when I said I had to go back downstairs to do homework.
Still, even during the darkest of times, I never doubted her love for me.
On a good day the sunlight would be streaming in through the window and she might be reading magazines, or a book, sipping a glass of iced tea. On those days I could stay for hours, or at least until my father got home. We both always knew, half an hour before he was due to arrive (and thank God he was always punctual), we had to maintain the status quo: The curtains had to be drawn again, the TV turned off. My father would go in to kiss her, and the metaphorical shades over her eyes would be drawn again. I saw it happen over and over, and I knew, even then, that it wasn’t glandular fever, or mono, as she said, but something else.
And I knew, even then, that my father was, if not the cause, a major contributing factor.
My father could be fun, but it always felt like an act. However light-hearted he might have seemed, it was entirely eclipsed by his need to control everything around him.
There were times when I felt loved by him, but only when everything in his environment, including me, was absolutely perfect. When my hair had been blown out and rolled into soft curls, held back by a pretty ribbon; when I was in a ruffled, feminine dress, patent Mary Janes, and lace-trimmed ankle socks; when I was quiet, well behaved, respectful.
The other Cat: the wild, tearing-round-the-garden-with-her-friend, disheveled, ample-thighed, growing into surly adolescent Cat? That Cat he hated. Perhaps hated is too strong a word for it, but from the moment I turned thirteen, I don’t remember ever feeling loved by him.
He would look me up and down, with little attempt to hide the sneer. “You’re going out in that?” he’d say, and I, who had looked at my new Doc Martens in the mirror with such pride, such excitement that I could show them off to my friends, would feel instant shame. “You look ri-di-culous.” He’d shake his head to himself and mutter, as my cheeks would turn scarlet, and I would want a hole in the ground to open up so I could disappear.
“You’re never going to get a boyfriend,” he’d say, behind his paper. “Wearing those ri-di-culous clothes. Can I remind you that you are, in fact, a girl?” And I would want to claw his eyes out in rage.
I hated him for how he treated me, and I hated him for how he treated my mother. He did exactly the same to her, telling her what to wear, berating her for saying or doing the wrong thing, so she made herself disappear in the best way she could, by going to bed. For years.
And me? How did I deal with it? With my friend vodka. And a whole host of other new friends if vodka wasn’t available. There was gin, with whom I had a brief but intense relationship while I was at university. Gin and tonics seemed the height of sophistication, but consuming the best part of an entire bottle of gin on its own was not. Even now, at twenty-nine, I can’t touch gin. The very smell of it makes me think of the hours and hours of deadly bedspins, the hours and hours of throwing up the next day. If not gin, there were many, many happy times with tequila, including, yes, the infamous worm on a beach in Mykonos one summer.
There was always wine, and beer, although somehow beer didn’t seem to count. My tipple of choice was hard: I would always choose a bottle of Jack over a bottle of champagne.
My father couldn’t stand my drinking. And I couldn’t stand him, so in that sense I suppose we were compatible. Once I finished university and moved up to London to do a journalism internship, which led to this job on the women’s desk at the Daily Gazette, I barely saw him.
My mother was a cook when I was very tiny, before my father had worn her down. She filled my toddler years with baked treats that reminded her of home: apple pies; muffins, and not the English kind, the American, cakey kind; chocolate chip cookies, which, to my friends who were being raised on chocolate Bourbons, Jammy Dodgers, and Garibaldi biscuits, seemed the height of glamor.
During the dark years, if she cooked, which wasn’t often, it was bland