Free Man at the Helm by Nina Stibbe Page A

couldn’t get quite enough to keep up with her feelings of loneliness and misery. And she’d started taking slightly more than the stated dose. Plus she needed a different kind in addition, to help give her that bit more vim. Dr Kaufmann would not prescribe any more pills, however eloquent and reasonable our mother’s requests for more. It would have been wrong.
    So much for my sister’s worry that they might make her feel ‘too better’ – they soon weren’t making her feel better enough. ‘It’s like having over-diluted Ribena,’ our mother explained. ‘It’s almost worse than having no Ribena at all.’
    And we knew exactly what she was talking about.
    In order to get more pills, our mother had to go to London to get topped up by a doctor who turned a blind eye. This was OK for a while, but soon she got sick of going all that way and once had a breakdown (in her car) halfway home and had to call our father’s chauffeur, Bernard, and he’d given her snooty looks in the rear-view mirror all the way home, and later our father had rung and accused her of upsetting Bernard and giving him snooty looks and said she needn’t think she could cadge a lift again.
    Anyway, that incident put the tin lid on the London trips and she got herself into a panic about getting enough pills – thinking she might have to hang around outside a library in the dark or something horrible and do a deal.
    My sister wondered if our mother might take on Audrina, the available help who was also a medium, to go and hang around outside a library once she’d done the laundry but our mother was against this idea. It being her belief that you should only break the law yourself and not get others to do it for you.
    So my sister and I told her we were more than happy to go to London for her. I amended it quickly to ‘happy to go’ (thinking that being ‘more than happy’ might be the same as being ‘more than welcome’ – i.e., not). She was very grateful for the offer but said we were far too young to be going to get pills in London on our own.
    The train was inky blue with a yellow nose. I’d been expecting it to roar into the station and screech to a halt like a car might, but it didn’t. It rolled in ever so slowly with a face like a sad puppy and little wipers on the two side windows blinking. It had come from Sheffield and wasn’t going to remain for long in the station, so we had to jump aboard quickly and get settled in our seats. I loved it. The tickets, the station, the smell, the noises, the mysterious other people, the lurching rhythms of the forward motion and the tiny little toilet. We bought ourselves tea and toast from the buffet car and actually would both have liked our tea a bit less milky, but you can’t have everything, and the toast was utterly perfect: darkly grilled, buttered to the edges and sweating in its napkin.
    London was approximately two hours away and Dr Gilbey’s rooms were on Devonshire Place – a short taxi ride from St Pancras station. On our first trip, my sister decided to take a detourvia London zoo. She’d planned it all along but she dropped it on me as a surprise as we waited in the taxi rank.
    ‘Shall we go to London zoo?’ she said.
    ‘I don’t think so, we don’t have time,’ I replied.
    ‘We do,’ she said. ‘We don’t need to be at Devonshire Place for two and a half hours.’
    ‘I’m not sure,’ I said.
    ‘Well, I’m going to the zoo,’ she said. ‘I’ll meet you at Devonshire Place later.’ And of course that was that. I mean, you don’t just walk round London on your own when you’re ten and you don’t even know the place.
    I honestly don’t remember much about the zoo that first time, except Chi Chi the giant panda. There was a long notice on an information board about Chi Chi. We read that Chi Chi displayed all the symptoms of chronic loneliness, and yet had confounded bear-breeding experts when she refused to mate with the only available male, An An,