Everyday Madness by Lisa Appignanesi

Author:Lisa Appignanesi [Lisa Appignanesi]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers
Published: 2018-08-12T16:00:00+00:00

13

MY FATHER IS STANDING halfway up the steep driveway that leads from our underground garage to the road. He has a large curved plough-like shovel in his hand. The world is white. Daylight is making its way and exposing a milk-white sky. Snow has fallen overnight and there is more falling. It covers everything – the gardens, the roofs, the high electricity wires, the pavements and the streets. These have already been ploughed, so hillocks of snow border the white expanse of road.

I am looking out of my bedroom window, which is rimmed in white. It’s beautiful. My father’s shovel breaks the silence as he thrusts into the snow, scrapes along the ground and heaves the snow to the side of the garden. Over and over. It is a slow task. I should go out and help him, but my mother has said there is no point. Why the architects in their wisdom decided to design houses for a Siberian climate with steeply sloped drives to the garage is a question we all put to ourselves regularly. Cars here, after all, have to be kept indoors if you want them to start.

I’ll undoubtedly be late for school. My parents will certainly be late for work and still my father is shovelling. Suddenly I see he is having difficulty heaving the snow upwards. He puts his hand on his hip and looks up at the sky. He seems to be trying to adjust his body. It’s a gesture I come to associate with hard labour. He starts again. His face wears a grimace. After a couple more heaves, he throws aside the shovel and comes up the basement steps to the kitchen. His expression doesn’t allow a question. He dumps his boots and walks stiffly towards the bathroom, swallows some pills, then goes into the parental bedroom.

I hear raised voices. There’s a note of panic in them. I peer through the half-open bedroom door. My father has taken off his trousers. He is donning a gigantic white girdle. Surreptitiously I tried to lift this frightening object once. Its heaviness was astonishing, not at all like those little-princess corsets my mother wears to accentuate her curves and hold up her nylons. My father’s girdle goes high up his back and down to his hips. He hates it. The doctor has told him it will help his back, with which he has repeated and chronic problems.

My mother is helping him fasten the hooks and cords that hold the girdle in place. His eyes are half closed. When he emerges from the bedroom, once more in suit and tie, he is as rigid as a knight wearing his armour on the inside. When we finally leave the house and the car has made it up the drive on the third or fourth try, nobody speaks, not even my mother.

Not so long before this snowy morning, or maybe it was shortly after, my father walked round bent over like an old man for months. It was hard to look at him.

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