by Meg Mason
And I am still lying because I wrote you a note this morning, Patrick, and I did not leave it for you. It is here in my bag. I am looking down at its folded pages. I am leaning forward and retrieving it, and the man with the tattooed neck is saying no problem and tossing it, screwed up, into the bin for me.
I didn’t give it to you because you do not deserve to know these things about me, about my desire for a baby or even about my diagnosis. Those things are mine. I have been carrying them by myself and it is like having gold inside me. I have been walking around, knowing I am better than you. That is why I smile at you like the Mona Lisa, Patrick, while you study me so closely and remain oblivious. You didn’t see it. You were not looking for it. And none of it matters anyway. If I tell you or not. It is too late.
I said, ‘No when – well, just different opportunities I guess. Things I wanted to do and didn’t.’
The man said, ‘Yeah, right. Life. What a bucket of shit. Let’s get you done.’
I thought it would hurt but it didn’t and I reached into my bag again with the hand he wasn’t holding and got out my phone. Over the sound of the needle, he said he’d never had a client scrolling Instagram at the same time as getting inked.
He was finished in a few minutes and as he wrapped my thumb in cling film I asked him if he remembered my sister, the woman who had to stop before he had finished the first letter of her eldest son’s name because she was going to pass out, so instead of their three names, she has a tattoo of a very short line.
‘If she was the one who said I should be in jail for not offering my clients epidurals, then chucked all over the floor, then yeah.’
We stood up at the same time and as I was leaving he said he’d usually suggest a couple of ibuprofens or whatever but clearly, I was pretty fucking down with pain.
*
It was late, after ten, when I got back to the Executive Home. I had been caught in the rain. My hair was dripping down my back. I wiped under my eyes and my fingertips were black with mascara. Patrick was in the living room. He had ordered takeaway, enough for one person, and was watching the news.
He did not ask where I had been. I wasn’t planning to tell him or, before that moment, speak to him at all when I got home but the fury caused by coming in and finding Patrick engaged in normal activity was so intense it felt like heat and whiteness in front of my eyes. He was not entitled to the ordinary evening he had created for himself or any content in domestic life from now on, its basic rituals and small, common pleasures. Because of what he had done, I had gone without it and I would never acquire it in however much time was still to serve out.
I went over and stood between him and the television. I held up my thumb, still wrapped in cling film, and told him I’d been in London, getting a tattoo. In silence, he moved his fork around in his plastic container, searching through the rice for a chunk of something to stab with it. When I asked him if he would like to know what it was of, Patrick said up to you and kept going with the fork.
‘It’s a map of the Hebrides. Would you like to know why I got that?’ I said, okay then, I’ll tell you. ‘It’s a reference to the Shipping News, Patrick. Cyclonic, occasionally good et cetera. That funny joke I made once, remember? About it being a metaphor for my mental state. You’re wondering, why now? It’s because I saw a new doctor who gave me an explanation for that state.’ I said, mid-May, before you ask. ‘So yes, seven months.’
‘I know.’
‘Know what?’
‘That you went and saw a psychiatrist.’
I said, ‘What? How?’
‘You paid with my card. Robert’s name was on the statement.’
The next wave of fury originated from so many sources I could only grasp one: how much I hated Patrick referring to him by his first name.
‘If you didn’t want me to know, you probably should have paid Robert with cash.’
‘Don’t call him that. He’s not your friend. You’ve never even met him.’
‘Fine. But you have ——, is that what you’re about to say?’
I said oh my God. ‘How do you know that? Did you call him?’ I told Patrick – I shouted – that he was not allowed to do that even though, in the unflooded part of my mind, I knew he hadn’t and even if he had, Robert could not have shared my diagnosis.
And Patrick, who was never sarcastic, said, ‘Really? I didn’t realise that. Is there like a doctor patient confidentiality thing?’
Like a child, I stamped my foot and told him to shut up. ‘Tell me how you know.’
‘I know the drug.’
‘What drug?’
‘The one you’re on.’ He dropped his fork into the container and put it on the coffee table.
‘I didn’t tell you I was on anything. Did you go through my stuff?’
Patrick asked if I was serious. ‘You leave it lying around, Martha. You don’t even throw the empty packets away. You just shove them in a drawer or leave them on the floor somewhere for me to pick up. I mean, I assume they’re for me to pick up since that’s what we do, isn’t it? You make a mess and I clean up after you, like it’s my job.’
My hands were in fists, so tight they seemed to be throbbing. ‘If you knew everything, why didn’t you tell me?’
‘I was waiting for you to tell me but you didn’t. And then after a while it seemed like you weren’t going to and I had no idea why. It’s clearly right,’ he said. ‘You clearly have ——.’
As I spoke back, I felt the muscles around my mouth contorting and making me ugly. ‘Do I Patrick? Clearly? If that is so fucking clearly right, why didn’t you work it out before? Is it a competence issue? As in, does a person need to be physically bleeding for you to comprehend that they’re not well? Or is it, as a husband, you’re not interested in your wife’s wellbeing? Or is it just total passivity? Your absolute, blanket acceptance of how things are.’
He said okay. ‘This conversation isn’t going anywhere.’
‘Don’t! Don’t walk out.’ I moved as if I would block him from leaving.
Patrick didn’t stand up, leaned back in the sofa instead. ‘I can’t talk to you when you’re like this.’
I said, ‘I’m only like this because of you. I’m well. I’ve been well for months. But you make me feel insane. Wasn’t that clear too? Didn’t you wonder why instead of being better to you, I’ve been worse?’
‘Yes. No. I don’t know. Your behaviour’s always been –’ he paused ‘– all over the place.’
‘Fuck you, Patrick. Do you know why? You don’t. It’s because I’ve always wanted a baby. This whole time, my whole life, I’ve wanted to have a baby but everyone told me it would be dangerous.’
Very slowly, Patrick said, ‘Do you really think I wasn’t aware of that either? I’m not stupid Martha. Even if it’s always, how annoying they are and how much you can’t stand them and how tedious motherhood is, babies are the only thing you ever talk about. You won’t let us sit near anyone with a baby in a restaurant, then you’ll be staring at them all night. Or if we pass a pregnant woman or someone with a child, you go completely silent and whenever we go to something, you’re so incredibly rude to anyone who dares to mention their children. We’ve had to leave things early so many times, just because someone asked you if you have kids.’ Patrick stood up then. ‘And you’re obsessed with Ingrid’s boys. Obsessed with them, and you pretend you’re not jealous of her but it’s so obvious that you are, especially when she’s pregnant. You’re not a good liar Martha. A chronic one, but not a good one.’
I went around the coffee table, grabbed the front of his shirt with both hands and wrenched it and twisted it and said guess what Patrick, guess what. ‘Robert said it would be fine.’ I tried to push him. ‘He said it would have been fine.’ I tried to hit his face. ‘It wouldn’t be dangerous but you knew that too, you knew that too.’ Patrick got my wrists and would not let go until I stopped struggling against his grip. Although, then, he ordered me to sit down, I went back to the coffee
table, put my heel to the edge and pushed it over. The takeaway container was upended, the liquid left in it spilt across the carpet. Patrick said for God’s sake Martha and went out to the kitchen.
I didn’t follow him. Every cell in my body felt individually paralysed except for my heart, beating hard and too fast. A moment later, he returned with a handful of kitchen roll, dropped it over the liquid that had soaked into the carpet and stamped on it. I couldn’t do anything except watch, until I stopped feeling my heart. And then I told him to stop it. ‘Just leave it. Listen to me.’
‘I am listening.’
‘Well stop cleaning up then.’
He said fine.
‘Why didn’t you say? Why did you just let me lie. If you had said something since the appointment, I could be pregnant now. You always wanted children Patrick – I could be pregnant now. Why would you do that?’
‘Because – you just said – you should have been better. You got your diagnosis finally, you got the right meds and you weren’t any better to me. I couldn’t work it out but then I realised.’ He shifted the kitchen roll with his foot. The liquid had settled darkly into the carpet, a stain that would never be got out. ‘This is who you are. It has nothing to do with ——. And,’ he said, ‘I don’t think you should be a mother.’
I opened my mouth. It wasn’t speech or screaming that came out. It was primal sound, coming from somewhere, my stomach, the bottom of my throat. Patrick went out and left me there. I sank to my knees, then my face was to the floor. I was gripping handfuls of my hair.
There is a gap after that, a blackout in my memory until, a few hours later, I am standing at one corner of the bed, dragging the sheets off it while Patrick puts things in a suitcase that is open on the floor. Sun is coming through the window. I’m compelled to the bathroom to throw up.
When I came back, Patrick had closed the suitcase and was carrying it out of the room. I called something after him, but he did not hear me. A moment later, I heard the car start and I went over to the window. He was backing out of the driveway. I tried to bring the blind down, pulled too sharply and it broke. For a long time, I just stood there with its slack cord in my hand, staring unfocused at the house on the other side where another woman had lived my life in mirror image.
Then Patrick was turning back into the driveway. I didn’t know why he had come back. I watched him park the car and get out. He had a bottle in his hand and once he had raised the bonnet he emptied it into the engine, closed the bonnet again and walked away, in the direction of the station.
Patrick is a man who puts oil in the car as his final act before leaving his wife. I put my hand on my chest but felt nothing.
34
I SPENT THE day and first night without him on the stripped bed; after he left there did not seem to be a reason to remake it. Life, a life involving sheets and dishes and letters from the bank did not exist any more.
Between sleeping and waking and sleeping again, I Googled Robert. Then I Googled Jonathan. His wife is a social media influencer. Her Instagram is a mixture of holiday photos, sponsored posts about a brand of collagen drink and photos of what she is wearing shot in the mirror of the lift that I used to take down to the street to breathe. She gets the most likes when she posts pictures of her little tribe, #thestronggirls, all of whom have blonde hair and names that are also common nouns. Objects and fruit. I scrolled all the way back to her wedding to Jonathan on a rooftop in Ibiza. I wondered how much he had told her about me, how much @mother_of_strong_girls knows about her husband’s forty-three-day starter marriage.
*
Ingrid texted me in the morning. She said she had spoken to Patrick. She said, ‘Are you okay?’
I sent her the bathtub emoji, the three-pin plug and the coffin. She asked me if I wanted her to come and get me. I said I didn’t know.
I was still in bed – on bed – half dressed, in the underwear and tights I had worn to London and surrounded by mugs that were empty or had become receptacles for tissues and dried-up curls of orange peel when I heard Ingrid let herself into the Executive Home. She went straight to the living room, trailed by smaller, quicker footsteps, and turned the television on to some sort of cartoon before coming upstairs.
I thought she would come and lie with me on the bed and stroke my hair or my arms as she usually did. I thought she would say, it’s going to be alright and can you try and stand up now, can you get all the way to the shower? Instead, she threw the door open, looked around and said, ‘This is quite the visual and olfactory cocktail. Wow Martha.’
*
At my party, I hadn’t noticed her stomach. Now I saw how already round it was. Ingrid crossed both sides of her cardigan over it as she entered and went to the window. Once she had wrenched it open, she turned back and pointed at the sheets. ‘How long have they been on the floor?’
I said I meant to deal with them but ending my marriage and trying to get a fitted sheet on by myself felt like too much at the same time. She stood at the end of the bed, stone-faced, and pushed the fingertips of one hand into the place where her ribs met the top of her stomach, as though she was in pain. ‘If you’re coming, come. The boys are downstairs and I’m not doing the A420 with them after four o’clock.’
I took too long to get up. I took too long finding something to wear, a bag to put things in. My sister’s rising impatience slowed me down even more. I gave up and lay back down on the bed, facing away from her.
Ingrid said, ‘Do you know what? Fine. I can’t do this any more either. It’s so boring Martha.’ She left the room and called out from the stairs. ‘Ring your husband.’
I heard her summon her children from the front door and a moment later, the door slamming shut. The television was left on.
It was the first time she had refused to do her job. I wanted her sympathy and she wouldn’t give it to me. I wanted her to make me feel like I was good, and right to make Patrick go. I was angry and then, at the sound of her car starting, lonelier than I was before she came.
I did not ring my husband. I could not call my father, who would be stricken and unable to hide it. I picked up my phone and dialled my mother.
I had not spoken to her since the day of my appointment and I did not want to speak to her then. I wanted her to answer and say, ‘Well isn’t this a turn-up for the books’ so that I could fight with her and she would hang up on me and then I could feel aggrieved and tell Ingrid and she would agree that it was classic her. Literally, so typical.
I had not forgiven my mother for what she had done. I hadn’t attempted to, or had to try and stay angry. Hating someone who was capable of seeing their daughter in pain and saying nothing, compounding it instead by drinking, was effortless.
It rang once. She picked up and said, ‘Martha, oh, I’ve been hoping and hoping you would ring.’
It was not her ordinary voice. It was from before, before I became the teenager who really brought out her bitchlike tendencies, her resident critic. The voice she used to call me Hum. She asked me how I was feeling and said, ‘Awful probably’ when I answered with a sound instead of words.
She continued on that way for ten minutes, asking questions and answering them herself – correctly. As I would have.
After we hung up, I went downstairs, found two open bottles of wine and took them back to my bedroom. I would not have called her again except her final question was, ‘Will you ring me back later? Any time. Even if it’s the middle of the night,’ and her answer to it was ‘Okay good. I will speak to you soon then.’
*
I was drunk when I called the second time, before dawn. I told her I didn’t know what to do, I begged her to tell me. She began to say something general. I said, ‘No, right now, what do I do? I don’t know what to do.’ She asked me where I was and then said, ‘You are going to stand up, and then you are going to go downstairs and put your shoes and coat on.’ She waited as I did each thing. ‘Now, you are going to go for a walk and I will stay on the phone.’
<
br /> I walked slowly and felt sober by the time I got to the end of the towpath. She said, ‘Right, turn around and walk fast enough that you can feel your heart beating.’ I don’t know why she said that but I did.
It was light by the time I reached Port Meadow again. Fog was thinning on the far side, gradually revealing the line of spires. She said, as I got home, ‘Have a bath.’ Then, ‘Call me in twenty minutes. I will be here.’
*
I began to ring my mother every day.
People describe things as ‘the only way I can get out of bed’ but usually they do not mean physically. But I meant it that way – I rang her in the morning, the moment I woke up. I could not move, or eat or walk through the house, open windows or wash my hair unless she was talking to me and telling me what to do.
In the afternoons, I sat in the front window of the Executive Home, looking out at the street. The house on the opposite side was for let. We talked until the side of my face was hot from the phone or I couldn’t turn my head because I had been holding it with my shoulder, or I noticed it was night-time. We talked only about small things. Something she had heard on the radio, a dream one of us had.
We did not talk about Patrick but I wondered if she was talking to him too. I wondered if she knew where he was. We did not talk about Ingrid; our mother must have known we were not speaking. She must have known my father and his grief were best kept away from me for the time being because he did not call and I was grateful.
One morning I called her and announced, like a child, ‘Guess what? I’m already up’ and she said, ‘Are you! Well done.’
She said, ‘What was that bang?’
I told her I was getting a cup out of the cupboard because I was making tea and she said, ‘That’s very good.’
Her voice was the only thing I ever heard from her end, no noise in the background. If I asked her what she was doing, she would say just sitting. I apologised once and said she must have to go, she must have work to do. She said her public would just have to wait for boundary-pushing installations. I had never heard her joke about her work before.
