The Big Black Hole Cont...

The next day, when I came out of my school, he was there, and although he pretended that it was just a coincidence, I knew it wasn’t. We went to a restaurant a few blocks away and he bought me a banana split and he asked me all kinds of questions about where I had been living, and who I had been living with, and who my mother (Cynthia) was living with now. And I told him, but it was a bit confusing, trying to explain some of it. When he left, he had tears in his eyes (again) and he told me he hoped he would see me again. He told me where his office was at the University and he said that if ever I needed anything, to please come and see him.

“Even if it’s ten years from now,” he said.

When my mother found out I had seen him, she was furious. “He has no business coming near you, the damned hypocrite,” she shouted.

The next day, I couldn’t get out of bed. It was as if my muscles had all collapsed. I was glued to my bed. Inside my head, there was a big black hole full of questions and I let myself fall into it. At first, my mother tried to coax me to go to school, but I couldn’t even look at her. She asked me what was wrong, but I didn’t know, so of course, I couldn’t answer. It was as if I had a big gob of plasticine in my mouth and I couldn’t let any word out. She got really angry and she shouted at me to get out of bed and get off to school.

“Get up,” she said, “I have a court case to go to.”

But I still couldn’t move or talk. I had Teddy with me under the blanket but she couldn’t see him. When I had not eaten or had anything to drink for two days, Doctor Griffin came to see me. He asked me all sorts of questions, but I still had the big gob of plasticine in my mouth. My mother wrapped a blanket around me, in my pyjamas, and the doctor took me in his arms and carried me into my mother’s car, and she brought me here to the hospital.

Sometimes I crawl out of the big black hole, and I get out of bed, and I go back home and to school. I take some pills. Sometimes, if I forget to take the pills, or if I see my dad (Bernard) hiding behind the bushes in the park, on my way home from school, I get back into my big black hole and I stay there for a while.

Sometimes, my friends come to see me here. One girl from my class brought me some flowers. When she was gone, I got up to go to the bathroom, and I gave them to the boy in the other bed because he cries a lot. The doctor comes with her students, and they ask me questions and I don’t answer; they write things down on their pads. After a while they go away.