Sorrow and Bliss

by Meg Mason

  Julie Female and I worked together for months. She said we were doing good work. All that time she was careful never to reveal the particulars of her own life, as though I would be compelled to drive to her house on a non-therapy day and sit outside in my car for long periods if I ever discovered she liked swimming and had an adult son in the military.

  Then, one day, in the middle of a session, she said something-something my ex-husband. I looked at her left hand. By that time I knew all Julie’s jewellery and Julie’s mugs and skirts and all Julie’s different pointy boots. The nestling ring set was gone from her fourth finger, now noticeably thinner than her other fingers below the knuckle.

  Julie Female’s marriage had broken down while we were in her converted spare room doing good work. At the end, I told her that I had just remembered I wasn’t going to be able to make it the following week.

  Patrick was home when I got back, in the kitchen, wiping something off his elbow with the dish sponge. I told him what had happened.

  He said, ‘You can’t just not turn up from now on’ and suggested I call her. ‘You might change your mind and want to start seeing her again.’

  ‘I won’t,’ I said. ‘It’s like having a fat personal trainer.’ He frowned. ‘Sorry, it is though. I’m not being mean. It’s just, clearly you don’t understand what I’m trying to achieve.’

  Patrick put the sponge down, went to the fridge and took out a beer. Opening it, he said, ‘Would you write a letter?’

  ‘Probably not.’

  Now I wish Julie Female had told me to put £95 in a savings account twice a week and go for a walk.

  25

  INGRID HAS NEVER had postnatal depression but inexplicably after her second baby was born she started getting Botox. Thousands of pounds’ worth in her flawless, thirty-two-year-old face.

  Hamish asked why, after a session that immobilised the central third of her forehead. She said it was because one, she was tired of looking like someone who had been disinterred, and two, paralysing her face muscles meant she couldn’t communicate the depth of anger she felt towards her waste of space husband just by looking at him.

  In that case, he wondered if they should have marriage counselling. Ingrid said at best she would consider some sort of one-day thing but would not be doing weekly appointments. She did not need a therapist to excavate their problems while the babysitter’s meter ticked up in five-pound increments, since she already knew their issue was having two under fucking two.

  The only one-day thing Hamish could find was a group workshop. In the conflict resolution module, the facilitator shared that sometimes, in the middle of an argument, he or his partner might say something along the lines of, ‘Hey, let’s have a time out! Let’s go and get burgers!’ He said that it worked in almost every instance, especially in conjunction with sticking to I statements, and asked if there were any questions.

  Ingrid raised her hand and, without waiting, asked if say, a husband was constantly getting his wife pregnant – with boys – and provided as much help with them as someone with a secret second family, and the best me-time the wife had had in the last fourteen months was during an MRI, but the husband’s main worry was how much Botox his wife was having, not that she was so desperately exhausted and unhappy she fantasised all the time about being sent for another MRI, and they were always fighting, would the burger thing work then?

  Hamish turned to self-help audio books after that.

  *

  Ingrid left him when their second son was six months old. The baby was with her, wailing inside his sling, when she knocked on the door of the Executive Home on a Friday night. Patrick and I had already gone to bed. As soon as she was inside, she dumped her bag and told me that she couldn’t do it any more.

  We sat on the sofa and I held the glass of wine she had asked me to pour for myself, so that she could drink most of it but feel like technically she wasn’t drinking while breastfeeding. She told me that she had stopped seeing Hamish as a person. Now she only saw him as a source of ironing, and a sex pest because he still wanted to have sex with her. She would love to never have sex again, and if she had to, it wouldn’t be with him. I listened and a while later, Ingrid still talking, Patrick came through from the bedroom and said, ‘I’m not here,’ and went to work. I told Ingrid she could sleep in our bed with the baby.

  She looked at the time on her phone. ‘Don’t worry. I have to go.’

  ‘Go where?’

  ‘Home.’ She sighed in anticipation of standing up.

  ‘But you just walked out.’

  She emptied the rest of the wine into her mouth then said, ‘Martha. As if I would actually leave Hamish.’ She circled her hand above the sling. ‘As if I could do this by myself.’

  ‘But you said you have lost sight of him as a person.’

  ‘I know, but it’s no reason to ruin the weekend.’

  I knew she was joking but I didn’t laugh.

  Really, she said, it was just a question of toughing out the next forty years.

  I told her to please be serious. ‘Are you leaving Hamish or not?’

  Ingrid stopped smiling and said, ‘No. I’m not. You don’t just leave your husband, Martha. Not unless there’s a proper-proper reason or you’re our mother and you don’t give a fuck about anyone except yourself.’

  ‘But what if you’re unhappy?’

  ‘It doesn’t matter if you’re unhappy. It’s not a good enough reason. If you’re just bored and it’s all a bit hard and you don’t feel like you love them any more, who cares. You made a deal.’

  She got up and did something to the sling. I followed her to the door and, waiting for me to open it, she said, ‘I know this won’t mean anything to you because you’re not having them, but the best thing a mother can do for her children is love their father.’

  It didn’t sound like something my sister would have thought of and I asked her who said it.

  ‘Me.’

  ‘No, but who told it to you?’

  ‘Winsome.’

  I said, ‘When were you talking to Winsome?’

  We looked at each other, separately incredulous. In general, I spoke to my aunt once in April, when she rang up to talk about arrangements for Christmas, and not again until two weeks before Christmas, when she rang up to reiterate them.

  Ingrid said what, and narrowing her eyes, ‘I speak to her about fifty times a day. That’s if she is not already at my house, folding washing and making shepherd’s pies and doing all the other things my own mother should do but doesn’t because she is too busy making shit out of forks.’ She sounded so weary. I watched her press the heel of her hand into one eye and rub it back and forth.

  ‘But you can’t stand her,’ I said. ‘You gave birth on her floor for revenge because she offered you a chair with a cushion on it. You’ve always hated her.’

  ‘I hated her because we were supposed to. I never hated her myself, and even if I did, it would be hard to keep hating the only person who’s ever helped me without being asked.’

  ‘And it really is helpful? Having her around all the time?’

  ‘What? Of course it is.’

  I had no image of Winsome at my sister’s house. The thought of her there, and the two of them forming their own close, separate relationship, Ingrid relying on her instead of me, made me feel peripheral, and jealous of their proximity now that I was in Oxford.

  She said, ‘Don’t look like that Martha. You make me happy but you know you can’t actually help me.’

  For a second she disappeared into some private memory then said, ‘I didn’t know what it was going to be like. I really have to go.’

  I held the door open and Ingrid walked out ahead of me. She hugged me and then, pausing, said, ‘That’s another reason I wouldn’t leave my husband, Martha. Because I’d have to convince myself first that it was only about us and I didn’t owe anything to the people around us.’ She looked at me in a way that made me feel uncomfortable. ‘And I would never b
e able to do that.’

  I watched her go to the car and put the baby in the capsule, just the two of them inside the small cone of light. A minute later she drove away and reconciled with Hamish after their three-and-a-half hour separation.

  *

  Not long afterwards, they left London because Ingrid said she was sick of sandpits full of cat shit and condom wrappers. They moved to a village which collectively pretends Swindon isn’t right there.

  She called me while she was watching their furniture come off the truck and told me she already hated most things about it, in particular the people and everything they stood for, but had decided to endure it because it meant we were only forty minutes apart.

  I drove to see her the following day and sat at the island in her kitchen that had been described by the agent as ‘to die for’ instead of, Ingrid said, a future dumping ground for everyone’s shit and wallets. I coloured in with her son while she put away groceries, breastfeeding the baby at the same time even though he was so big now.

  She kicked a block of toilet rolls towards the laundry door and said if she had to characterise her stage of life right now, it would be spending two hundred pounds a week on paper products: kitchen roll, loo roll, pads, nappies, in such quantity that the trolley was full before you put anything else in. I stopped drawing and watched her retrieve a heavy bottle of milk from the floor, open the fridge with her elbow and swing it into the door without disturbing the baby. ‘If Sainsbury’s had one aisle that was dinner ingredients and absorbent shit, I would be in and out in two minutes.’

  Her son was trying to push a crayon into my hand so I would go back to what we were doing. Ingrid kept talking. I took the crayon and stared down at the page so she couldn’t see my face. ‘I’m legitimately jealous, you only shopping for two,’ she said. ‘Oh my gosh. You probably use a basket! You probably didn’t even know they sell toilet roll in forty-eight packs.’

  Later, at the door, she asked if I thought she was going to be able to do it, the house, the village. ‘You like it don’t you?’ Her son was on her hip, trying to make her look at a plastic car he was holding by putting it in front of her face. She kept moving his hand away. ‘As in, you’ve made it work. It was the right thing to do, because you’ve been good, and you and Patrick are good.’ Her voice went up at the end; they were all questions. She needed me to say yes.

  On her son’s next attempt, Ingrid took the car off him. He started crying and tried, with his tiny hand, to hit her in the face. She caught his wrist and held it. Her son started writhing and kicking his legs, holding the back of her hair with his free hand. Ingrid continued, undeterred. ‘So definitely, Oxford is better. Different-better but fundamentally – you like it.’

  I said yes. ‘You’ll be fine. It was a good idea.’

  ‘And you’re fine?’

  I said totally.

  ‘So no bathroom floor topics.’ It was another question. Or an instruction, a caution, or my sister’s hope.

  I said no so that I could leave and Ingrid could convey her son, still flailing, to the bad-choices chair.

  *

  Was it different-better. Fundamentally. In the car on the way home, I thought about our life in Oxford, with its walks and weekends, its dinners and author talks, minibreaks and exhibitions, Patrick’s important work and my very small work. I liked it no more or less than our life in London. It had been nearly two years. In the only way that mattered Oxford wasn’t different or better. There were still bathroom floor topics – Ingrid meant, the times I was so scared or leaden or in another way consumed by depression that I couldn’t move from whichever corner it had driven me into, until Patrick came, and put his hand out and pulled me up. Then, as always, in a day, a week, however long, I could go into the bathroom and think nothing about the corner where I’d previously trembled, cried, bit my lip, begged, except the whole floor could do with a mop.

  There was a prescription sticking out of a compartment under the radio. I’d put it there before so I would see it and remember to stop and have it filled on the way home. At a set of lights, I took it out. For some reason, the pharmaceutical company had opted to make their most potent antidepressant a chewable – designed to disintegrate on first contact with the tongues of suffering adults, coating it with a long-lasting taste of pineapple, then collecting as sand-like granules in the pockets of the mouth, ulcerating the gums, before reforming into a clag that burned on the way down. I had been taking it for so long. I was taking it before Patrick and I got married. I was taking it when I started throwing things and when I went to hospital. I was on it now. I wasn’t different or better.

  That night, I told Patrick I was going to stop taking it because it didn’t do anything. I said, ‘I don’t see the point. I’m exactly the same.’ I was watching him make dinner.

  He said, ‘Do you want me to make you a doctor’s appointment so she can tell you how to come off it?’

  ‘No. You just come off it by not taking it.’

  Patrick stopped his knife halfway through an onion and put it down next to the board.

  I said it’s fine. ‘I’ve done it millions of times. And I don’t want to see any more doctors either. I just want to be. I’m so tired Patrick. I was seventeen.’ I pressed my eyes so I wouldn’t cry. ‘I’m thirty-four.’

  He said he got it, it had been quite a while, and came over, letting me stand in his arms for a long time. My face into his shoulder, I said, ‘I don’t even want to take the pill any more either. I can’t swallow another tablet.’ I don’t know why I said please.

  Patrick put his hand on the back of my head. He said of course, it was totally fine. He’d rather I came off antidepressants under supervision but he could see how I’d just want to be off everything really, if I didn’t think it helped. He said, who knows. ‘Maybe this is just you.’

  *

  I asked Ingrid what to use instead of the pill. She said the implant thing. If I touched the inside of my arm, I could feel it under my skin.

  *

  The year that followed was indistinct from any before it. Near the end of it Ingrid called and said, ‘Literally, why do I always do pregnancy tests in Starbucks toilets?’ And this time, she told me, it was a Swindon Starbucks which made it even worse.

  ‘Are you pregnant?’

  ‘Of course I am.’

  ‘Don’t you have the implant thing?’

  ‘I didn’t get around to it.’ Her bursting into tears made a noise like static in my ear and then I heard her say, ‘Three under fucking five, Martha.’

  26

  HAMISH’S FAMILY HAS a house in Wales. Once she had three under fucking five, Ingrid started making me go there with her whenever Hamish went away for work, even though it depressed us both. There was nothing to do at the house. The nearest town has a Morrisons, a leisure centre and a slag heap.

  The baby was a month old the first time we went. Because all three were asleep in the back as we drove into the town, we were not allowed to stop. Ingrid said we would be circumnavigating the slag heap until this lovely micro-holiday was over. ‘Don’t you think –’ she put an indicator on ‘– you can’t make a joke about a slag heap that’s funnier than just saying slag heap?’

  I told her it was the best objective correlative I’d ever heard.

  She glanced across from the wheel and looked annoyed. ‘Can you please not say things that you know I don’t understand because my brain is a solid wad of wet wipes at this point.’

  ‘Two things that when you put them together in a poem make the reader feel whatever emotion you want them to so you don’t have to expressly name it. As in, if you write slag heap it saves you the job of typing morbid existential despair.’

  ‘I didn’t ask you to explain it but that’s fine.’ She tugged out her ponytail with one hand. ‘Does Dad know about it though? Maybe that’s where the money is.’ One of the children made a noise and Ingrid lowered her voice. ‘If you can get the words slag heap into Waitrose magazine, I will give y
ou one thousand pounds.’

  ‘Do they have to be next to each other?’

  ‘If they are, I will give you a thousand pounds and a child of your choice. But not the baby because he can’t talk and ask me for things.’

  The eldest one woke up as we were passing the leisure centre again and started crying, louder and louder, because he wanted to go swimming. Ingrid started crying because she was too tired to say no a second time. Pulling into the car park, she said, ‘And this is where MRSA was invented.’

  I started breathing through my mouth as soon as we were inside.

  In the change rooms, three little girls were crouched in the middle of the flooded floor trying to get back into their school uniforms. They could not get their tights on by themselves and were taking turns to point out that they were going to get in so much trouble if they didn’t hurry up. I watched them while I was holding things for Ingrid and saw the smallest one give up and drop her head into her hands.

  I wanted to go over and help her but Ingrid said talking to a child in the context of a swimming pool changing room was basically asking to be put on the sex offenders’ register. ‘Also, can you please help me? Take this.’ She handed me some kind of special nappy and told me to put it on the baby.

  A moment later, a teacher appeared and stood in the entrance with her hands on her hips. She was incongruously dressed, in a clingy wrap dress and high heels protected from pool water by the supermarket bags she had put on each foot and knotted around her ankles. Ingrid and I both stopped what we were doing when she started shouting. The little girls froze until she was gone, then became more frenzied in their efforts to get dressed, saying we’re going to get left behind, we’re going to get left behind. The smallest one burst into tears.

  I put the baby back in his pram. Ingrid said seriously don’t as I went over and, crouching down, asked the girl if she would like me to help her with her laces. She raised her head and nodded slowly. The laces were wet and grey. I told her it was difficult, getting dressed in a hurry and she said, especially because the pool made her legs go sticky. Her ankles were impossibly thin; she seemed too fragile to be in the world. Once I was finished, she sprang up and ran after her friends.