Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal?

the idea of a fossil record. Now I was there again – the sense of something written over, yes, but still distinct. The colours and forms revealed under ultraviolet light. The ghost in the machine that breaks through into the new recording.
    What was the ‘imprint’?
    I was having a hard time. My six-year relationship with director Deborah Warner was rocky and unhappy for us both.
    I was trying to write. The book was pushing me. Creative work is a lie detector. I wanted to lie to myself – if lies are the comforts and the cover-ups.
    In the spring of 2007, my father’s second wife Lillian died unexpectedly. She was ten years younger than him, and had been lively and merry. A botched hip replacement had led to foot gangrene, foot gangrene had led to no walking, no walking had led to diabetes, diabetes had led to hospital for a three-day stay. Three weeks later she left the hospital in a coffin.

    Dad and Lillian had both taken respites in a care home in Accrington run by a wonderful woman called Nesta. She had worked as a comedienne on a cruise ship – and you need a sense of humour to run a care home. She had finally stopped telling jokes for a living and taken over the family care home business. She and I talked about things, and decided Dad should go and live there when there was a vacancy. He would get to church on Sundays and be taken out midweek and there would be plenty of people to visit him. I would make the 350-mile round trip to see him once a month.
    I drove up to Accrington and cleared out his bungalow and was busy arranging everything in the preoccupied way that you do – the interminable paperwork of death.
    All the photos had definitely gone, taken by the ghastly Uncle Alec (him of the Dobermanns), for what purpose I don’t know. There was nothing really of the old days, but there was a locked chest.
    Treasure? I have always believed that the buried treasure is really there . . .
    I went to my car, got a screwdriver and a hammer, and drove the screwdriver into the mouth of the padlock. It sprang open.
    To my horror the chest was full of Royal Albert, including a three-tier cake stand. Why had Dad hidden the remnants of the Royal Albert in a Long John Silver pirate chest?
    There were some other bits of crockery that brought the taste of my childhood back into my mouth. Mrs Winterson’s ‘cottage’ plates, hand-painted with golden edges, and in the centre a little cottage on its own in a wood . . . (rather like where I live now).

    There were Dad’s medals from the war and some notes and letters from Mrs W, and some sad personal items, and some horrible things about me, so I threw those away, and a few of her weekly shopping lists and budgets, and saddest of all, her letter to Dad, written in very shaky copperplate handwriting, telling him step by step what to do after she was dead – the insurance policy for the funeral . . . the pension papers . . . the deeds for the house.
    Poor Dad – did he ever expect to outlive two wives? Unlike Mrs Winterson, Lillian had left no instructions – but this time it was all right because this time I could be there.
    I lifted out the Royal Albert salmon platter. Underneath was a little box. A box hiding in a box . . . Not locked . . . a bit of jewellery, a few envelopes, a few papers carefully folded.
    The first bit of paper was a court order dated 1960. It was my formal adoption paper. The second bit of paper was a kind of MOT of Baby: I was not a mental defective. I was well enough to be adopted. I had been breastfed . . .
    And I had had a name – violently crossed out. The top of the paper had been torn too, so that I could not read the name of the doctor or the organisation, and the names at the bottom had been ripped away.
    I looked at the court order. That too had a name – my other name – crossed out.
    Typewriters and yellow paper. So old. Those things look like a hundred years ago. I am a hundred years ago. Time is a gap.
    *

    It is dark now. I am sitting in my coat on the floor of the empty bungalow. I feel emptied of the familiar furniture. I have opened a door into a room with furniture I don’t recognise. There is a past after all, no matter how much I have written over it.
    Like the name on the pieces of the paper – the name written over – my past is there – here – and it is now. The gap has closed around me. I feel trapped.
    I don’t know why this matters. Why this feels so bad. Why did they never tell me or show me? Why would