Chapter Sixteen: Borrowed Sunlight
That evening, after returning from my father’s relatives, something inside me ruptured. Plates shattered across the kitchen tiles, my voice broke ragged, my hands moved with a feral precision I barely recognised. I was furious, not just about the drinking, though her insistence that everyone did it was part of it, but about the entire ecosystem of our house, a place where chaos had been woven in as thoroughly as the upholstery. By the end, I had a black eye, though I cannot recall exactly how; shame followed like a tide - slow, insistent - a weather system I was too naïve to predict. Looking back, I see the irony: the fury I raged against had already begun to apprentice itself to the very patterns I despised. Adults often confuse habit for virtue, order for safety. Children know better: they sense the rot beneath polished surfaces, even if they lack the words to describe it.
The next morning, I moved through the motions as if rehearsing a script written for someone else. Dressing, commuting to community college, attending my resits, all performed with a zombie-like detachment. In our house, shell shock was not an event; it was the baseline. It felt like living on a ship shrouded in fog, rocking with each outburst, everyone walking as if the floor might tilt.
Mum must have spoken afterwards - I imagine her shaking her head, bewildered and out of her depth. She arranged for me to see a counsellor, a name passed along through a friend. His office was meticulously ordered: shelves lined with books, a teddy perched like a small show of reassurance. His voice was calm, but the calm carried the weight of certainty rather than curiosity. He told me Mum needed a friend, that she was weak, alone. Later, she relayed his verdict on me: immature, needy. My words, supposedly private, returned to me through her voice, reshaped, stripped of context. That was the pattern: help, even care, was recycled into the family economy.
He warned I was so overwhelmed I might end up in a psychiatric hospital, softened with the consolation of the teddy I could take in with me, as if fur could make the prophecy better. At the time, I felt grateful. What startles me now isn’t the warning but the certainty - with which he charted a future, plotted collapses like coordinates on a map. He saw symptoms but not soil. He named me, but not the house I came from. Still, even ineffectual kindness leaves its trace. The smallest act of noticing can create a clearing where something else might breathe.
That space was where my uncle stepped in. Mum’s half-brother, sustained by appearances, trained in the careful maintenance of order. He owed us nothing; it was only Grandma’s gravity that kept him orbiting us at all. After Mum married Stuart, wealth narrowed the distance, creating a window through which he could better view our chaos without entering it. I imagine him weighing it all, the way people like him do: stability as a kind of currency, disorder as a debt no one admits aloud.
Italy was the form his intervention took. Rows of poplar trees, vineyards planted out into straight lines, meals arriving on time. I smoked my cigarettes, drank his wine. My uncle, mostly silent, once remarked that as a child I’d been slow to speak. Casual, and yet it landed differently: a subtle assertion of attentiveness, a quiet hint that I was different. His words were like that: minor at the time, yet faintly alive still.
Nevertheless, I drifted through that holiday like a ghost. I took, I waited, I watched. The order was beautiful, temporary, beyond my reach. I mistook it for permanence; I didn’t yet know that most scaffolds lent by others are exactly that - lent. Kindness is sunlight on a terrace: it warms, but you cannot carry it home.
Returning was brutal. I remembered the heavy feeling in the kitchen. Mum’s eyes blurred behind the wine. Italy had been a glimpse, a lesson in what was possible if you only put your mind to being ordered and disciplined, and what would not be mine.
And perhaps that is the lesson that has stayed with me longest: stability and kindness are often borrowed, not bestowed. Yet a brief glimpse teaches you to recognise the shape of it.