iris

iris. seventeen. i have, since we were eleven, slept on the floor of your room a total of (i counted) forty-three times. i know the ceiling of your room better than my own. i know the precise spot above your desk where the paint cracked when you tried to take down the polaroid wall in year nine. i know the loose floorboard by the door. i know that you read for an hour before you'll speak to anyone in the morning and i have, after six years, finally learned to respect it. you are, by some distance, the kindest girl at school and the one i would call from anywhere. happy birthday, bell. the floor is, as ever, my preferred bed. — w xx

Iris — your English teacher writing, from the staff room at Roedean on a Friday afternoon, the week after we finished the Robinson unit. In twenty-two years of teaching A-level English I have, very occasionally, had a student write a paragraph in a closed-book essay that made me put the marking down, walk to the window, and read it again. You wrote one in February, on the second half of Gilead, in which you said that the novel is "less about belief than about the discipline of paying attention, which is the same thing, only stated more honestly." I have, since, quoted you (with credit) in two staff meetings and one parents' evening. Oxford will be lucky. So will the rest of us. Many happy returns, Iris. — C. Ashby

iris. five months. i have, in five months, learned: that you take your coffee black on weekdays and with one sugar on saturdays, that you cannot, under any circumstances, be rushed through the national portrait gallery, that you write in the margins of every book i lend you in a 0.3 muji pen, and that when i ask what you are thinking you, eighty per cent of the time, say "i'm thinking about it" and then come back to it three days later. i do not, yet, fully understand the way you think. i am, however, prepared to spend a long time finding out. happy seventeenth, bell. the window at mine on sunday morning is, as ever, yours. — cy

Iris — Saoirse writing, from the flat in Edinburgh on a Wednesday night. I have, as you know, been gone since August. Edinburgh is colder than London and the girls in my halls do not, yet, know that I read for an hour before breakfast and would, accordingly, not slept on the floor of my room for a single night. I miss you in a particular way. I miss the walk from the bus stop to school. I miss the way you would, every Tuesday, leave a battered paperback on my desk in registration with a post-it on the front in your tiny handwriting saying "for Saoirse — page 47, the bit about the lamp." I have, since I've been here, started doing the same to my new flatmate. She is baffled. It is, however, the best thing I know how to do for a person, and I learned it from you. Seventeen, Bell. Save me a slice of cake. — S xx

Iris — You asked, in February, what the point of a birthday was. I did not, in February, have a good answer. I have, since then, been working on one. The point, I have decided, is the room. The point is that on a Sunday in October, in a single quiet room — the kitchen at the back of the Hampstead house, the one with the long table and the window that opens onto the garden — the people who have watched you become yourself write down, properly, what they have been quietly noticing about you all year. And you read it, slowly, at your own pace, and then you keep it. The room is yours. The page is yours. Seventeen is yours. I have loved you, my careful girl, every day since the morning of October 11th, 2009, and I will keep loving you, in this register, in this room, on this Sunday in October, for as many years as we are given. — Mum.

Iris-the-second — Granny writing, from the kitchen table at the cottage in Norfolk on a Wednesday in October. You are seventeen. I was seventeen in October 1964 and I did not know, then, that I was going to be lucky. I know, now, that you are going to be lucky too, because you have the thing I had to learn, which is that you look properly at the thing in front of you before you decide what to think about it. It is the only useful inheritance I can give you, and you came by it yourself, which makes it better. The blue jug on the dresser is yours when you want it. So is the cottage, on Sunday mornings, for as long as I am in it. With my love, my second Iris — Granny.

Iris — Felix here, your annoying little brother, writing this at the kitchen table on a Tuesday because Mum said I had to and also because I wanted to. Things I have observed about you, aged twelve, for the record: (1) you always make me a piece of toast when you make yourself one, even when I haven't asked, even when I'm being annoying. (2) you helped me with my Latin homework every single Sunday last year and never told Mum or Dad I was struggling. (3) you let me come into your room when there's a thunderstorm and you don't make me feel stupid about it. you are, I am sorry to admit on the record, the best person in this house. happy seventeenth. — Felix

Iris — your cousin Tomas, writing from the desk in my room in Oxford, where I am supposed to be finishing the second chapter of the novel and am, instead, writing this. We are, as you know, the two writers in the family, and this puts a particular pressure on the birthday card. I want to say: the small notebook you carry, the dark green one, with the elastic, in which you keep sentences — I saw you, in August at the cottage, write something in it at the breakfast table without putting down your toast, and I thought, very clearly: she is doing it already. She is, at sixteen, doing the thing I started doing at twenty-two. Don't stop. Don't lose the notebook. Happy seventeenth, Bell. The chapter is, since you ask, still going. — Tomas.