Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal?

without a sixth form. That was part of the Labour government's education policy. I was able to go on to a techanical college to take my A levels, and with some grumbling Mrs Winterson had agreed, providing I worked on the markets in the evenings and on Saturday to bring some money into the house.
    I was glad to get out of the school and make a fresh start. Nobody thought I would come to much. The burning place inside me seemed like anger and trouble to them. They didn't know how many books I had read or what I was writing up in the hills on long days alone. On the top of the hill looking out over the town I wanted to see further than anybody had seen. That wasn't arrogance; it was desire. I was all desire, desire for life.
    And I was lonely.
    Mrs Winterson had succeeded there; her own loneliness, impossible to breach, had begun to wall us all in.
    It was summer and it was time for the annual holiday in Blackpool.
    This holiday consisted of a coach ride to the famous seaside town and a week in a backstreet boarding house – we couldn't afford a sea view. My mother sat in a deckchair most of the day reading sensationalist literature about Hell, and my father walked about. He loved walking.
    In the evenings we all went gambling on the slot machines. This was not deemed to be gambling proper. If we won, we got fish and chips.
    When I was a child I was happy with all of this and I think they were happy too, in that brief, carefree, once-a-year one-week holiday. But our lives had got darker. Since the exorcism the year before we had all been ill.
    My mother started staying in bed all day for days on end, making my dad sleep downstairs because she said she was vomiting.
    Then she had manic sessions when she stayed up all day and all night, knitting, baking, listening to the radio. Dad went to work – he had no choice – but he stopped making things. He used to make clay animals and fire them in the kiln at work. Now he hardly spoke. No one spoke. And it was time to go on holiday.
    My periods had stopped. I had had glandular fever and I was exhausted. I liked being at the technical college and working the markets, but I was sleeping ten hours a night every night, and it was the first time, but not the last, that I could hear voices, quite clearly, that were not inside my head. That is, they presented themselves as outside my head.
    I asked to stay at home.
    My mother said nothing.
    On the morning of departure my mother packed the two suitcases, one for my dad and one for herself, and they left the house. I walked down the street with them to the coach station. I asked for the house key.
    She said she couldn't trust me in the house on my own. I could stay with the pastor. It had been arranged.
    ‘You didn't tell me.’
    ‘I'm telling you now.’
    The coach pulled in. People started getting on.
    ‘Give me the key. I live there.’
    ‘We'll be back next Saturday.’
    ‘Dad . . .’
    ‘You heard what Connie said . . .’
    They got on the coach.
    I had been seeing a girl who was still at the school – I have a late August birthday so I was always the youngest in my year. This girl Janey had an October birthday so she was one of the oldest – we were a year apart academically but only a couple of months in age. She was coming to the college in the autumn. I liked her a lot, but I was too scared to kiss her. She was popular with the boys and had a boyfriend. But it was me she wanted to see.
    I went round to her house and told her what had happened and her mother, who was a decent woman, let me sleep in their caravan parked outside the house.
    I was filled with rage. We went for a walk and I pulled a farm gate off its hinges and threw it into the river. Janey put her arm round me. ‘Let's go and break in. It's your house.’
    So that night we climbed over the back wall and into the yard. My dad kept a few tools in a little shed and I found a jemmy bar and a claw hammer and prised open the kitchen door.
    We were in.
    We were like kids. We were kids. We heated up a Fray Bentos steak pie – they used to be sold in flat saucer-shaped tins – and we opened some canned peas. There was a canning factory in our town and tins of food were cheap.
    We drank some of the bottled stuff everybody loved called sarsparilla – it tasted like liquorice and treacle and it was black and fizzy and sold in unlabelled bottles from a market stall. I always bought it when I had the money, and I bought it for Mrs Winterson too.
    The house was