Hastings to Victoria train, Normans Bay, 19.44

Petit Poulet

Tomorrow, Ava Anna Ada, tonight the journey into town; tomorrow, publication day circus and friends, all day today, nerves. That familiar lump in my throat, one impossible to swallow past. And food would not stay down even if I could. The train tunnels through the darkness, on the flat horizon, dots of light from distant houses.

The fun of living with anorexia is that you cannot eat when you’re sad, you cannot eat when you’re happy. This is why I used to try and make the days neither up nor down. But you miss out on life if you live like that. Better to feel it. Three children laden with cold at home all day, impossible to wake for school this morning. On waking Avery proclaimed it like a snow day. It is intriguing, the things children remember. I love listening to them listing memories of their childhood, they rarely match my versions of events and who am I to think mine are right.

2017, one snowy morning. It had snowed for days. The road outside the cottage window black when it first fell, turned quickly to white and two hours later and the main road, five minutes along the track, was impossible to access. I could see it from the kitchen window, cars still making their way carefully up the hill, but soon, they stopped. By dusk we were snowed in. I counted the tins of food in the cupboard, planned ways to make fresh produce stretch, ambushed as we were by sudden snow.

On the first day, it was fun to play in. Although Avery has never liked snowballs. He likes to plan, to know what’s happening next, and a snowball, wet and icy to the face disrupts his sense of certainty. I don’t blame him. Alexander and his older sister, would play for hours in the cold, coming home with red hands and noses, Estella was a baby then, 9 months old and marvelling at the world turned white. I pulled her along in the sledge, and she’d lie, staring at the sky, her tiny nose, pink. They played and they warmed themselves up by the stove and I made soup and it sounds idyllic really but I was climbing the walls by the end of the first day and the sky whitened and took on that particular white grey shade that lets you know snow is coming and a lot of it too and I was thankful for the delivery of logs stored in the outhouse.

By the fourth day the other three children had settled into a rhythm. Call it happiness, call it Stockholm Syndrome, whatever it was, they were happy. But I like to move and Avery is too much like me for his own good, we made our way out into the snow, me with a spade a little too heavy for me to use easily and him with a yellow plastic thing he wielded wildly at the falling flakes. My pretext was we were digging the car out, a Sisyphean task with the snow falling as quickly as it was, but still, we were out the house and we were occupied and we were cold and laughing and I kept him talking because I couldn’t see him, not exactly, through the snow, not well enough for a boy only four years old and under average for his height as he was then before he became all stretched arms and legs still not quite grown into. We didn’t stay outside for long, it was much too cold for that, it was inside and warming up and eyeing the oil tank as anxiously as I also eyed the food cupboard, never have chickpeas looked so appealing.

That’s my version. Today Avery started to tell me about the time we’d got snowed in the house, with snow up to the windows, and remember mummy, the way the front door couldn’t open because it couldn’t push the snow out but the door opened inward, I wanted to tell him but didn’t and it came all the way up to the windows, remember how dark it was when the windows were covered and remember the walk we went on to get to the car and the car was stuck on the road and no and no and no, I wanted to tell him, to set him straight but he is attached to these memories, they give him a sense of where he came from and what we did. Does it matter if we never did any of it, or if we didn’t do it the way round he remembers, very likely we didn’t do it the way round I remember either; and how small was he at the time, how high the snow must have seemed, how far the car in the drive must have seemed, how it made sense to think the windows were covered with the sky lowering as it was for so many days, does it matter if it never was like this, or maybe it was, maybe it being like this in his head is all that matters. By the end of this morning’s recollections, I preferred his version of events and the train approaches Lewes and the dark thickens as if the town’s lights make it more vivid and my stomach begins to roar, made painful by the lack of food these last two days, and soon, London and tomorrow, Ava Anna Ada.