The High House

She didn’t have the habit that the rest of us were learning of having our minds in two places at once, of seeing two futures – that ordinary one of summer holidays and new school terms, of Christmases and birthdays and bank accounts in an endless, uneventful round, and the other one, the long and empty one we spoke about in hypotheticals, or didn’t speak about at all.

It is so hard to remember, now, what it felt like to live in that space between two futures, fitting our whole lives into the gap between fear and certainty – but I think that perhaps it was most like those dreams in which one struggles to wake but can’t, so that over and over again one slips back against the mattress, lets the duvet fall and shuts one’s eyes. There is a kind of organic mercy, grown deep inside us, which makes it so much easier to care about small, close things, else how could we live? As I grew up, crisis slid from distant threat to imminent probability and we tuned it out like static, we adjusted to each emergent normality and we did what we had always done – the commutes and holidays, the Friday big shops, day trips to the countryside, afternoons in the park. We did these things not out of ignorance, nor through thoughtlessness, but only because there seemed nothing else to do – and we did them as well because they were a kind of fine-grained incantation, made in flesh and time. The unexalted, tedious familiarity of our daily lives would keep us safe, we thought, and even Francesca, who saw it all so clearly – even she who would not let herself be gulled by hope – stood by the open fridge at five o’clock in the afternoon and swore because there was nothing to give the baby for his tea.

-Sometimes,
the therapist said, breaking the long silence in the room,
-children are a kind of weathervane. They pick up on the currents in family life and... act them out.
-Voice them,
Francesca said, as if explaining to me, eyebrows raised.
-Or not.
The therapist smiled, a little thinly, a pale man in a pale sweater with black, square-framed glasses balanced halfway down his snub nose. He looked at me.
-Would you say you were an anxious family?
Afterwards, we went out for lunch. While we waited for our order, Pauly sat on my lap, colouring with crayons on some sheets of paper which Francesca had brought from home. I picked one of his drawings up and turned it over. An Analysis of Recent Climate Trends and the Increased Likelihood of Devastating Weather Events, I read. Francesca frowned.
-What they don't seem to understand,
She said,
-Is that anxiety is a perfectly reasonable response to what we are living through.
Pauly was drawing people, moon faces with stick bodies underneath, giant feet on the end of dangling legs. Father said,
-But Paul is only a child, and if he's picking up on your - our fears -
He tried again.
-We have to at least try to believe that he will have the chance to live an ordinary life.
Francesca said,
-We have to do no such thing.
And for a moment there was a gap in her fury, and she looked neither fierce nor righteous but only rather sad - as though she could already see how far she had failed, and wished only that the end would come, and let us all out.

After that, I watched an earthquake, and then it was an outbreak of cholera, a flood, a drought. Each time, people gave money, for a while, and then there was something else, and the last thing was forgotten by all except those who, presumably, still lived inside of it. To watch became a hobby or a habit, and I thought I was better for it, because at least I knew what was going on - but what difference did my knowledge make? Outside, in the garden, things went on. The owls hooted. A fox barked. In the morning, I ate my porridge and got dressed for school. We were no better than anyone else, Grandy and I. We noticed the changes, but we dismissed them, or said that they were only part of the inevitable, because doesn't the world always change, one way or another?

We are not self-sufficient. There is no such thing. We rely on the stores we have left in the barn. We rely on the chickens, but the flock is shrinking. We rely on the wheat, but one bad year and we will have none left to sow as seed. We rely on the tide pool and the generator which we cannot fix if it breaks. We rely on the high house, on its fabric, on its shelter and protection, but these things will not last forever. We rely on one another. I try not to be afraid, but I am.