Sorrow and Bliss

by Meg Mason

  We ran back to the car, holding our clothes and shoes. It took a long time to get dressed in the front, hot air roaring out of the vents, talking so fast about what we’d just done.

  I said, we are the best.

  Patrick said, do you feel like chips, so badly?

  We drove out and found a pub. It was empty apart from an old couple sitting at a table on the other side of the room and a woman behind the bar polishing glasses. We ate chips and drank beer on a sofa in front of a fire, and I was so warm and so clean.

  ‘Do you ever think we’re the best, Patrick?’

  He said no. ‘But we probably are. No one else would have done that.’

  I said I know. ‘Anyone else would have been too scared. We’re the only ones.’

  Patrick said, ‘Are you super, super conscious of having no underwear on?’

  ‘There’s no one here,’ I said. ‘We are the only people in the world.’

  28

  I READ AN article in a Sunday magazine about a newly classified disorder. The journalist, a sufferer himself, described Boarding School Syndrome as a sort of PTSD/attachment disorder hybrid being silently endured by a mass of British men who had been incarcerated since the age of six, at the will of their own parents. Symptoms, he said, included excessive self-reliance, the inability to ask for help, ‘pride in endurance’, an overactive moral compass and repression of emotions, chiefly negative ones.

  Patrick was watching a ball sport on television, next to me. Some time had passed since the miscarriage, not enough that I had stopped counting it in weeks.

  I pushed my foot into his thigh and said, ‘Can I do you a quiz?’

  ‘This only has ten minutes to go.’

  ‘I want to see if you have Boarding School Syndrome.’

  ‘Ten minutes.’

  I raised my voice above the commentary and said okay, question one. ‘Do you struggle to ask for help from others?’

  Patrick said no and to the rest as I read each one out, most adamantly to the question of whether he struggled with emotional attachment, on the basis that he had been emotionally attached to me since he was fourteen. I got to the end of the list and pretended I hadn’t.

  ‘There’s a few more.’

  ‘Can I just watch the penalty?’

  ‘Record it.’

  Patrick sighed and turned it off.

  ‘Do you experience a violent emotional reaction to certain foods, chiefly scrambled eggs with a high water content, vegetables from the brassica family, and/or any liquid that acquires a skin when it is boiled, such as milk or custard?’

  Patrick looked at me, sure but not sure I was making it up.

  ‘Aside from at home, do you feel most comfortable eating in the canteen at your work because your food comes on a tray? And, would you agree, or disagree, that it may be because you weren’t allowed to pick what you ate until you were eighteen that you are, as an adult, the slowest menu orderer in the world, and sometimes your wife feels like she might die in the yawning expanse of time between the waitress asking you what you would like and you actually being able to say?’

  Patrick turned the television back on.

  ‘Until it was pointed out, by her, after you got married, did you know you ate with your head down defending your plate with one arm?’ He was turning the volume up. I shouted. ‘If you answered mostly As, you are the mental one in your relationship, not your wife as everyone has previously supposed.’

  I thought he was pretending to be irritated by my stupid quiz and only realised he wasn’t when he suddenly got up and left the room without turning the television off again. I rose and followed him into the kitchen, apologising, without a specific sense of what I was apologising for. He moved from the cupboard to the sink, to the fridge like I wasn’t there. It was humiliating. I went upstairs and shut myself in the box room.

  For some time, I sat in my chair and snipped off split ends with desk scissors, then turned on my computer, planning to wishlist things on The Outnet. Instead, I went to the magazine’s website and read the article again, feeling guilty and then sad, then scared. I closed it, hearing him come upstairs.

  Patrick entered but didn’t say anything. I turned around, and because he remained mute I said, ‘I think we should have counselling.’ I did not mean it. I said it the way I always did – to be wounding, in retaliation for a perceived crime, and was shocked when he said so do I.

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Martha, because.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Because of the river incident.’

  I could not look at him then and picked up the scissors again.

  He said, Martha. ‘Can you please stop cutting your hair. Tell me why you think we need counselling.’

  ‘Because you have Boarding School Syndrome.’

  *

  He left the house and I went into the bathroom to find the tranquillisers I had been given by an after-hours doctor Patrick took me to at the conclusion of the river incident. I wanted to see when exactly it was that I had got up in the middle of the night and gone outside, walking, then running as fast as I could along the towpath, until Patrick caught up to me at the first cross-bridge.

  I was climbing onto the side of it. He put his arms around my waist and tried to get me down. I fought him and accidentally scratched his face. His energy outlasted mine and he walked me back and drove me to the doctor, while I said sorry over and over and over again.

  I picked up the pill bottle and read the date on the label. It seemed wrong. I went to bed, even though there were hours of daylight left because I felt so ashamed, I couldn’t bear to be awake.

  It was a dream about the baby – the thing that woke me and told me to run along the river, because what if she was there. Two nights before.

  *

  We had one session with a therapist. She was white but dressed as if she had come directly from a Kwanzaa celebration and said, ‘Not to worry!’ when neither of us could articulate why we’d come.

  Patrick could not say, ‘Because on a recent occasion, my wife behaved like a psychotic, and much older, Anne of Green Gables in the Lady of Shalott episode.’

  I could not say, ‘Because I have lately discovered that the pillars of my husband’s personality, the qualities for which he is so broadly admired, the exceptional stoicism, emotional equanimity and never complaining, are actually just symptoms of a newly classified disorder.’

  ‘The point is, you have come.’ The therapist said that was a great sign and asked us to hop up, directing us to the two chairs that were in the middle of the room, already facing each other and close enough that when we sat down our knees were touching. She told us that because it was very common for partners who’d been together some time to stop looking into each other’s eyes, she always started by getting couples to do just that – stare at each other with total concentration and no talking for three minutes. She would simply observe.

  Some seconds into the exercise, a quick succession of electronic alerts came from the handbag at her feet. Patrick and I turned at the same time, to see her reach into the bag and feel around for her phone, saying, ‘I should get that, in case it’s my daughter wanting a ride.’ Once found, she swiped the screen and said without taking her eyes off it, ‘Ignore me. Keep going. I just need to very quickly reply to this.’

  Patrick does not hate anything, except swordfish as a food and in nature, joke presents and, as an iPhone option, the audible keypad. As the therapist composed her reply, each letter clicked like Morse code. He looked at me in disbelief, silently mouthed the words ‘No way’ after the therapist leaned forward to put her phone away but levered up again when it beeped twice more in her hand. ‘Honestly, sorry you two. She’s sixteen. They think the world revolves around them at that age.’

  Patrick got up, apologised for realising that he had forgotten to do something and needed to do it straight away. The therapist looked bewildered as he ushered me out of her office.

  We were suddenly outside, r
unning across the road, hand in hand, towards a bar. We drank champagne, then tequila. I told Patrick we were like two people who had decided to turn themselves in but, in the moment of surrender, they had realised that as exhausting as it was to keep running and surviving and not give up, the alternative is worse. I said, ‘Because the alternative is other people.’

  Patrick said, ‘For me, it’s being by myself.’

  Outside, on the curb, he took my hand again. We were looking for a taxi but then he pointed to a shop further along and said he wanted to pick up some items. We were both drunker than we had ever been together. It was a small chemist, staffed by a woman with a pinched face who did not find us funny. Patrick put wine gums and a toothbrush on the counter. He said, ‘Would you like anything darling?’ I picked up a shower cap and said I would like to wear it home, if the woman would be so kind as to scan it and give it back. He put everything on the counter and said, ‘All this and a packet of the house condoms please.’

  We kissed in the taxi and went to bed as soon as we got home. It was the first time since the miscarriage. Or, I was too drunk at the time to realise, the first time since I had conceived.

  As we were about to finish, Patrick stopped moving and said, ‘Sorry, keep going. I just need to check my phone in case someone’s been in touch about a ride.’

  ‘Martha,’ he said afterwards, lying next to me. ‘Everything is broken and messed up and completely fine. That is what life is. It’s only the ratios that change. Usually on their own. As soon as you think that’s it, it’s going to be like this forever, they change again.’

  That is what life was, and how it continued for three years after that. The ratios changing on their own, broken, completely fine, a holiday, a leaking pipe, new sheets, happy birthday, a technician between nine and three, a bird flew into the window, I want to die, please, I can’t breathe, I think it’s a lunch thing, I love you, I can’t do this any more, both of us thinking it would be like that forever.

  29

  A NEW ADMINISTRATOR joined Patrick’s hospital last year, in May. She had moved to Oxford for the lifestyle but her husband, a psychiatrist, was commuting back to London because he had just got rooms on Harley Street and, she said, we all know they’re like hen’s teeth.

  I met her at a charity dinner for a cause I can’t remember, even though the purpose of going was to have our awareness raised. She asked me what I did and I told her I created content so people could consume it. It was a job I had taken auxiliary to the funny food column, which I didn’t mention in case she read Waitrose magazine and realised I was that writer she hated.

  I said, ‘I also consume content, in a private capacity. Not content of my own creation in that instance, obviously. But either way, I am very much a part of the problem.’

  She laughed and I went on to tell her that whenever I was out and I saw a mother who was on her phone, I worried that it was my content she was consuming instead of looking into her child’s eyes.

  She said, ‘It certainly seems like we’ve lost the ability to not be on our phones, doesn’t it?’ and sounded wistful.

  ‘But I’m sure at the end of our lives we will all be thinking, if only I’d consumed more content.’

  She laughed and touched my arm and whenever, for the remainder of our conversation, she was imparting some information about herself, seeking to emphasise a point or making some observation, she would do the same – touch my arm, and if I said something she thought was funny, she would softly grip it. I liked her so much for that reason and because, although she asked me questions beyond what I did, she did not ask me if I had children.

  On the way home, I asked Patrick to find out the name of her husband the psychiatrist.

  I had not had a doctor for four years; I was not looking for one. But I made an appointment, I think because I wanted to see what kind of person he would be – if, being married to a woman like that meant he would be good. Therefore, unlike any doctor I had seen before.

  *

  A female receptionist told me that ordinarily I could expect to wait twelve weeks for an appointment but there had been a cancellation – very rare – and the doctor could see me at five o’clock this afternoon if I thought I could get there in time. I could hear her clicking her pen on and off while I held the phone with my shoulder and looked at the train times, then told her I could.

  The waiting room was dark and felt too warm because I had run most of the way from Paddington in a coat that was too heavy for May. The same receptionist said that ordinarily I could expect a long wait but the doctor would only be a minute. Also, she said, very rare. I stayed standing and played a game that my father invented for me at the beginning: how would I improve this room, if I was only allowed to remove one thing? I chose the visible price tag on the cyclamen, then turned at the sound of a heavy door opening across thick carpet. A man wearing moleskin trousers, a white shirt and knitted tie came out and said, ‘Hello Martha, I’m Robert.’ He shook my hand, firmly, as though he hadn’t presumed it would be limp.

  In his office he told me to sit wherever I liked, establishing himself in an ergonomic chair that had a wider armrest on one side to accommodate his notebook, open to a page that was empty except for my name. I sat and waited while he underlined it. Then with the other hand he smoothed his tie and I saw that his index finger was wrapped in a very white, professional dressing. It remained straight, separate from his other fingers, exempted from use.

  He looked up and asked me to start from the beginning. Why had I come to see him? And to my reply, which felt uninteresting as I delivered it, could I remember the first time I felt like this?

  Cyclonic, becoming rough or very rough. Occasionally good.

  I started with the day of my last A level, and I stopped at half past nine that morning, when I had gone outside with a bag of rubbish and a woman walking past holding the hands of two toddlers smiled at me and said I looked as tired as she felt. I stood still until she had gone, then went back inside with the rubbish bag and flung it down the hallway. It hit the wall and burst. I told him that Patrick would be the one to find it because I was here, and he would just clean it up, the spaghetti and the eggshells and still, after so much time, pretend that was a normal thing that wives did.

  Robert asked me if I threw things a lot or did anything else that I wouldn’t consider, ‘in your word, normal’.

  I told him about the time I had lifted a terracotta pot and shattered it against the garden wall. I told him about smashing my phone so many times against the kitchen tiles that pieces of glass got in my hand, about throwing the hairdryer at Patrick, the bruise it left, about driving my car on purpose into a metal guard rail in a car park, about standing with my back to the wall and banging my head over and over because it felt better than I did, about the days I could not get up, the nights I couldn’t go to sleep, the books I’d ripped up and clothes I had torn apart by their seams. With exception of the hairdryer, none were unrecent.

  I apologised to him and said it was completely fine if he couldn’t think of anything, in terms of helping me. As an afterthought I said, ‘The funny thing, not funny ha-ha but as in funny terrible, is that once it finishes and I feel normal, I see the leftovers, smashed bits of plate in the bin or whatever, and I think, who did that? I truly can’t believe it was me.’ I told him about Ingrid’s fashion crises. That he continued taking notes was peculiarly affecting to me. The grace of it, I think, his acting as though it was something worthy of his writing down.

  He turned the page in his notebook and asked me what diagnoses I’d been given by previous doctors. I said, ‘Glandular fever, clinical depression, then – this is in order –’ and proceeded to list them, one after the other until I was being boring and did a little laugh. ‘Most of the index of the DSM, really.’

  I looked around for the dictionary of mental illnesses that was always somewhere on display in the office of the kind of doctors I saw. It had become a dismal kind of Where’s Wally – trying to pick its
blood-red spine out of the shelves of psychiatric textbooks with titles that seemed intentionally menacing. But it wasn’t anywhere. I felt another surge of gratitude as I turned back and saw that he was waiting for me.

  ‘What I’m most interested to know is what diagnosis you’ve given yourself, Martha.’

  I paused as if I had to think about it. ‘That I’m not good at being a person. I seem to find it more difficult to be alive than other people.’

  He said that was interesting. ‘But based on the fact you’ve come here today, you must also think there’s a medical explanation.’

  I nodded.

  ‘What would you say it was, in that case?’

  I said, ‘Depression probably, except it’s not constant. It just starts for no reason or a reason that seems too small.’ I braced myself for him to take the laminated list out of his drawer, turn it towards me and make me do my Always, Sometimes, Seldom, Nevers.

  Toujours, parfois, rarement, jamais.

  Instead, he took a moment to recap his pen, laid it on the notebook and said, ‘Perhaps you can tell me what it feels like when you suddenly find yourself in the trenches, as it were.’

  I described it in the ways I had to Patrick, after his first exposure to it – that day in summer when we weren’t yet together – and so many times since. I said, ‘It’s like going into the cinema when it’s light and when you come out you’re shocked because you didn’t expect it to be dark, but it is.

  ‘It’s like being on a bus and strangers on either side of you suddenly start screaming at each other, fighting over your head and you can’t get out.

  ‘You are standing still and then you’re falling down a flight of stairs, but you don’t know who pushed you. There is no one behind you.

  ‘It’s like when you go down into the Tube and the sky is blue, and when you come out, it’s pouring with rain.’

  For a moment he waited as though there might have been more, then said those were interesting and very helpful descriptions.