Eleanor Oliphant is Completely Fine. Gail Honeyman

I’d drawn a big housefly, Musca domestica, on his tongue with a pilfered Sharpie. I’m not artistically gifted in any way, but it was, in my humble opinion, a fair rendering of the subject matter. I felt that this act had helped me to take ownership of the donated item, and created something new from something second-hand. Also, he had looked hungry. June Mullen seemed unable to take her eyes off it.

      ‘Everything’s fine here, June,’ I reiterated. ‘Bills all paid, cordial relations with the neighbours. I’m perfectly comfortable.’

      She flicked through the file again, and then inhaled. I knew what she was about to say, recognizing full well the change in tone – fear, hesitancy – that always preceded the subject matter.

      ‘You’re still of the view that you don’t want to know anything else about the incident, or about your mother, I understand?’ No smiling this time.

      ‘That’s right,’ I said. ‘There’s no need – I speak to her once a week, on a Wednesday evening, regular as clockwork.’

      ‘Really? After all this time, that’s still happening? Interesting … Are you keen to … maintain this contact?’

      ‘Why wouldn’t I be?’ I said, incredulous. Where on earth does the Social Work department find these people?

      She deliberately allowed the silence to linger, and, although I recognized the technique, I could not stop myself from filling it, eventually.

      ‘I think Mummy would like it if I tried to find out more about … the incident … but I’ve no intention of doing so.’

      ‘No,’ she said, nodding. ‘Well, how much you want to know about what happened is entirely up to you, isn’t it? The courts were very clear, back then, that anything like that was to be entirely at your discretion?’

      ‘That’s correct,’ I said, ‘that’s exactly what they said.’

      She looked closely at me, as so many people had done before, scrutinizing my face for any traces of Mummy, enjoying some strange thrill at being this close to a blood relative of the woman the newspapers still occasionally referred to, all these years later, as the pretty face of evil. I watched her eyes run over my scars. Her mouth hung slightly open, and it became apparent that the suit and the bob were an inadequate disguise for this particular slack-jawed yokel.

      ‘I could probably dig out a photograph, if you’d like one,’ I said.

      She blinked twice and blushed, then busied herself by grappling with the bulging file, trying to sort all the loose papers into a tidy pile. I noticed a single sheet flutter down and land under the coffee table. She hadn’t seen it make its escape, and I pondered whether or not to tell her. It was about me, after all, so wasn’t it technically mine? I’d return it at the next visit, of course – I’m not a thief. I imagined Mummy’s voice, whispering, telling me I was quite right, that social workers were busybodies, do-gooders, nosy parkers. June Mullen snapped the elastic band around the file, and the moment to mention the sheet of paper had passed.

      ‘I … is there anything else you’d like to discuss with me today?’ she asked.

      ‘No thank you,’ I said, smiling as broadly as I could. She looked rather disconcerted, perhaps even slightly frightened. I was disappointed. I’d been aiming for pleasant and friendly.

      ‘Well then, that seems to be that for the time being, Eleanor; I’ll leave you in peace,’ she said. She continued talking as she packed away the file in her briefcase, adopting a breezy, casual tone. ‘Any plans for the weekend?’

      ‘I’m visiting someone in hospital,’ I said.

      ‘Oh, that’s nice. Visits always cheer a patient up, don’t they?’

      ‘Do they?’ I said. ‘I wouldn’t know. I’ve never visited anyone in hospital before.’

      ‘But you’ve spent a lot of time in hospital yourself, of course,’ she said.

      I stared at her. The imbalance in the extent of our knowledge of each other was manifestly unfair. Social workers should present their new clients with a fact sheet about themselves to try to redress this, I think. After all, she’d had unrestricted access to that big brown folder, the bumper book of Eleanor, two decades’ worth of information about the intimate minutiae of my life. All I knew about her was her name and her employer.

      ‘If you know about that, then you’ll be aware that the circumstances were such that the police and my legal representatives were the only visitors permitted,’ I said.

      She gawped at me. I was reminded of those clowns’ heads in fairgrounds, the ones where you try to throw a ping-pong ball into their gaping mouths in order to win a goldfish. I opened the door for her, watching her eyes swivel repeatedly towards the giant customized frog.

      ‘I’ll see you in six months then, Eleanor,’ she said reluctantly. ‘Best of luck.’

      I closed the door with excessive gentleness behind her.

      She hadn’t remarked upon Polly, I thought, which was odd. Ridiculously, I felt almost slighted on Polly’s behalf. She’d been sitting in the corner throughout our meeting, and was clearly the most eye-catching thing in the room. My beautiful Polly, prosaically described as a parrot plant, sometimes referred to as a Congo cockatoo plant, but always known to me, in her full Latinate glory, as Impatiens niamniamensis. I say it out loud, often: Niamniamensis. It’s like kissing, the ‘m’s forcing your lips together, rolling over the consonants, your tongue poking into ‘n’s and over the ‘s’. Polly’s ancestors came all the way from Africa, originally. Well, we all did. She’s the only constant from my childhood, the only living thing that survived. She was a birthday present, but I can’t remember who gave her to me, which is strange. I was not, after all, a girl who was overwhelmed with gifts.

      She came with me from my childhood bedroom, survived the foster placements and children’s homes and, like me, she’s still here. I’ve looked after her, tended to her, picked her up and repotted her when she was dropped or thrown. She likes light, and she’s thirsty. Apart from that, she requires minimal care and attention, and largely looks after herself. I talk to her sometimes, I’m not ashamed to admit it. When the silence and the aloneness press down and around me, crushing me, carving through me like ice, I need to speak aloud sometimes, if only for proof of life.

      A philosophical question: if a tree falls in a forest and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound? And if a woman who’s wholly alone occasionally talks to a pot plant, is she certifiable? I’m confident that it is perfectly normal to talk to oneself occasionally. It’s not as though I’m expecting a reply. I’m fully aware that Polly is a houseplant.

      I watered her, then got on with some other household chores, thinking ahead to the moment when I could open my laptop and check whether a certain handsome singer had posted any new information. Facebook, Twitter, Instagram. Windows into a world of marvels. While I was loading the washing machine, my telephone rang. A visitor and a phone call! A red-letter day indeed. It was Raymond.

      ‘I rang Bob’s mobile and explained the situation to him, and he dug out your number from the personnel files for me,’ he said.

      I mean, really. Was all of me on show in buff folders, splayed wide for anyone to flick open and do with as they wished?

      ‘What a gross abuse of my privacy, not to mention an offence against the Data Protection Act,’ I said. ‘I’ll be speaking to Bob about that next week.’

      There was silence on the other end of the line.

      ‘Well?’ I said.

      ‘Oh, right. Yeah. Sorry. It’s just, you said you would call and you didn’t, and, well, I’m at the hospital now. I wondered, you know … if you wanted to bring the old guy’s stuff in? We’re at the Western Infirmary. Oh, and his name’s Sami-Tom.’

      ‘What?’ I said. ‘No, that can’t be right, Raymond. He’s a small, fat