THE CHILD didn’t understand at first. But as she stared and stared at the nurse who now wouldn’t look her in the eye, slowly she realised that this person had been talking about her. What the nurse had said to another child outside the room was this: “Be quiet. There’s a little girl dying in there.”
This is how Maggie O’Farrell learnt that she was very ill indeed. She was eight, she was paralysed, she was in intensive care and, understandably perhaps, she had been protected from the knowledge that her condition might be terminal. How did she react to the discovery?
“I was shocked, appalled. I knew I was really ill but when you’re a child no one tells you, no one shows their reaction to you. In front of you everything’s fine, and you’re not fine. You have to glean things from the doctors talking above you, or listening to what your parents are saying. No one says that you’ve got X, or that you’re not going to walk again. I’m sure my parents did tell me, but it was a watered-down version. Overhearing the nurse was the awakening point for me.”
Did she discuss what she had heard with anyone, did she ask questions? “No, I didn’t,” she replies. “When you are seriously ill the rest of the real world falls away. I had this horrible headache and couldn’t move — it’s very sore when your muscles seize up. The whole time was very blurred.”
Neither has O’Farrell much discussed her childhood illness since. Those close to her know that she was ill for two years, initially deteriorating to a point where she could do nothing but talk, listen and watch. She was believed to have had a virus which attacked her brain, stripping away her motor functions, and which it was feared would move on to her respiratory system, but it didn’t and the condition was never identified. Neither was O’Farrell brain damaged as had been predicted: she got better, grew up, became a journalist, recently had a baby, and the illness which might have killed her would have remained a private matter had she not chosen to describe it in her new novel.
The Distance Between Us is a treat, a fluent and enticing tale about the bond between sisters, and the need to face and then move on from a difficult part of the past. The themes are not self-conscious — O’Farrell is too skilled a writer for that and prefers to swim around questions rather than concoct answers.
A fine-featured woman of 31 with white skin and russet hair, she has chosen a North London café for our meeting and has neither the presence nor the personality of an egomaniac. This, perhaps, is why, unlike some writers with an illness to describe, she has never allowed hers to become the focal point of her life, to define her. “I can’t stand all those ‘poor me’ memoirs,” she says. “Illness porn. So selfaggrandising.”
Instead her illness became a small but pivotal part of her fiction, attached to her protagonist’s sister, Nina, who, as O’Farrell did, has to relearn all the elementary things the rest of us learn only once: walking, writing, climbing stairs, feeding herself, sitting, standing, dressing. “That’s the bit I really remember because it was very hard. You’re put back in the life you had before, in your bedroom, but absent from your other life. Your sisters are going to school but you’re not, you’re just lying in bed or on the sofa. That seemed a very long period.”
Medical opinion had it that nothing more could be done for O’Farrell, but her parents insisted that she should have physiotherapy and fought for her to return, eventually, to her old school in Bridgend. Their uncharacteristic bolshieness saved her, she says. “Otherwise I’d have been in an institution. That’s unimaginable. What terrifies me is that there must be other people who didn’t have parents like mine and who were written off.”
Back at school after two years she had no academic problems because the education authority had provided her with a home tutor: “I might not have been able to walk but I could read and I could do long division, which the rest of them couldn’t. I was pale, thin, kind of weird-looking. That waxy pallor of the skin that ill people have — I looked like that. Children are very sensitive to anything that’s different and they were told I’d been brain-damaged, which didn’t help, especially because I couldn’t walk properly and had a stammer so I rarely spoke. They called me weirdo, spas(tic).” Was there any physical bullying? “Yeah, a bit because I wasn’t very strong. If you poked me I would fall over.” Being patronised by teachers? “There was a lot of that.”
Moving to North Berwick when she was 13 and her academic father changed jobs enabled her to leave her sickly reputation behind. “That was a massive relief because no one knew my terrible secret so I could start again,” she says. “I was a bit odd and fell over a bit and I was terrible at games, but no one knew I’d had this brain damage. Moving to a new town when something like that has happened to you is such a gift because it means you can reinvent yourself and leave it behind.”
She still has some neurological difficulties, she says: problems with balance, telling left from right. Occasionally her cerebellum cuts out, giving her the sensation that she is lying down when she is sitting. She lacks stamina and her feet are wrecked: “The way I walk is a bit strange.” I hadn’t noticed: surely she is more conscious of these things than other people? “Exactly.”
What the illness did leave O’Farrell with, I think, other than mental resilience, is an exaggerated sense of being different. Has this given her a need to prove herself, has it affected her relationships, I wonder. She thinks not but then, as she says, she has no idea how her life would have panned out had she not been ill and this seems a much more sensible response than the psychobabblist tendency to link every life event as cause or effect.
“The thing is, it happened so young that I don’t really know what’s normal and what I should feel like. I never drank alcohol because alcohol affects balance, so I was probably quite odd as a teenager. You’re very aware of your physical frailty — not so much of your personal frailty but of everyone’s, that your body can let you down. As a teenager the world hangs by a thread anyway. I think knowing that it can and it does, that we ’re all very close to the membrane between life and death all the time, made me a gloomy, angry teenager. Maybe I would have been that anyway.”
That is precocious knowledge, I suggest. “I suppose it is. Maybe that’s something that’s different. It doesn’t frighten me, though. Not at all. I’ve never been frightened of death. Maybe you’re more aware of it. I don’t think that’s a bad thing.”
She makes light of it, I say. “There’s no point dwelling on it. Things happen but you have to live round them, don’t you? The only long-term effect it’s had on me is that they said it could come back at any time. They said lots of things that were wrong. They said I’d never walk again. But I don’t really believe it will come back and it hasn’t so far. I think you just have to live your life. It gives you a sense that this could be my last day so I might as well live it to the full — a kind of recklessness, I think. I feel slightly as though I’m living, not on borrowed time but on extra time. I also feel incredibly lucky.”
The Distance Between Us, Review, £14.99, available from Books First for £11.99 plus £2.25 p&p, 0870 160 8080
