by Meg Mason
I bit my thumbnail, then looked down at it for a second and peeled off a part that hadn’t torn completely. ‘Mainly, it’s like weather. Even if you see it coming, you can’t do anything about it. It’s going to come either way.’
‘Brain weather, as it were?’
‘I suppose. Yes.’
Robert said, ‘I’m very sorry for you. It sounds like it has been hard for a long time.’ I nodded, biting my nail again. ‘I wonder, has anyone ever mentioned —— to you, Martha?’
I moved my hand and said no, thank goodness. ‘It’s the only one I haven’t got, or been told I have. Although actually,’ I recalled as I spoke, ‘when I was maybe eighteen, one did say, a Scottish doctor said he couldn’t rule it out but my mother told him she could. She said the only thing it made me do was cry all the time; that I wasn’t a complete nutcase who thinks she’s Boudicca and that God talks to her through her orthodontia.’
‘No, of course. But may I say,’ he paused briefly, ‘the sort of symptoms your mother described, in such vivid terms, only exist in the popular imagination. Actual symptoms might include –’ Robert named a dozen.
I had been starting to feel uncomfortably hot and now my throat felt like someone had stuffed a rag down it. I swallowed. ‘I don’t really want —— though,’ I said and felt stupid, then rude.
He said, ‘I quite understand. As a condition —— is not well understood and undeniably, within the general public, it carries somewhat of a –’
‘Why do you think it’s that?’
‘Because typically it begins with –’ a little bomb going off in your brain when you’re seventeen. ‘And you will have been given –’ Robert listed every medication I had ever taken, all the familiar and long-forgotten names, then told me the clinical reasons why they would not have worked, worked poorly or made me much worse.
I swallowed again as the tears that had been an ache behind my eyes since he said it sounds like it has been hard for a long time began to spill down my face. Robert picked up a box of tissues and because it turned out to be empty, he took out his own handkerchief and passed it across the distance of carpet between us. I wiped my face and wondered who ironed this man’s handkerchiefs for him.
I asked him why no one else had thought of it, apart from the Scottish doctor who wasn’t even sure.
‘I would say it’s because you’ve been managing it so well, for many years.’
I could not stop crying because the only thing I thought I had managed well was being a difficult, too-sensitive person. Robert got up and poured me a glass of water. I made myself sit up straight and say thank you. I drank half of it, then said —— out loud to see what it felt like, applying that word to myself.
He returned to his chair, smoothed out his tie and said, ‘That’s my sense, yes.’
‘Well.’ I breathed in slowly and out again. ‘Hopefully it’s just the twenty-four-hour kind.’
Robert smiled. ‘I hear it’s been going around. Would you be interested to try what I generally prescribe for that, Martha? It tends to be very effective.’
I said alright and quietly looked out the window at the Victorian buildings on the other side of Harley Street while he began my prescription. They were so beautiful. I did not know if they had been built for sick people. I didn’t think so much trouble would have been taken if they had been. I turned back to Robert saying, ‘You’ll have to pardon the speed of my typing. I had a contretemps with a tomato.’ I asked him if he’d needed stitches. As he loaded the printer, he said a half a dozen in fact.
At the end, we came together at the door and Robert said he would look forward to seeing me again in six weeks. I wanted to say something more than thank you but all I said was, ‘You are a nice person’ in a way that embarrassed us both, and after shaking hands again, I turned and walked quickly back to the waiting room.
The receptionist took my payment and said, ‘That turned into a double appointment but it seems the doctor has put it through as a single.’
I asked her if that was rare. She said very.
*
Outside, I put on my coat against a wet mist and walked slowly towards the chemist on Wigmore Street. Part way, I stopped in the middle of the footpath and got out my phone. A man coming towards me on a scooter had to swerve out of the way. He said fuckssake watch it. I stepped back into the doorway of a closed-down restaurant and Googled ——, clicking on an American medical website that presents all its information in quiz format, or as articles with headings that read like a supermarket women’s magazine if you imagine them with exclamation marks. Ingrid used it before Hamish blocked it on her browser because, she told me, literally whatever symptoms you put in, you always have cancer.
I sat down on the step and scrolled down.
——: Symptoms, Treatments and More!
——: Myths and Facts!
Living with ——? Nine Foods to Avoid!
I wished my sister was with me, to take my phone and pretend to read on. Easy Weeknight Meals for People with ——! Five Weeks to a Flat Stomach for —— Havers. Think You’ve Got ——? It’s Probably Just Cancer!
I scrolled past —— and Pregnancy because I already knew what it would say and clicked on —— Symptoms: How Many Can You Name? I could name them all. If it were a game show, I would have a chance at the car.
*
I walked out of the chemist and, reaching the station, realised I didn’t want to go home. I decided to walk to Notting Hill instead. I had no reason for going there, except it would take a long time. It was starting to get dark when I got to the edge of the park. I walked along the cycle path, waiting to cry. The pill bottle rattled inside my bag with every step. I didn’t cry. I just looked up at the trees, their black branches dripping rain, and held Robert’s dry handkerchief inside my pocket.
At the top of the Broad Walk, I thought about Patrick accidently hitting Ingrid in the chest when we were teenagers, and now, at the Executive Home, cleaning up the mess I had left, waiting for me to get back from wherever I was.
I got my phone out as I walked. Contacts, Favourites, Patrick as HUSBAND. I did not know what he was going to say or what I hoped he would say. Continuing ahead I imagined him hugging me, asking me if I was okay. Being shocked, contesting Robert’s diagnosis, saying obviously we need a second opinion. Or ‘now I think about it, that makes sense.’ I put my phone away and left the park at the next gate.
Dark then, I went up Pembridge Road to Ladbroke Grove, then onto Westbourne Terrace. The organic supermarket where Nicholas and I worked had become a clinic offering laser hair removal and cosmetic injectables. The shops and bar on either side of it were still open but I was too wet to go inside. I just stood there for a minute, hearing my cousin. ‘Ideally, Martha, you want to figure out the reason why you keep burning your own house down.’ I turned and walked back down Pembridge Road to the station, letting myself get trapped behind slow-walking tourists because I still didn’t want to go home.
*
On the train back to Oxford, I called Goldhawk Road, expecting to hear my father’s voice. I had already tried to call Ingrid at Paddington to tell her about the appointment. Her autoreply said I Can’t Talk At The Moment. Now, exhausted, I just wanted to listen to my father talk about something uninteresting, knowing he would continue for some time as long as I said really at intervals.
My mother answered and said immediately, ‘He’s gone to the library. Ring back later.’
As a source of solace, I had always considered my mother many rungs below last resort. It is funny to me now, the line that spoke itself to me just then: Oh well. Port in a storm.
I said, ‘You and I could chat.’
My mother exaggerated her shock. ‘Could we? Alright. What have you been up to? That’s how these conversations are supposed to begin, isn’t it?’
I said, ‘I’m on the way back from London. I just saw a psychiatrist.’
‘Why?’
I told her I wasn’t sure.
It is funny, now, because she was the storm. Just about to break over my head.
‘Well I hope you didn’t believe a word he said. I’ve never known a psychiatrist who wasn’t full of shit. They want us all to be mad. It’s very much in their interest.’
She knew. My grip on the phone was so instantly rigid, it sent a little shock up my arm.
My mother said, ‘Are you still there?’
‘Do you remember that time when I was eighteen –’ saliva was flooding my mouth in the way that precedes vomiting ‘– you took me to a doctor who said I had ——?’ My right thigh started shaking. I tried to stop it with my hand.
‘I do not.’
‘He was Scottish. You knocked over his coat stand on the way out on purpose and refused to pay. His receptionist chased us to the car.’
My mother said, ‘What about it if I do remember?’
‘Why did you get so angry?’
There was a silence and I checked my screen to see if she had hung up. But the timer was ticking on and I put the phone back to my ear.
Finally she said, ‘Because he was trying to put some awful label on you.’
‘He was right though. Wasn’t he?’
‘How do you know.’ It wasn’t a question. She said it like a child in a sibling argument. How do you know.
I told her it didn’t matter. ‘You knew he was right. You have known the whole time and you didn’t say anything. Why would you do that to me?’
Both of my legs were trembling then.
‘I didn’t do anything to you. I told you, I didn’t want you to have to go through your life with that terrible label attached to you. If anything, I did it for you.’
‘But the thing about labels is, they’re very useful when they’re right because,’ I carried on through her attempt at interruption, ‘because then you don’t give yourself wrong ones, like difficult or insane, or psychotic or a bad wife.’ That was when I started crying for the first time since Robert’s office. I put my head down so my hair fell and hid my face but my voice was getting louder and louder. ‘My whole adult life I’ve been trying to work out what is wrong with me. Why didn’t you tell me? I don’t believe you it was about labels. I don’t believe you.’ A man across the aisle got up and ushered his son and daughter to seats further away. ‘You were perfectly happy for it to be other things. You let me think it was depression and everything else doctors told me. Why not this? Why didn’t you –’
She cut in then. ‘I didn’t want it to be true. ——’s a hateful disease. Our family has been ravaged by it. My family and your father’s. I’ve seen what it does, believe me, and I couldn’t bear the idea of it being you as well. I couldn’t. If that makes me a bad mother –’
‘Who?’
‘What do you mean?’
‘Who in our family?’
My mother exhaled and began speaking in the weary tone of someone commencing a list they know is long. ‘Your father’s mother, his sister who you never met. One or likely both of my aunts. And my mother, who you may as well know now did not die of cancer. She walked into the sea in the middle of February.’
She stopped and then, sounding exhausted, said, ‘And probably –’
‘– you.’
She said yes. ‘Me.’
‘Not probably though.’
‘No. Not probably.’
Out the window, the outskirts of London had been giving way to countryside. The train slowed down and stopped on a section of floodlit track. A dense flock of birds rose off a bare tree. I watched them until finally my mother said, ‘What do you want me to do?’
The flock separated into two, looped upwards and came back together. ‘You can stop drinking.’ I hung up, assuming my mother had already done the same.
I felt ragged. For the rest of the journey, my mind ranged through periods of illness. The memories came out of order. I tried to locate my mother in them but she was never anywhere. Coming into the station, I sent her a text message, telling her not to say anything to Ingrid or my father. She didn’t reply.
*
I let myself in to the Executive Home and went into the kitchen. Patrick and some number of colleagues were sitting around the table. There were bottles of beer in front of them. Someone had opened a bag of crisps, torn it open all the way. Now it was a greasy square of silver with only crumbs left on it.
Patrick said hi Martha and got up, making a gesture out of their view, as he came over, to indicate that he’d definitely told me about what was presently happening but I’d evidently forgotten. I moved my head away from his attempt to kiss me and, with an uncertain look, he sat back down.
One of the doctors, opening himself another beer, told me I was allowed to come and join them. Another one said it was a good idea, since they were just chilling. All the other doctors signalled their agreement, all the other useless, useless fucking, fucking doctors, with their doctorly confidence and doctorly way of owning a room and the air in it, telling me what I was allowed to do and deciding for me what was a good idea. I said no thank you and ran upstairs, leaving them alone to talk to each other with surety about what they knew, although no doctor I had ever met, except one, knew a fucking thing. Not even Patrick. My own husband, a doctor, had not worked out what was wrong with me. In all this time.
I had a shower. Afterwards I stood in the middle of the bathroom, dripping without a towel, looking at the plants and the £60 candle, the bottles of things. None of it was mine. All of it had been chosen by a woman who as far as she knew did not have ——, a woman who just thought she wasn’t good at being a person.
I pretended to be asleep when Patrick came up later. The next morning, once he left, I took one of the new tablets out of the bottle still in my bag. It was tiny and pale pink. In the kitchen I filled my hand with tap water, Me Cookie, and then went for a walk.
All the way, I thought about my diagnosis. The fact that, in receiving it, the mystery of my existence had been solved. —— had determined the course of my life. It had been looked for and never found, guessed about, never correctly, suspected and disqualified. But it had always existed. It had informed every decision I had ever made. It made me act the way I did. It was the cause of my crying. When I screamed at Patrick, it put the words in my mouth; when I threw things, it was —— that raised my arm. I’d had no choice. And every time in the last two decades that I’d observed myself and seen a stranger, I had been right. It was never me.
I could not understand, now, how it had been missed. Less and less as I kept walking. It is not uncommon. Its symptoms aren’t hidden. They can’t be disguised by the afflicted person in its throes. It should have been obvious to Patrick, the observing person, all along.
*
He came home that night and apologised that I hadn’t remembered about the thing last night. I was standing at the sink, filling a glass. I looked over my shoulder and saw him hovering in the doorway, holding a plastic bag with something in it. He asked me how my day was. I said fine and turned the tap off. He appeared to me, then, with his plastic bag, unintelligent. An uncertain person, unquestioning. I asked him to move and he stepped aside. He said sorry when my elbow knocked into him on the way past and I was filled with disdain for a man who was so kind, and obedient, and oblivious.
30
MY FATHER RANG and asked if I could come into town and have lunch with him. I assumed he wanted to talk about what my mother had told him and our argument on the train because he mentioned straight away that she wasn’t going to be home, as though he knew I’d say no if she was.
I had thought about her constantly in the week that had passed since my appointment, enacting conversations with her in my mind, phone calls, scratching out letters listing every one of her crimes, all the ways she had hurt my sister, and me, and my father, as far back as I could remember. Pages about her dereliction of duty as a mother – her choosing to make ugly statues out of rubbish instead of caring for us. About her drinking and falling down, her stupid cr
uelty towards Winsome, her being fat and unimportant, the embarrassment of my life and now I never wanted to see her again.
Patrick kept asking me if I was alright. He kept telling me I seemed a bit preoccupied. A bit stressed. He wondered if something had happened. But my mother left no room for Patrick – his failure to notice there was something wrong with me was so much less than her effort to pretend there wasn’t, her decades-long devotion to not noticing.
I told him to stop asking and he did, leaving me free to think about my mother to the exclusion of everything else, awake and in dreaming. Patrick and telling Patrick and Patrick’s possible reaction to my —— had become irrelevant to me. All I wanted was to hate my mother, and punish her and expose what she’d done. I said yes to lunch.
*
My father was in the kitchen buttering sandwiches when I arrived. We took them up to his study and sat on the sofa under the window, with our plates on our laps. He asked me what I’d been reading. I had been reading nothing and said Jane Eyre. He told me he ought to pick it up again as well, then after a brief hesitation, ‘Do you know, your mother hasn’t had anything to drink this week. Nearly six days.’
Tensing, I said, ‘Really. Well, did you know my mother has …’ and then I stopped. His face was so open. He looked so certain that I would be gladdened by the fact. That he even thought it was worth reporting. ‘Did you know she –’
He waited and in another moment, my reply still half-said, he picked up his sandwich. A little piece of cucumber slid out. He said whoops. It was unbearable. I did not want to hurt him, I wanted to hurt her. In some direct way, not through him. I just said, ‘Six days isn’t even her personal best.’
My father peeled back a corner of bread and put the cucumber back in. ‘I suppose not, no.’
‘Do you want to talk about the —— though?’
‘The what?’
‘My diagnosis. The new doctor.’
He apologised. He said he was drawing a bit of a blank.
My mother hadn’t told him. I assumed, for a second, in deference to my text. But then, of course not. I felt so tired.
