The More You Ignore Me by Jo Brand

a right scumbag having her locked up, when we saw how she was and what
she was saying, we thought it best she had more treatment and went to
hospital.’
    ‘What
was she like? What was she saying?’ said Alice, who had never quite managed to
elicit this information on previous occasions.
    A rare
guilty queasiness swept through Nan Wildgoose, who was well aware that Keith
had attempted to protect Alice from the worst excesses of the Wildgooses’
behaviour and Gina’s illness.
    ‘That’s
for your dad to tell you, sweetpea,’ she said. ‘But your mum went out waving a
white pillowcase of surrender and they carried her off back to St Mary’s where
she stayed for the next two months and then came back to us.’
    ‘But it
wasn’t her, was it, Violet?’ said Bert.
    ‘Was it
someone else?’ said Alice, wide-eyed, conjuring up images of gothic plotting in
the hospital and Frankensteinian experimentation.
    ‘No,
what he means, love, is your mum was different —quieter, no spark to her any
more, all the Wildgoose wild-ness gone.
    All for
the best,’ said Bert and the conversation turned to more prosaic topics like
what was for tea and how Alice was doing at school.
    What
they had said was true, though. Gina had become a watered-down version of her
previous self. Controlled by long-term medication which she received once a
month at the hospital, she seemed to have had the sharp edges shaved off. She
no longer mentioned Ted Fairfax or watched the weather forecast in her
previously agitated way, but sat demurely in the corner of the room, the muttering
television a constant backdrop as she smoked, or twisted a piece of string in
and out of her fingers, the only part of her body that seemed restless and free
now.
    Keith
could see that some flames had been extinguished on the blazing bonfire but for
the most part he was relieved. Gina had not been an easy person to live with
and the delightful flashes of anger and excitement he had once loved had become
coarse and wearing as her illness had progressed. Now, at least, the family
home was peaceful and their lives ticked over, thankfully, with little incident
apart from contact with his wife’s family which was always fraught with weirdness
and occasional threat.
    Keith’s
parents had tried to persuade him to leave Gina. They wanted him back near them
in a little semi, furnished with a dull and obedient wife and a child who
didn’t stand in the corner of the room wordlessly observing them and honouring
them with the odd monosyllable.
    ‘That
child is a bit odd,’ Keith’s mum, Jennifer, had tactlessly said to him on a
number of occasions. ‘She needs taking in hand. Why can’t she chat nicely and
dress prettily like your cousin Lesley’s two?’
    Keith
thought that cousin Lesley’s pale-skinned, gawky offspring were as dull as they
come and that rather than dressing prettily, they both looked like anorexic
toilet roll covers. He waved his mother’s comments away with a humorous remark,
but her words stayed in his head until eventually he booked an appointment with
Marie Henty to talk about Alice.
    Keith’s
name in the appointments book of the gargantuan receptionist at the surgery
where Marie worked lifted her spirits as her eye ran through the usual gamut of
varicose veins, chronic coughs and the collected complaints of the
over-seventies. She wanted to think that perhaps Keith had just missed her and
wanted a chat. Gina’s equilibrium had been fairly well maintained with monthly
anti-psychotic injections, with few side effects, apart from a general slowness,
some weight gain and a bum like a pin cushion, so Marie had rarely seen Keith
over the past five years. Yet she had rejected approaches from a number of
unsuitable suitors in the hope that one day, like Mr Rochester in Jane Eyre, he would rid himself of his mad wife and fall into her arms. But it seemed
Keith wanted to talk about Alice. Marie rarely saw Alice but she had noted
sadly that her mother’s illness