The Household Guide to Dying

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Much later, when Sonny grew so fond of Archie, it became harder. I seesawed for a few years between thinking Archie and I could be a real couple, and thinking that maybe I only thought that because it would make it easier for me and Sonny. Thinking that if I agreed to move in with Archie it might only be because it would suit me, with Sonny growing and the caravan becoming increasingly impossible, not because I wanted him for his sake alone. Thinking that I didn’t really know what I was thinking. The thinking revolved around and around in my mind like a mouse on a wheel. Strangely, it didn’t seem to bother Archie. Which was why I read so much. Easier to enter someone else’s dilemmas or questions or nightmares than confront or solve my own.

I told Sonny only what I judged he needed to know, since complete honesty, I’d found, was not always the best option with children. One day, his goldfish, the best pet a caravanliving mother could manage for a child, floated to the top of its bowl and commenced putrefying. Sonny seemed to cope with the fact of Jaffa dying, but the idea that the fish’s body then laid solemnly in the good earth – in a patch adjacent to the caravan and marked by a banana tree I had recently planted – would be prone to worms, bacteria and other elemental onslaughts made him sob for hours.