Amanda Craig

In a Dark Wood

Fourth Estate, 2000.

We got out of the car, and began to walk up Primrose Hill...Far above us, above the figures of our children toiling up the green hill, kites whirled and swooped in aerial geometry, whirring as the breeze caught them. Up and down and round and round, looping the loop, soaring and plunging, the fine lines that held them like great fish taut in the hands of the fliers. If I could hold on to myself like that, I thought, if I could still fly but remain anchored, stabilised, sane. I had to try

Having finally accepted the need for medication, Benedick is hoping he can get his manic depression under control. On an earlier visit he recalls playing there as a child, and is dismayed to find in the refurbished playground that 'the big brass slide burnished from all the little bums slipping down it was gone, replaced by a monstrous construction in dull steel'. Outings with their divorced dad can't have been much fun; on this one, and on a visit to the Zoo, there are outbursts of violence: 'other adults looked away as my children shrieked'.