and her nightdress pulled up to her face. You could see all her bones. There was a mile of space between her legs, and her pubis stuck out, a bulging hammock of flesh, terribly split. She pulled the nightdress down when she heard the door open, so by the time I looked from her reflection to the cubicle, she was decent again. It was just a flash, like flicking the remote to find a sitcom and getting a shot of famine in the middle, or of porn.
Serena lay in a bed near the end of the row, a still shape in the fidgeting ward. She read books, and turned the pages slowly. I brought her wine gums and LLC gums, because when she was little she used to steal them from my stash. Serena was the kind of girl whose pocket money was gone by Tuesday, and who spent the rest of the week in a whine. Now, it was a shower of things she might want — wine gums, Jaffa Cakes, an ice-cream birthday cake, highlights in her hair — all of them utterly stupid and small. We were indulging a five-year-old child, and nothing was enough, and everything was too late.
Then there was the therapy. We all had to go; walking out the front door in our good coats, as though we were off to Mass. We sat around on plastic chairs: my father with his leg stuck silently out; my mother in a welter of worry, scarcely listening or jumping at some silly thing and hanging on to it for dear life. Serena sat there, looking bored. I couldn’t help it, I lost my temper. I actually shouted at her. I said she should be ashamed of herself, the things she was putting Mam through. ‘Look at her,’ I said. ‘Look!’ I said I hoped she was pleased with herself now. She just sat there listening, and then she leaned forward to say, very deliberate, ‘If I got knocked down by a bus, you’d say I was just looking for attention.’ Which made me think about that car crash when she was small. Perhaps I should have mentioned it, but I didn’t. Brian, as official boyfriend, sat in the middle of this family row with his legs set wide and his big hands dangling into the gap. At the end of the session he guided her out of the room with his palm on the small of her back, as though he was her protector and not part of this at all.
It takes years for anorexics to die, that’s the other thing. During the first course of therapy they decided it would be better if she moved out of home. Was there another family, they said, where she could stay for a while? As if. As if my parents had a bunch of cheerful friends with spare rooms, who wanted to clean up after Serena, and hand over their bathroom while she locked herself in there for three hours at a time. We got her a bedsit in Rathmines, and I paid. It was either that or my mother going out to work part-time.
So Serena was living my life now. She had my flat and my freedom and my money. It sounds like an odd thing to say, but I didn’t begrudge it at the time. I just wanted it to be over. I mean, I just wanted my mother to smile.
Five months later she was six stone and one ounce, and back in the ward after collapsing in the street. I expected to see Brian, but she had got rid of him, she said. I went to pick up some things from the flat for her, and found that it was full of empty packets of paracetamol and used tissues that she didn’t even bother to throw away. They were stuck together in little lumps. I don’t know what was in them — cleanser? Maybe she spat into them, maybe her own spit was a nuisance to her. I had to buy a pair of rubber gloves to tackle them, and I never told anyone, not the therapist, not the doctor, not my mother. But I recognised something in her face now, as though we had a secret we were forced to share.
I went through her life in my head. Every Tuesday night before the goddamn therapy, I sifted the moments: a cat that died, my grandmother’s death, Santa Claus. I went through the caravan holidays and the time she cried halfway up Carantoo-hill and sat down and had to be carried to the top. I went through her first period and the time I bawled her out for stealing my mohair jumper. The time she used up a can of fly-spray in an afternoon slaughter and the way she played horsey on my father’s bocketty leg. It was all just bits. I really wanted it to add up to something, but it didn’t.