Black Chalk Read Online Free PDF Page B

time, that’s all.’
    â€˜Good,’ she said, nodding while her eyes looked at my feet.
    I extended my hand palm up hoping she would take it again, but she couldn’t have noticed for she turned around and made her way back to her chair.
    ***
    The world around me seemed to gather definition. Or perhaps I was now staying awake long enough to appreciate it, to expect its contours every time I broke through the lethargy.
    I was in a large room with yellow walls and no doors. Badges roamed along a corridor to my right. And a window spanned the entire length of the room to my left. When I crooked my neck, I could take in the whole of south-east Oxford. I could lose myself in Headington’s parks, and if I squinted hard enough, I could imagine my grandmother’s old house, the one she had before she moved to Cambridge, my grandfather died, and my mother found her a nursing home. It stood off a main road at the end of a hazy cul-de-sac. I remembered the Sundays we spent there well: in the winters, I would only breathe through my mouth, because there was something wrong with the sofas and it wasn’t just their flower print – no, if I breathed through my nose, their musky dampness would settle in my stomach and start breeding mould. Our summer visits were much safer: then, I could spend hours hiding with my cousins in the labyrinthine hedge that ran along the garden walls.
    To the right of my grandmother’s house, I could watch the traffic crawling on Cowley Road, and further right still, I could glimpse far-off Iffley and its lock. But I hardly ever looked. I preferred observing the people around me. When my mother was not sitting on a chair near me, when she wasn’t watching over me, reading through academic papers, jotting down her esteemed thoughts, I was left with three other silent patients, perennially waiting for something: nurses, meals, examinations, or the omnipotent team of doctors.
    I was luckier than most: my mother was with me throughout the entire visiting hours. She’d been spoken to – your son needs rest, he needs sleep, he needs calm. She’d nodded her head and made up her own mind. Her lab, her students, her colleagues, she told me, could go on without her, and plus, she pointed at her papers, she could work by my side too. A professor of experimental psychology. When I was little, I’d imagined patients reclining on a leather chaise longue while she fitted a flashing helmet on their skulls and jotted down the value of each dial. Even when she started taking me to her lab after school, on the first floor of a building that looked like an overgrown concrete bunker, I kept on believing there was something vaguely sinister about her work. It took me years to dispel that idea. Whenever I’d ask her about her work, she’d either give me an answer that was too broad or one that was too detailed – so that all I remembered was that she, and her lab, ran experiments on memory, biases, encoding.
    Once, as she sat by my hospital bed, I put down one of the books she’d brought me, Dostoevsky’s The Idiot , and I asked her what she was reading. She put her papers aside, stretched her arms out and, leaning towards me, asked me whether I really wanted to know. I hesitated but only for an instant: I hadn’t seen her so engaged for some time. She read out the title of the article she’d been reading: ‘Homocysteine and Cognitive Performance…’ She stopped halfway through the subtitle. ‘You don’t know what homocysteine is, do you?’ I could pretend to know what cognitive performance meant, but homocysteine was beyond me. ‘It’s an amino acid.’ She waited for a sign. ‘You don’t know what that is, do you?’
    The same day, after I’d lost her to her pile of papers, I asked her why she sat with her head resting against the window, when she could sit against the wall and enjoy the view over the