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pain, I laughed hard so as not to feel embarrassed. He grimaced back, but by the end of the evening, I’d convinced him it had been a good joke, and that he’d deserved it for getting out when he shouldn’t. He was too happy a person not to believe me. Still, after that day, he never made a disparaging comment about my mother again.
    ***
    This morning, I opened my first hospital diary, the one with most of the sketches, and looked at an early entry. ‘Eric: private mother moment after shed.’ Short as it is, it’s enough to make me remember how I felt then.
    It also helps me challenge the revisionist approach I took to my convalescence. A psychiatrist and two psychologists were always going to be too strong for me. Believing their scheme fitted my condition, I wrote over my early convalescence, accepting their jargon, fitting it over my experiences, wrapping my reality. But their picture was always too simple. And now, years gone since they had me in their grasp, I prefer my thoughts complex.
    Certainly, these thoughts show me that I was never in denial over the whole episode. Rather, mere days after the incident, I was already reaching for reason, pondering over the master of all questions, why, and all its guises. My thoughts were focused on Eric’s interaction with his mother, on a moment that had left me puzzled as it happened.
    It was in the spring of 1999. I was sitting down in Eric’s living room when his mother walked in with her husband. He was polite but didn’t linger, while she came towards us as if to start a conversation. Eric rose from his armchair and walked out into the garden, leaving me stranded behind. Rather awkwardly, I stood up and spoke with his mother about the weather, about school. When it became clear Eric wasn’t coming back, I left her and found him in his shed, absorbed by woodwork.
    â€˜Why did you leave?’ I asked him.
    â€˜I abhor him,’ he said. ‘Fuck her.’ Abhor and fuck; they still stand out today as they did then. ‘Of course, you’ve got no problems with them.’
    I said nothing. He wasn’t the only one of my friends fighting his mother. But that very afternoon, I had to rethink their relationship. His stepfather was out, and I was meant to be down in the shed clamping two pieces of wood together. I’d come up to ask Eric a question, and I was standing outside the kitchen window, peering in, afraid to walk in on them. I could see their shapes swaying back and forth, embracing each other almost violently, both his arms holding her head tight against his chest. When he eventually released her, I counted to thirty and opened the door. He was peeling vegetables, she was kneading dough. I looked at the space between them. But all I had was her gentle smile and his defiant look.
    ***
    On the fourth day, my mother walked in late, after lunch had been served and cleared, and stopped by the foot of my bed as if she could go no further. I’d raised the top half of my bed so that I could better lose myself in my ward’s dynamics. The first thing I noticed was that her eyes were bloated red. The rest of her appearance, the scarf hanging dishevelled from her neck, the coat drooping over her arm, had my fingers clutching hard at the sheets.
    For what can’t have been more than twenty seconds, she looked at me through a veil of welled-in tears. I could never handle my mother crying. I wanted to get up and throw my arm around her, but she was too far and I was too weak. It must have been my growing anguish that finally made her act.
    â€˜Anna…’ she said before a sob took over. The tears breaking through, she crossed the space between us and took my hand, almost crushing my fingers.
    It took her a minute to calm down, by which time I’d already guessed that Anna had died. I listened to my mother through a loud dullness. Shock was weighing on all my limbs.
    Thinking of this moment now brings me a