Sorrow and Bliss

by Meg Mason

  And I felt normal grief, commensurate with the discoveries I had made and the consequences of making them when I had. On which basis, my behaviour towards Patrick was also normal. Anyone party to it would have to admit that under the circumstances, a wife acting as if she hated her husband, it was all very normal.

  *

  On a day in November, Patrick came into the box room while I was writing the deadline my editor had given for my next column into my diary. At my desk, my back was to him. I sensed him walk up and stand behind me, looking over my shoulder.

  I said, ‘Can you not?’

  He pointed out that the deadline was a day before my birthday. He wondered why I hadn’t written it in.

  ‘Do adults usually write My Birthday in their diaries? Why did you come in?’

  He said no reason and I thought he would leave then but instead, he retreated to a cane chair in the corner. It cracked when he sat down. Without turning around, I told him it wasn’t really a chair for sitting on.

  ‘Do you want to have a party?’

  I said no.

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘I’m not in the right place, re celebrating.’

  ‘It’s your fortieth though,’ he said. ‘We have to attack the day.’

  ‘Do we.’

  ‘Fine. Don’t then.’ The chair cracked again with his getting up. ‘But I’m going to organise something because otherwise we will get to the actual day with nothing planned and you will punish me for it.’

  ‘Right. So,’ I turned around and looked at him for the first time since he’d come in, ‘the party is more a hedge against me being upset than you wanting to celebrate your lovely wife who you love so much.’

  Patrick put both hands on his head, elbows out. ‘I can’t win. I seriously can’t. I love you, that is why I am trying to do this thing. To make you happy.’

  ‘It won’t. But do what you need to do.’

  I put my back to him again and he left, saying as he went out, ‘Sometimes I wonder if you actually like being like this.’

  He sent me an invitation by email, the same one he sent everyone else.

  *

  The next conversation Patrick and I had, of length, was in the car driving home from the party, when I told him that his pointing at people, the gun fingers he did while offering them drinks, made me want to shoot him.

  He’d said I know what, Martha, how about we don’t talk until we get home.

  I said, ‘How about we don’t talk once we’re home either,’ and turned on the heater, as high as it would go.

  *

  Always, when I see Ingrid’s eldest son he says, ‘Can you say about how I was born on the floor?’ He tells me his mother is too tired to and his father only saw the end part. He says his brothers don’t believe babies can happen on the floor – meaning, they will need to hear it again too, but separately, after him. On my lap, he puts one hand on each side of my face and tells me I have to do the funny version.

  The last line is his. The last line is, ‘But my mum didn’t like it and that’s why sometimes everyone calls me Not Patrick.’

  Before he slides off my lap, he needs me to explain one more time how Patrick wasn’t his uncle then and a bit later, he was. The fact is astonishing to him. It seems to confirm his belief that the very nature of things pivots on his existence, but he cannot fully enjoy it until he has my assurance that things can’t go back the other way. That Patrick will always be his uncle.

  32

  THE MORNING AFTER the party, Ingrid called to post-mortem it, she said ‘as is my wont.’ I was still on the sofa where Patrick had left me to go and buy a newspaper, believing he was and would be back soon. She told me she was in the bathroom hiding from her children, and would have to hang up if they found her. Over the sound of slopping bathwater, she rated the outfits the women wore in ascending order from worst to okayish, then talked for a while about Oliver’s new girlfriend who had got spectacularly drunk and flirted with Rowland. At the end of the night, Ingrid had seen her mine-sweeping the room for abandoned glasses, and later, being broken up with in the car park. It was so weird, she said, that it wasn’t our mother doing the mine-sweeping, insisting when she could no longer stand up that someone had spiked her drink, Ingrid would say, with ten other drinks. At the party, my sister hadn’t asked me why our mother wasn’t there and didn’t then. Her not appearing at an event thrown in celebration of someone else was not remarkable enough.

  ‘Did you have fun?’

  I thought she meant it as a real question and said no.

  ‘Yes. That was obvious.’

  I felt accused and told her I tried.

  ‘Did you? Really? Was that when you locked yourself in the toilet or when you were looking at your phone during my stupid speech?’

  ‘Can you please remember that I didn’t even want a party,’ I said, ‘The whole thing was Patrick’s idea. But whatever. I’m sorry.’

  I heard the loud suction of water, my sister getting out of the bath. She told me to hang on for a second, then sighed heavily into the phone before she began talking again. ‘I know you and Patrick have been having a shit time for reasons I can’t work out but I wish I could understand why you can’t just backburner it for one night, and be like fuck it, it’s my birthday, my husband’s done all this, everyone is here, I’ll just have a champagne and a fucking olive and get back to my marriage problems tomorrow.’

  I could not explain to Ingrid why I behaved like I hated Patrick without revealing why, by that time, I truly did. And I was so exhausted – all of a sudden – so exhausted by being the bad one, the disappointing one, the ruiner of everything again, again, again, that when I replied I was almost shouting. ‘Because it’s all false, Ingrid. All those speeches and laughing and oh Martha you look lovely, happy birthday, the big four-oh. They’re not my friends. None of them know the first thing about me, why I am the way I am. And it’s my fault because I am a fuck-up and a liar. You don’t even know me.’

  ‘Literally what are you talking about?’

  I moved the phone to my other hand. ‘I have ——.’

  ‘Who said that?’

  ‘A new doctor.’

  As though I’d complained that I was fat, Ingrid said, ‘Well that’s stupid. He’s obviously wrong.’

  ‘No he isn’t.’

  ‘What? Really?’

  I said yes.

  ‘You have actual ——? Fuck.’ She was quiet for a second. ‘I’m so sorry.’

  ‘Don’t be. I’m fine with it. He gave me something that worked. I’ve been a new man for six months.’

  ‘Why didn’t you tell me?’

  I said, ‘I haven’t told anyone except our parents.’

  ‘Why not? If you’re fine with it, why wouldn’t you just tell everyone?’

  ‘Because it’s still fucking embarrassing.’

  ‘I wouldn’t have judged you. Nobody would have. They shouldn’t anyway.’ Then, sounding so completely unlike herself I worried I was going to laugh, my sister said, ‘We as a society have to break down the stigma around mental illness.’

  ‘Oh my gosh Ingrid. I’d rather we as a society built it up a bit so we could talk about something else.’

  ‘That’s not funny.’

  ‘Okay.’

  ‘What does Patrick think?’

  ‘Ingrid, I just said.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘He doesn’t know.’

  ‘What? Oh my God, Martha. Why the fuck would you decide to tell our parents instead of your own husband?’

  ‘I didn’t decide. I told our father by accident. Our mother, it transpired, did not need to be told.’

  ‘What? Why not?’

  I asked if we could talk about her later.

  ‘Fine. But –’ Someone screamed Mum and started banging on the bathroom door. Ingrid ignored it. ‘I still don’t understand why you don’t want him to know. You’re having a horrible time and apart from the fact that it would probably help if he had this
fundamental information about his wife, secrecy is extremely shitty married-person behaviour.’

  ‘He should have known.’

  ‘Why? You didn’t.’

  ‘I am not a doctor.’

  ‘And Patrick’s not a psychiatrist. And you know now so does it still matter?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Why?’

  There was another loud noise in the background, the door being flung open too hard and hitting the wall, followed by the voices of her children. Ingrid told me to wait. I heard her say, ‘Out, out, out,’ but they wouldn’t go and the interchange dragged on for minutes. By the time she came back, she had forgotten her question.

  ‘Martha, you need to tell him. You can’t just keep going indefinitely, thinking you can be happy on any level, ever, if you’re not telling him this giant thing.’

  ‘I don’t think we can be happy on any level.’ Ever – it was the first time I had heard myself say it, plainly, aloud.

  ‘Martha, seriously.’ Ingrid was worn. ‘Where is he now?’

  I told her he had gone to get the paper. From where I was sitting, I could see into the kitchen, the clock on the oven. We had been talking for two hours. I had no idea where Patrick really was.

  ‘Please promise that you’ll tell him as soon as he gets back. Or even, I don’t know, write him a letter. You’re good at that.’

  I said I would and that I had to go because my phone was on four per cent. I did not know if either was true.

  *

  I sat there for a bit longer, until my guilt became annoyance or the other way around. Either way, a feeling powerful enough to compel me off the sofa and upstairs. I had a shower and dried the floor with my dress, still there from the night before. I went downstairs to the kitchen and tipped Patrick’s coffee out, peeled a banana and did not eat it, and by the time I had done all those small, stupid things, I didn’t care about anything. I got a pen out of a drawer and wrote the letter, standing up, the paper pressed against the wall until the ink ran out and I decided to go to London.

  *

  The oil light came on as I started the car. I walked to the station. On the platform, I got a text from Ingrid. I read it, with no instinct to throw my phone against something or grind it into the ground with my heel, then got on the train, not sure where in London I was going.

  In my seat, I put my bag against the window and leaned my head on it. Someone had scratched the word Wrekt into the glass. I went to sleep wondering why they had chosen that word, spelt that way, and where they were now.

  When I opened my eyes, the train was coming into Paddington. My sister’s message said, ‘I meant to tell you on the phone. I’m having another baby. sorry x 100000000.’

  33

  I GOT A Tube to Hoxton, to a place I’d gone to a year before when Ingrid had decided to get her sons’ names tattooed on the inside of her wrist by a man she found on Instagram. She said he had 100,000 followers.

  A girl behind the desk said the studio didn’t do walk-ins, playing with her septum piercing as she spoke. ‘But he’s got a gap in five minutes and could do you something small, i.e. not this,’ referring me to her exposed clavicles, tattooed with a pattern of leaves and vines. I said it was very impressive. ‘Yeah, I know. You can wait over there if you want.’

  I pretended to study the menu of terrifying body art options on the wall until the man with all the followers came and took me out the back, directing me to a reclining chair, drawing up next to me on his saddle stool. I showed him a picture on my phone.

  I said, ‘Not coloured in. Just the outline of it. As small as possible.’

  He took the phone and made the picture bigger. ‘What is it?’

  I told him it was a barometric map of the Hebrides. I wanted it on my hand, I didn’t care where.

  He said cool, picked up my hand and rubbed his thumb over the fine cross-hatched forty-year-old skin of mine. ‘Yeah, I reckon just below the nail.’ He let go and pulled a trolley towards him, picking things out of its small drawers.

  ‘Is that where you’re from or what?’

  I said no and then nothing for a second, unsure whether to tell him the reason. I wanted to, but worried that it would be as incomprehensible, then as quickly boring, as someone’s explanation of a dream, a revelation had in therapy or a description of what their wedding dress was going to look like.

  Then I remembered I didn’t care about anything any more.

  He had picked up my hand again and was washing alcohol over my palm with cotton. I said, ‘The weather there is generally just cyclones and torrential storms and hurricanes that are unpredictable and devastating which, I assume, makes it hard to live a normal life. It’s how I feel. I have ——.’

  He swivelled, and tossed the cotton in a bin and said, ‘Who doesn’t, love?’

  It made no sense and felt like the most intense kindness – that this man with a crucifix and a snake and a dead rose and a knife with blood dripping off it tattooed on his neck, and the name Lorna which, based on the date of birth underneath it, might belong to his mother, was so unperturbed by my revelation that he didn’t look up or ask me anything else until he’d finished drawing on my thumb with pen.

  ‘But you’re alright now, are you? You don’t seem like a mentalist.’

  ‘Yes, I’m fine now.’

  ‘So why do you still want your weather on you?’

  ‘I think –’ I said, maybe ‘– a memorial. I lost things.’

  He had been about to start. The point of the needle was against my skin but he took it away again and did meet my eye then as he said, ‘Like what? Friends?’

  I opened my mouth and said, ‘No, when –’

  – when I was a teenager, a doctor gave me some pills and told me not to get pregnant. The next doctor gave me something else, but said the same thing. Another doctor and then another one and another, diagnosing and prescribing and insisting their predecessor had been wrong, but always issuing the same caution.

  I took everything they gave me, imagining the pills dissolving into my stomach, whatever was inside them spreading through my body like black dye or poison, making it toxic to the foetus I was told strenuously and repeatedly not to conceive.

  I was seventeen and nineteen and twenty-two and I was still a child who didn’t think doctors could be wrong, or I did not suspect they might warn me against pregnancy, not because the medication was dangerous but because in their minds I was dangerous. To myself, to a baby, to my parents, to their excellent and unblemished professional records. Not a single unplanned baby born to a mentally ill girl on their watch.

  And so I did as I was told and I made sure I did not get pregnant and I never stopped being scared, until I met Jonathan. Briefly, with him, I was allowed to think I was a different person. If I stopped it all, I could have a baby.

  But I couldn’t stop it all. My body could not live without the black dye flowing through it. And then Jonathan saw who I was, someone with tendencies, and he said thank God. And I said yes, thank God that I did not manage to get pregnant.

  Because even if a baby survived inside me and even if it was born and I could care for its body, one day a little bomb would go off in its brain and all the pain and sadness it would feel in life from then on would be from me, and my guilt at what I had given it would make me hate it like my mother hated me. I accepted it. A biblical genealogy.

  Depressed seaside mother begat Celia.

  Celia begat Martha.

  Martha should not beget anyone.

  And then, a doctor said I’d got it wrong. Robert said, ‘—— is not a reason to forego motherhood.’ He has many patients who are mothers. They do very well. He has no doubt I would be a wonderful mother. If that is something I want.

  Listening to him, sitting on the dirty platform, is when I realised that what I had always believed to be true was the understanding of a sick child. I had never thought to question it when I became an adult. Instead, I put evidence to it and stoked it, all those beads
on the one long string. I imagined more than what I’d been told and whenever I imagined my damaged baby, a child damaged by the kind of mother I would be, I felt fear and worse shame, and that was why I had been lying.

  All the time. To anyone. Strangers, people at parties, my parents. To my sister as we gazed down at her swaddled baby in the soft darkness. To myself, looking out the window on a 94 bus. I lied to Robert. He said, ‘if you decide to become pregnant,’ and I told him I couldn’t think of anything worse. And I lied to Patrick, before we were married and every day afterwards.

  My husband does not know that a child is the only thing I have ever wanted. He doesn’t know that seeing my sister become a mother, a lovely good mother, was like being cut open, and her conceiving so easily and having more babies than she wanted made it too wide to ever close. And I have hated her sunmoonstarsgreatloveofmylife for complaining about all of it, her ruined body, the newborns who exhaust her with their crying, the toddlers and their constant touching and constant need, the cost, washing washing washing always washing, and muddy shoes, the end of sex, their fingerprints on all the windows, lice again! the night terrors, sudden fevers and fighting, the endless noise, and they make her completely useless because God, these perfect perfect perfect beautiful boys. The best thing she has ever done. But you are so lucky – you probably use a basket – you probably didn’t even know they sell toilet roll in forty-eight packs!

  There is nothing inside me except want for a child. It is every breath in and every breath out. The baby I lost that day by the river, I wanted her so desperately I thought I would stop being at the same time as her. I have cried for her every day since then.