Sorrow and Bliss

by Meg Mason

  My father said, ‘You’ll have to give me a bit of a clue.’

  I began to tell him what Robert had said.

  The interest on his face became concern and then total grief as I kept going. He said goodness. ‘Goodness me.’ Over and over. I could tell he wanted to believe me when I said, as some sort of conclusion, that it is good because it means I’m not insane.

  He said yes, okay. ‘I can see that and, supposedly, it does favour the brilliant. In fact –’ he put his plate aside and stood up, going over to his computer which was enormous and old, purchased with the money from Jonathan’s engagement ring ‘– let’s have a look.’

  He poked at the keyboard with his index fingers, saying slowly out loud, ‘Famous … people … with … ——.’ He pressed one more key and looked up at the screen, squinting at the slideshow he was being offered. I watched him try, with some effort, to guide the mouse towards its target. And I felt happy, unaccountably, except that I was with him, in this room where we had spent so much time and where I had always felt alright, if it was just us.

  He clicked and said, ‘Look, here we go. Right off the bat,’ reading out the name of the famous artist who appeared first. I looked at his black and white photograph and said it was a curious choice – the artist sitting on the edge of a bed, holding a rifle. ‘Didn’t he shoot himself in the head?’

  My father seized the mouse. Another dead artist appeared, then a dead composer and two dead writers as he kept clicking, faster and faster, in search of a better example. A dead politician and a dead television presenter. I watched, aware that I should have been upset by an online roster of suicides, but I wasn’t. For everything it had done to me, I had outrun it. More brilliant people, famous and unknown, had not been able to although they would have done so much to save themselves and I had done so little. I did not deserve to be alive instead of them. They had suffered, and lost. I had been told by a doctor that I had managed very well. I should not have been so lucky.

  After a series of dead actors, my father glanced over his shoulder and in a desperate voice said, ‘Who is that?’

  ‘He is a comedian who used to be addicted to painkillers. But he is still alive so that’s good.’

  ‘Yes.’ My father smiled feebly before turning back to the screen and skipping past a picture of a pop star he didn’t recognise either, in despair until finally he dropped back in his chair. He pronounced the name of an American poet, who was dead but of natural causes. Exhausted, but gratified. He said, ‘Well, I did not know that.’

  I laughed and said, ‘Amazing.’

  ‘It is amazing. My daughter and the architect of postmodernism!’

  I asked him if he thought we should go and make coffee and he leapt out of his chair and went ahead of me to the kitchen.

  *

  Late in the afternoon, at the front door about to leave, I hugged my father and with my cheek still pressed into his chest, the familiar feel and wool smell of his cardigan, I said, ‘Please don’t tell anyone about the ——. Ingrid or anyone. I haven’t told Patrick yet.’

  He stepped back. ‘Why not?’

  I looked down and smoothed out a kink in the carpet runner with my foot.

  ‘Martha?’

  ‘Because. I have been busy.’

  ‘Even so, even if you have –’ my father paused, trying to think of a kinder way to say don’t lie, you are never busy ‘– whatever the case, this is more important than anything else. It’s the most important thing. I’m surprised, if I’m quite honest.’

  I had committed so many crimes as his daughter and never, once, had my father been angry with me. He was angry at me now, for a crime of someone else’s.

  ‘Well,’ I said, ‘if I’m quite honest –’ my father flinched at my tone ‘– I haven’t had time to talk to Patrick because I’ve been trying to process the fact that your wife had this information all along and decided just to keep it under her hat. I mean yes, my daughter has been unwell on and off for most of her life and can be a touch on the suicidal side, but why burden her as to the reason. I’m sure it will all come out in the wash.’ I could not tell if it was still shock at the way I was speaking on my father’s face, or incredulity, or upset because he knew it was true. He only said Martha, Martha as I shoved past him and left, shutting the door with too much force. That I had not told Patrick did not seem wrong, until then. It had not made me feel guilty. But I walked to the station, heavy with conviction, hating my mother for that as well.

  *

  As the Tube passed out of a tunnel to a section of overland track, my phone rang inside my bag. I answered it and Robert’s receptionist told me Doctor wished to speak to me if I would kindly hold.

  I waited, listening to an unnerving section of Handel’s Messiah, until there was a click and then Robert saying hello Martha. He hoped he hadn’t caught me at a bad moment but he had realised this morning, reviewing my notes, that he’d failed to ask me one of the standard questions before giving a prescription – it was an oversight for which he was very sorry, although not a dangerous one in this instance.

  The Tube was coming into the next station and I could only just hear him over the recorded announcement. I apologised and asked him if he could say it again.

  He said of course. ‘You’re not pregnant or trying to be? I neglected to ask during our appointment.’

  I said no.

  Robert said marvellous and told me no change was required, as to the medication, he simply needed to check for his records, and now he could let me go.

  Over the loud beeping of the doors, I said sorry. ‘Just quickly, would it matter if I was?’

  He said beg your pardon.

  A group of teenage boys were trying to get into the carriage too late. One forced the doors and held them open while the others ducked under his arms. I wasn’t conscious of getting up but heard him call me bitch as I pushed him out of the way so I could get off.

  On the platform, I asked Robert again if it would matter if I was pregnant on this medication.

  ‘Not in the least, no.’

  The Tube tore away and in the total silence that fell then, I heard him say, ‘Any medication in this category and certainly the versions you’ve been prescribed in the past are all perfectly safe.’

  I asked him if he would mind waiting a moment while I found somewhere to sit down. Instead, I leaned over a rubbish bin and spat into it, holding my phone as far away as I could. Nothing came out even though a thick, vomitous feeling had appeared at the back of my mouth.

  Robert asked me if something was wrong. There was a row of seats next to the bin. I went to sit down but missed the edge and dropped onto my tailbone. The platform was empty now. I stayed there on the dirty ground. ‘No. Sorry. I’m fine.’

  He said good. ‘But should you find yourself becoming concerned later, I can assure you it’s perfectly safe, for mother and baby. Both pre- or postnatally. Thus, if this medication works and you decide to become pregnant, at a later point, you would not need to discontinue it.’

  It was like a dream where you try to stand up but you can’t, you need to run away from something but your legs won’t move. I tried to answer him but there were no words. After a time, Robert asked me if I was still there.

  I said I don’t want a baby. ‘I would be a bad mother.’

  I do not remember how his reply began, only that it ended by him saying, ‘If that belief is connected to a sense that you’re perhaps unstable or might present some risk to a child, I would only say that —— does not disqualify you from having children. I have many patients who are mothers and do very well. I have no doubt you’d be a wonderful mother, if it’s something you wanted. Really —— is not a reason to forego motherhood.’

  I told him I could not think of anything worse and laughed merrily as my hand went into a fist. I hit myself in the head. It didn’t hurt enough. I did it again. There was a spark of white behind my left eye.

  Robert said indeed, indeed. ‘I am here, should y
ou ever change your mind.’

  Another train was coming. I watched its progress towards me. A minute later I was standing up in a crowded carriage, staring at nothing, letting myself be thrown back and forwards as it jolted over the tracks and tore through the total darkness of the tunnel.

  *

  There was an airport car parked in front of the Executive Home. Patrick was standing beside the open boot, trying to help the driver put his suitcase into it.

  He saw me and let the driver take it, then jogged towards me looking unusually irritated. ‘I thought I wasn’t going to see you before I left. Did you see my calls?’

  I said no and made up some reason why not, but Patrick’s attention had shifted to whatever it was he’d just noticed on the side of my head.

  ‘What happened to your face?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  He reached out to touch it. I batted his hand away and started laughing.

  ‘Martha, what is happening?’ In frustration, he said for goodness sake, which made me laugh more.

  ‘Stop it. Martha, seriously. Stop. I’ve had enough.’

  ‘Of what? Of me?’

  ‘No. Damn it.’

  That was very funny as well.

  He was angry then and he said, ‘I’m going away, I’m not going to see you for two weeks. Why can’t you just be normal?’

  I was overtaken with laughter then. I said, ‘I don’t know, Patrick. I don’t know! Do you know? I don’t know. It’s a mystery. A complete mystery!’ and I walked into the house, sufficiently enlarged by the exchange that I could hate my mother and my husband at the same time as I did, from then on. Intentionally and unintentionally, they had both ruined my life.

  That night, I took my pink pill even though it didn’t really matter if I got better any more.

  31

  PATRICK WAS GONE for ten days. He texted. I did not reply except to tell him I was going to stay with Ingrid for the week, to which he said, ‘Great, have fun.’

  I said to her, a few days. I said, to help you out. And although it was unbelievable, she was too desperate for help to query it. And she was perpetually tired, often in tears because of the children, otherwise shouting at Hamish. The house was untidy and always loud with appliances and television and her friends and their children coming and going all day, the crying and door-slamming in the night, and I was perfectly invisible. Even when I could not contain my grief to my room, nobody noticed. I did not go home after a few days. I was still there when Patrick got back. He texted me. I said Ingrid wanted me to stay another week.

  Only once, in what became two weeks and then three, did my sister ask me how I was, and she did not query it either when I said I was amazing, or request information beyond that. I said nothing about Robert or Patrick. I told her I was not speaking to our mother and she was not interested in the specifics of why since she had been not-speaking to our mother at so many points, for so many reasons, in her own life.

  By the time he drove to the house, it had been a month since Patrick and I had seen each other. He walked in the open front door and came to the kitchen. Ingrid and I were at the table, helping the boys with their tea.

  He said, ‘It’s time to come home, Martha.’

  I did not intend to go with him but Ingrid leapt up and said yes, yes definitely, and started making a lap of the kitchen, collecting up anything that was mine. I put down the fork I was holding, a little ring of sausage on the end of it that I had been trying to coax into her middle son’s mouth. I thought I had been very helpful. My sister’s relief was so plain and she was so insistent that I could just go now and Hamish could bring all my stuff later that I stood up and followed Patrick out to our car, both of us carrying the various possessions she’d put in our arms.

  *

  My anger towards him did not diminish in the weeks after that. When I was with him, it was acute, fed by the way he drank from a cup, his teeth-brushing, his work bag, his ringtone, his laundry at the bottom of the basket, the hair on the back of his neck, his effort to be normal, his buying batteries and mouthwash, saying you seem unhappy Martha. It made me mean and baiting in conversation, dismissive or contemptuous. I was ashamed afterwards, but I could not resist my anger in the moment. Even when I resolved to be better, to talk to him, a sentence that started well ended hatefully. And that was why, mostly, I avoided being in the same room, or home at all if he was there.

  Alone, I felt grief. It was intense but not constant, and in between I felt an unnatural serenity that I had not experienced before. It was, I decided, the serenity of a cancer patient who has been fighting for so long, they are relieved by the discovery it is terminal, because they can stop now and just do what they like until the end.

  The only thing Patrick said in reference to the new way of things was that it had occurred to him, the other day, that it had been a long time since he had seen me cry. He said, ‘I guess you’ve finally worn out the mechanism’ and ‘ha-ha’, the words not the sound.

  That was his way of asking me to tell him what had happened. I said, ‘Can you start sleeping in a different room?’

  *

  My editor sent me an email about a column I had written. It was a Monday afternoon. I counted later, in my diary, six weeks since I saw Robert.

  The subject was Feedback. My stomach didn’t plummet when I read it, or the first sentence of his many mistyped paragraphs. ‘Hey, apols it’s taken me ages to get back to you.’ Things, he said, had been insane. ‘Anywya,’ he went on, ‘some pretty gnarly issues with this one, think you’ve missed the mark, over all too harsh/judgy.’ He wanted me to start again. ‘Something funnier & more first person. Taek your time.’

  I looked out the window, at the leaves of the plane tree, enormous and iridescent under the sun. On their passage back to the screen, my eyes stopped at a pattern of deep triangular dents in the wall above my computer. I wondered how the last email my editor had sent me like this had made me feel so humiliated and scared and hot and nauseated that I had risen out of the chair I was sitting in now, crossed to the cupboard and returned with the iron and, holding it over my head, driven it nose first into the wall over and over and over. This time I just felt very still. I said oh. That was when I knew I was better, the pills Robert gave me had worked.

  I turned back to the window and looked at the tree for a while, then rewrote the column, about the time I lost my eco-cup and had to drink takeaway coffee out of a cocktail shaker because I had said so many judgemental things to my barista about people still using disposable cups and it was the only substitute I could find.

  That I was able to return to it at all, to put his email out of my mind and work until I was finished, was extraordinary to me. I could not send it then, because my editor would know it had only taken forty minutes to produce six hundred funnier & more first-person words. I saved it and started writing an email to Robert.

  I wanted to tell him what had just happened. I wanted to say it was the first time I had been able to decide how to react to something bad, even such a small thing, instead of coming to consciousness in the middle of already reacting. I said I hadn’t known you could choose how to feel instead of being overpowered by an emotion from outside yourself. I said I couldn’t explain it properly. I didn’t feel like a different person, I felt like myself. As though I had been found.

  I deleted it all and sent one line to say I was feeling better and grateful and I was sorry for emailing him. Then I put his name into Google.

  *

  No matter what private morsel she could have inadvertently divulged in our countless hours together, I never would have parked outside Julie Female’s house in the hope of acquiring another precious fact about her life. I didn’t care who she was outside her converted spare room. But I thought about Robert constantly for days after that. I Google Image-searched him and clicked on photographs taken at conferences. I read journal articles he had written and watched a long presentation he had given to an audience of psychiatrists, on Yo
uTube.

  I imagined going back to London, to Harley Street, at a time when he might emerge from his rooms and knew that if I saw him pause on the curb, appraise the evening while doing up a raincoat, I would step back and watch him, wondering where he was going and who was waiting for him and whether on the train he would think backwards through his day, reconsidering each patient with his newspaper unread in front of him.

  I was consumed by the desire to know what Robert thought of me; whether, after I came to see him, he had told the wife I had met and liked so much about a new patient, a woman he’d diagnosed with ——. It began to matter to me so much that Robert would have found me intelligent and amusing and original and that he’d recall me that way now, even though I hadn’t been any of those things in the hour I had been in his rooms.

  As I was sending my column on Friday morning, he replied. My heart did a single thud when I saw his name. After a week of thinking about him in imagined terms, having the certain knowledge of what he’d been doing seconds ago was so exquisite, I screen-shotted my inbox and then the email after I read it. It said, ‘Wonderful, glad to hear it. Sent From My iPhone.’ Then I deleted them both, cleared my history and went downstairs. Robert’s name and his single line of reply should not feel so precious to me that I needed to preserve them. What I had been doing for so many days until then was the occupation of the mad, and I was not mad; I knew Robert was just a person.

  But if I had been found out, I would have said it was because he had saved my life, and the only thing I really knew about him was that he once cut his hand slicing a tomato.

  I cancelled my follow-up appointment because I didn’t have anything else to say.

  Supposedly, my column was spot on.

  *

  Everything was normal after that. I was normal and I lived hyperaware of it. I broke something, accidentally, and responded the way a normal person would, with frustration that only lasted as long as it took to clean up. I burned my hand and felt a normal level of pain, and inconvenienced not enraged when I could not find the stuff to put on it. The house and objects in it were just objects, not imbued with menace or intent. Going out, I felt so normal I wondered if it was obvious to other people. I had conversations in shops. I asked a man if I could pat his dog. I said to a pregnant woman, ‘Not long to go,’ and she laughed and said, ‘I’m only five months.’