by Meg Mason
For a while she lay next to me and stroked the inside of my arm, talking to me about Hamish’s annoying sister and the tenets of the South Beach Diet. Eventually she said she was going to go so I could sleep. She put her feet on the floor but remained on the edge of the bed. ‘Martha, it’s going to be okay. You’ll get over it much faster than you think, I promise.’
I sat up and leaned against the wall, arms around my legs. ‘We were going to have a baby.’
Ingrid’s face fell. She reached for my foot and held it. ‘Martha.’ Her voice was so quiet. ‘You said –’
‘It was Jonathan’s idea.’
‘So you didn’t really want one. He talked you into it.’
‘I let him.’
She frowned, I first thought at me, but it was disdain for Jonathan. ‘He is such a fucking car salesman.’ She squeezed my foot and said she was so sorry. But then, ‘Thank goodness it didn’t happen. Can you imagine, having Jonathan Fucking Annoying Face for a father.’
Ingrid let go of my foot and said she’d come back later; that it was still going to be okay.
My mother entered as she was going out, stopped a short way in and looked at the ivy for a moment. ‘I can’t remember if I put water in that or not.’ Then she turned to leave again but paused at the door and said, ‘Martha. Jonathan is a shit.’
*
In the morning, I started putting away the clothes Hamish had packed then stopped, realising I did not want any of them. Things I had acquired while Jonathan and I were together, things that I had owned before, now poisoned by some association with him. The drawer I had opened wouldn’t close again. Behind it, I found a half-used box of pills from a previous era, a brand I didn’t recognise, prescribed by a doctor whose name meant nothing, for whichever pathology he/she thought I had. I took some and hoped they would make me feel better even though they were so far past their use-by date.
*
It was a sort of muscle memory that compelled me out of my room and down flights of stairs to the kitchen when the phone started ringing. Answering it had been added to the list of duties my mother conscientiously objected to a long time ago, an interruption to her repurposing like cleaning and cooking and raising daughters. Often her shrieking somebody bloody answer that would see my father and Ingrid and me congregated in the same room, a minute later, as if we had been mustered by a fire alarm. I had forgotten about it, and although I hated it at the time, the same feeling of slipping in socks off the front of each carpeted stair made me feel nostalgic for the four of us at home. But only by the definition Peregrine taught me once, later – ‘the original Greek, Martha.’
It was Winsome, ringing to talk to my mother about plans for Christmas, which, she pointed out, was nearly upon us, with it being suddenly September. She did talk about Christmas – to me, because my mother did not respond to my calling out – rapidly and with an edge of hysteria in her voice for a number of minutes after I answered her question as to why I was there.
She was flirting with the idea of a buffet, Jessamine was bringing a boyfriend, something was being painted, something may or may not be finished in time – I was looking out the window at a blackbird pushing its beak into the same bit of grass over and over again. ‘And Patrick won’t be with us.’ He was overseas – Winsome could hardly imagine the day without him but, she said, in compensation we would be seeing much more of him afterwards, now that he was near finishing at Oxford and coming up and down to organise a job, staying with Oliver who had just bought in Bethnal Green – why there, she did not know.
She went on to list the deficiencies of the flat itself, but I could not move past the image of Patrick in the street outside Jonathan’s apartment, the sense of him looking only at me before he turned the corner. Then, I believed what Oliver said. I didn’t any more. In the short course of my marriage the idea had come to feel absurd. Winsome concluded her list but said, ‘At least it isn’t in one of those awful glass towers that are all surfaces and sharp corners.’ Her first and final word on Jonathan.
*
The lady behind the counter at the Hospice Shop would not accept my wedding dress. Piece by piece, she was emptying my clothes out of the bin bags I had carried in. I was wearing the only outfit I would own once I left – jeans and a Primark sweatshirt that Ingrid bought two of because they were £9 and had the word University printed on the front, which, she said, made it clear to people that we’d been educated at tertiary level but weren’t so desperate for approval we needed them to know where.
My wedding dress was underneath other things and when she tugged it out by its sleeve and I told her what it was, the lady gave a little gasp. Aside from the fact something as lovely as that should be in tissue paper and a proper box, she was sure I would regret parting with it. Her eyes darted to my left hand. I was still wearing my wedding rings and, assured by their presence that she had not said something unfortunate, the lady smiled and said, ‘You might have a daughter to give it to one day.’ She was going to nip out the back and see if she had something better for me to take it home in.
Once she was through the curtain, I left without my dress and started walking home. It had begun to rain and water was sluicing across the pavement and spilling into the gutters. At the first corner, I stopped and twisted off my rings, wondering if it was form for a woman in my circumstances to toss them down the drain then walk on, emancipated. It was the kind of gesture that would have made Jonathan roar with laughter and say, ‘Brilliant.’ I zipped them into the coin bit of my purse and kept going.
Hamish put them on eBay. With the money, I bought my father a computer and gave the rest to a community organisation that opposes the development of apartment buildings like Jonathan’s.
10
THE JOB I never went back to after my honeymoon was my job at World of Interiors. A final letter, readdressed by Jonathan, arrived at Goldhawk Road. Due to my delinquency, I had been formally released from employment.
Sitting on my bed, I wrote to Peregrine. I wanted to apologise for disappearing instead of resigning properly, and not being brave enough to tell him why I couldn’t come back. I tried but could not, after many drafts, make the real reason sound amusing. In the letter I sent in the end, I told him that I had run out of descriptors that could be applied to chairs. I said I had nothing left except ‘nice’ and ‘brown’ and I was so grateful and sorry and I hoped we could stay in touch.
His reply came back on a monogrammed card the same week. It said, ‘Better for a writer to run than give in to the siren call of thesaurus.com. Lunch soon/always.’
*
According to my father I needed to recuperate emotionally before I even thought about trying to find another job. I was in his study looking at a recruitment website and had selected Greater London, then found myself at a loss.
Because recuperating emotionally was impossible in my room, the soundtrack of my mother’s repurposing coming constantly through the window, he invited me to spend time in his study like I was seventeen – he didn’t say that part, but we were both aware of it. For a few days I did, but the work of writing poetry had become visibly less enjoyable since then. Now, it involved more getting up and chair scraping, walking around the room and sighing and reading the poetry of other writers aloud, which he said helped him get in the zone, although obviously not enough.
I moved downstairs to the kitchen and started writing a novel. The sound of his labour was audible from above. I began going to the library. I liked it there but the novel kept steering itself towards autobiography and I couldn’t steer it back. I imagined myself speaking at a writers’ festival and being asked by someone in the audience how much of the book was based on my own life. I would have to say all of it! There’s not a single shred of invention in its four hundred pages! Except the section where the husband – who is blond in real life and unmurdered – decides to relocate his expensive coffee machine to another part of the kitchen and when he picks it up, brown water from the collection tray cas
cades down the front of his white jeans.
That scene and every other seemed to vibrate with brilliance and humour as I typed them. The next day they read like the work of a fifteen-year-old with encouraging parents. Altogether, I could see how much it lurched in style towards whatever I was reading at the time. A confusing mix of Joan Didion, dystopic fiction and an Independent columnist who was serialising her divorce.
I gave up and started reading large-print romance until I realised I had made friends with the elderly contingent who also spent their days in the silent area because, by the time they invited me to lunch at The Crepe Factory, it did not seem remarkable that I said yes.
*
Nicholas moved into Goldhawk Road a month after I did, making the house feel, to my mother, like a temple of unemployment. He arrived from residential rehab unannounced and told us he would be back to self-medicating in twenty-four hours if he had to go back to Belgravia.
Because he had always been unpredictable in ways that reminded me of my mother, and periodically depressed in ways that reminded me of me, I had always liked Nicholas the least out of my cousins. But his being there meant Oliver began coming over at night to watch television with him, or sit while he stepnined his former friends by phone.
Oliver brought his laundry, and he brought Patrick whenever he was in London because although the flat in Bethnal Green was conveniently situated, he told me, between a takeaway that specialised in all world cuisines and Yesmina Fancy USA, purveyor of human and artificial hair extensions, it did not have a washing machine, hot water after five p.m. or what the estate agent said he was legally allowed to advertise as a bathroom.
Patrick and I met in the kitchen, the first time he came to the house. I was emptying the dishwasher and a wet bowl slipped out of my hand when he came in.
He looked the same. I had moved in and out of an apartment, been married, abroad, ill and thrown out, and Patrick was wearing the shirt he’d had on at Jonathan’s dinner, the last time I had seen him. I could not make sense of it, that I was entirely changed and he wasn’t changed at all. I got down and started cleaning up, remembering it had only been three months.
He came over to help me and there with him, kneeling opposite, not saying anything except to tell me that some of the smaller bits were really sharp, Patrick’s sameness seemed to collapse time, until none had passed, nothing had happened and it was just the two of us, picking up bits of bowl.
I did not expect him to say, all of a sudden, ‘I’m sorry about Jonathan.’
I said yes, right and got up quickly to go and get a broom because I did not want to cry in front of him. He wasn’t in the kitchen when I came back with it, and there weren’t any broken pieces left on the floor for me to sweep up.
Oliver and I hadn’t revisited the topic of our conversation under the awning or acknowledged the conversation itself since we had it. I did not know if he had told Patrick, whose level of discomfort in the kitchen wasn’t obviously higher than it always was whenever he was around me. I did not know if Patrick had detected mine. Because of it, I didn’t join them in the living room that night, or any night afterwards. Still, when they were there and I could hear the television, the sound of their voices, the thump of the dryer in the under-stairs cupboard, food being delivered, I felt less on my own.
*
Early in the morning, Nicholas went on walks and filled the rest of his day by going to meetings and journalling and talking to his sponsor on the phone. Having deduced, in a short time, that I had even less to do than he did, he asked me if I wanted to go with him.
That day, we made our way from Shepherd’s Bush to the river, along it as far as Battersea; the next, all the way to Westminster. From then on, we took circuitous routes to the city, followed canals, went up into Clerkenwell and Islington, inventing ways home that took us through Regent’s Park, eventually walking for so many hours a day that we started buying energy bars and Lucozade. By the time we had worked through every flavour varietal, I loved Nicholas. He felt like my brother, and never asked why I was twenty-six and jobless and living with my parents and why I only owned one outfit. When I volunteered it, he said, ‘I wish marrying a total fuckwit was the worst life-choice I’d ever made.’
But, he told me, ‘Everything is redeemable, Martha. Even decisions that end up with you unconscious and bleeding in a pedestrian underpass, like me. Although ideally, you want to figure out the reason why you keep burning your own house down.’ We were somewhere in Bloomsbury, sitting on the edge of a fountain in a gated garden. I asked him why he kept burning his house down, then said he didn’t need to talk about it if he didn’t want to.
He did. He said no one ever talking about anything when he was growing up was the reason.
I told him Ingrid and I were always desperate to ask about his origins.
Nicholas said, ‘God, my origins.’
I’d said it the way Rowland did. I thought he would find it funny but it was clear he didn’t.
I apologised. ‘It must have been horrible, having something about you that was unspeakable.’
Nicholas sniffed. ‘Being something unspeakable, you mean. If you were so desperate to ask questions, why didn’t you? Did your parents tell you not to or something?’
I said no. ‘We just assumed we weren’t allowed. I don’t know why. Probably because we never heard anyone in your family mention it and,’ I considered it, ‘I think, for me, it was like I didn’t want to be the one to break the bad news.’
‘It’s not like I didn’t know I was adopted though is it?’
‘No. The bad news you weren’t white.’
He said what? so loudly that people turned around, then grabbed me by my shoulders. ‘Why am I only hearing this now Martha?’
‘I’m so sorry Nicholas, I thought you knew.’
He released me with a little backwards push and said he needed to keep walking, to process. Maybe, he said, on a level he’d suspected but still, it’s a massive shock, hearing someone say it. I told him I understood it would be a huge blow.
Out of the gate Nicholas put his arm around me and said, ‘Martha you are a fool.’ We walked like that for a while, back through Fitzrovia. Later, we turned up towards Notting Hill. I asked him if he thought we should be eating more carbohydrates. He said Martha, we should be getting jobs.
*
There was a sign in the window of a small organic supermarket we passed on Westbourne Grove advertising casual vacancies in all departments. Even though we lacked essential retail experience, we were both hired, I think, because as a recovering addict and spurned wife who walked for miles every day, we both had the requisite pallor and wasted bodies of health shop employees.
Nicholas was put on night fill. The manager asked me if I would prefer register or café. I told her that, as an insomniac, I was also interested in evening work. She glanced at my biceps, said, ‘Register,’ and sent me home with a sample of herbal sleep tonic that tasted like supermarket salad leaves that had decomposed in the bag.
We didn’t go on walks any more. On breaks, I ate ham sandwiches from Pret and drank the ultimately best flavour of Lucozade, hiding in the stockroom because meat is murder and, I overheard the manager telling a customer, sugar is microbial genocide basically. Even though Nicholas was still at Goldhawk Road, I missed him.
11
THE LAST TIME I saw Jonathan was at his office. I went there to sign our finalised annulment papers. It had been six months by then since I had skedaddled. I stood in front of his desk waiting as Jonathan checked every page with uncharacteristic diligence then pushed them towards me, smirking. ‘All I can say is thank God you didn’t manage to get pregnant. Someone with your tendencies.’
I snatched up the papers and reminded him that it had been his idea. ‘But yes, thank God you didn’t manage to get me pregnant, Jonathan. A baby I didn’t want in the first place turning out to have a genetic predilection for cocaine and white jeans.’ I left before he could say anything else.
*
Outside, on my way to the bus, I walked past a rubbish bin and tossed the papers in without stopping, unable to imagine a situation that would require me to present a hard copy record of my abortive marriage or where I would keep them in my bedroom at Goldhawk Road unless I dragged one of my father’s filing cabinets upstairs and put them under A for Agonising Fuck Ups ’03 – ’04.
At a set of lights, I got off the bus and walked half a mile back to the rubbish bin. The papers were still there, under a McDonald’s cup that had been tossed in full and split its lid. Without them I had no proof that I wasn’t married to a man who, Ingrid told me while evacuating me from his apartment, scored nine out of ten on an online questionnaire she had done on his behalf called Are You a Sociopath?. I lifted them out, the pages now a single clod, and carried them by one corner to find another bus, dripping Fanta down the side of my leg.
For half an hour, the bus crawled along Shepherd’s Bush Road. Traffic lights changed, and changed again, without admitting any cars to intersections already jammed. There was no one else on the upper deck and I sat with my forehead against the glass, looking down at the footpath and then, as it came into view, through the wide front window of a café where a woman was breastfeeding a baby and reading. To turn the page, she had to put the book on the table and keep it open with the heel of her hand while swiping her fingers right to left. Before she began reading again, she would drop her face enough to kiss the baby’s hand that had got a tiny grip on the edge of her shirt. After a few minutes, I saw a pregnant woman get up from another table and go over. They started talking to each other, the one touching her stomach and laughing, the other patting her baby’s back. I could not tell if they were friends, or like-strangers compelled to acknowledge their shared fecundity. I did not want to be either of them.
I told Ingrid that I had let Jonathan change my mind. As she understood it, it was a brief reversal of a life-choice.
