Free Lost for Words: A Novel by Edward St. Aubyn Page B

taught the word for something ubiquitous, and sits in his chair on the motorway, saying ‘car’ every time there happens to be one in view.
    After two weeks the hotel management insisted that he let the maid in to clean the room. Alan, who had not eaten for several days, found that his aversion to staying in the room with the maid outweighed his aversion to moving at all, and so he went out, bearded, dishevelled, unwashed, and muttering his new word, ‘Gap … gap … gap,’ as he hurried hungrily down the street, close to the railings, avoiding the cracks in the paving stones.

 
    15
    The text that was dominating Vanessa’s thoughts, as she sat at home, looking out at the bird feeder hanging from the apple tree in her back garden, was not one of the Elysian Prize submissions, nor indeed was it the PhD thesis she was supervising, in which the semi-colon had just arrived obscurely from Italy and was being disseminated into English literature by the erudite Ben Jonson; the text she couldn’t get off her mind was written by her daughter.
    In a perversion of filial piety, Poppy had asked Vanessa to use her critical skills to improve the little manifesto she was writing for a ‘pro-ana’ website, extolling the hidden ecstasies of her suicidal eating disorder. Vanessa felt that her relationship with her daughter had now gone irretrievably through the looking glass – the very same looking glass in which Poppy saw her skeletal and hirsute body as a repellent mass of white flab. The piece was hand-written, with no corrections, in a pink notebook, with a brass clasp holding its covers together. It rested on the small round table next to Vanessa, looking more like the diary of a fourteen-year-old girl than the exercise book of a grown woman. Vanessa didn’t need to read it again, couldn’t face reading it again. It was a defiant prose poem on the subject of emaciation and the beatitude of extreme hunger, the ‘breakthrough’ when the ‘gherlin gremlin’ (gherlin, it turned out, was the hormone for hunger) turned into ‘the radiance’, the single-pointedness, the febrile quickness, ‘the humming wire’. Ranged against these incisive mental joys was the cunning enemy and intolerable temptation of food, as if every scrap were as tragic as Eve’s first bite of the forbidden fruit – a fall, a rush of shame, an exile from the luminous sphere of control and self-sufficiency; a self-sufficiency that would one day go beyond the rejection of food and liquid, and perfect itself by discarding air as well.
    If only this constriction in her chest and throat could be expressed in tears, but Vanessa had never found it easy to cry and she knew that there was little point in looking for relief in that direction. She heard the front door open and close. It was Tom, who was at home revising, coming back from a ‘walk’. There was no point in greeting him, or offering him anything. He always returned from his walks reeking of grass and bolted back to his bedroom as soon as he came in. The boy in the coma from the ayahuasca weekend had died, but far from making Tom wake up from his stoned life, it seemed to have become the pretext for smoking elegiac joints with mutual acquaintances. He had asked Vanessa to recommend a poem he could read at ‘a kind of wake thing’ they had organized.
    ‘I didn’t really know him,’ Tom told her. ‘But it was really bad luck. It must have been some sort of allergic reaction – I mean everyone else had an amazing time.’
    ‘You can’t imagine how happy it makes me to hear that,’ said Vanessa, with what she assumed was devastating sarcasm.
    ‘Yeah,’ said Tom with a survivor’s laugh. ‘I could have done without the snakes. I mean there were snakes everywhere , coming out of the walls, out of the eye of the little cockerel in the cornflakes package, pretty weird stuff, but then they kind of died away and it was all about light ,abouteverything being basically light .’
    She was