The Assassination of Margaret Thatcher

NOVEMBER: DR. BHATTACHARYA from the unit came to discuss the hairiness. It happens, she said. The name of the substance is lanugo. Oh, it happens, I am afraid to say. She sat on the sofa and said, “With your daughter I am at my wits’ end.”


Their father wanted Morna to go back to the unit. “I would go so far as to say,” he said, “either she goes, or I go.”

Dr. Bhattacharya blinked from behind her spectacles. “Our funding is in a parlous state. From now till next financial year we are rationed. The most urgent referrals only. Keep up the good work with the daily weight chart. As long as she is stable and not losing. In spring if progress is not good we will be able to take her in.”

Morna sat on the sofa, her arms crossed over her belly, which was swollen. She looked vacantly about her. She would rather be anywhere than here. It contaminates everything, she had explained, that deceitful spoonful of cream. She could no longer trust her food to be what it said it was, nor do her calorie charts if her diet was tampered with. She had agreed to eat, but others had broken the agreement. In spirit, she said.

Their father told the doctor, “It’s no use saying all the time,” he mimicked her voice, “‘Morna, what do you think, what do you want?’ You don’t give me all this shit about human rights. It doesn’t matter what she thinks anymore. When she looks in a mirror God knows what she sees. You can’t get hold of it, can you, what goes on in that head of hers? She imagines things that aren’t there.”

Lola jumped in. “But I saw it too.”

Her parents rounded on her. “Lola, go upstairs.”

She flounced up from the sofa and went out, dragging her feet. They didn’t say, “See what, Lola? What did you see?”

They don’t listen, she had told the doctor, to anything I say. To them I am just noise. “I asked for a pet, but no, no chance—other people can have a dog, but not Lola.”

Expelled from the room, she stood outside the closed door, whimpering. Once she scratched with her paw. She snuffled. She pushed at the door with her shoulder, a dull bump, bump.

“Family therapy may be available,” she heard Dr. Bhattacharya say. “Had you thought of that?”

* * *

DECEMBER: Merry Christmas.

* * *

JANUARY: “YOU’RE GOING to send me back to the unit,” Morna said.

“No, no,” her mother said. “Not at all.”

“You were on the phone to Dr. Bhattacharya.”

“I was on the phone to the dentist. Booking in.”

Morna had lost some teeth lately, this was true. But she knew her mother was lying. “If you send me back I will drink bleach,” she said.

Lola said, “You will be shining white.”

* * *

FEBRUARY: THEY TALKED about sectioning her: that means, their mother said, compulsory detention in a hospital, that means you will not be able to walk out, Morna, like you did before.

“It’s entirely your choice,” their father said. “Start eating, Morna, and it won’t come to that. You won’t like it in the loony bin. They won’t be coaxing you out on walks and baking you bloody fairy cakes. They’ll have locks on the doors and they’ll be sticking you full of drugs. It won’t be like the unit, I’m telling you.”

“More like a boarding kennel, I should think,” Lola said. “They’ll be kept on leads.”

“Won’t you save me?” Morna said.

“You have to save yourself,” their father said. “Nobody can eat for you.”

“If they could,” said Lola, “maybe I’d do it. But I’d charge a fee.”

Morna was undoing herself. She was reverting to unbeing. Lola was her interpreter, who spoke out from the top bunk in the clear voice of a prophetess. They had to come to her, parents and doctors, to know what Morna thought. Morna herself was largely mute.

She had made Morna change places and sleep on the bottom bunk since new year. She was afraid Morna would roll out and smash herself on the floor.

She heard her mother moaning behind the bedroom door: “She’s going, she’s going.”

She didn’t mean “going to the shops.” In the end, Dr. Bhattacharya had said, the heart fails without warning.

* * *

FEBRUARY: AT THE last push, in the last ditch, she decided to save her sister. She made her little parcels wrapped in tinfoil—a single biscuit, a few pick’n’mix sweets—and left them on her bed. She found the biscuit, still in its foil, crushed to crumbs, and on the floor of their room shavings of fudge and the offcut limbs of pink jelly lobsters. She could not count the crumbs, so she hoped Morna was eating a little. One day she found Morna holding the foil, uncrumpled, looking for her reflection in the shiny side. Her sister had double vision now, and solid objects were ringed by light; they had a ghost-self, fuzzy, shifting.

Their mother said, “Don’t you have any feelings, Lola? Have you no idea what we’re going through, about your sister?”