by Meg Mason
I said I needed to unpack. Ingrid offered to help me and got up.
Outside the door I told her I did not need help.
‘By help, I mean I’ll sit and watch you do it.’
She followed me to the stairs.
‘Where are the boys?’
‘Hamish took them to get their haircuts fixed. I thought I could do it but, turns out, it’s quite hard.’ She was puffing before we were halfway up the first flight and required small breaks on the second. ‘I was going to open a salon called Mum Cuts – but – obviously that can be read two – ways depending – on – I need to sit down for sec – your mental state.’
Outside my door, Ingrid told me to move so she could open it for me. Looking in and reversing straight out she said, ‘Why don’t you take my room instead?’ Mine had been pressed into service as a storage room for sculptures that, my mother explained when we enquired later, ‘were not there yet conceptually’.
We went next door and I pushed the bags in the bottom of Ingrid’s empty wardrobe, then went and sat with her on the futon that had come with the birch table and the brown sofa, and borne the brunt of her teenage smoking.
She talked for a while about the particular occasion of each burn mark, her room, things she had written and drawn on the wall, many of which remained including, she showed me behind the curtain, the words I HATE MUM. And then, times she remembered me coming in and getting her when there had been A Leaving. Idly she had picked up my hand and noticing it, rubbed her thumb over my tattoo as if it might come off. ‘Do you ever regret getting this?’
‘Yes.’
‘When?’
‘When I see it.’
‘I would judge you, except –’ She turned her wrist up and showed me the very short line. She said anyway. ‘What are you going to do now? Do you have a plan? Because you could –’ Her tone indicated the start of a list but nothing came after her preparatory inward breath, except an outward one. She looked sorry.
‘I know, don’t worry.’
‘I will think of something.’
I told her it was fine. ‘It isn’t your job. I have one anyway or not – it’s not a plan-plan. It’s more –’ I paused ‘– I need to figure out what kind of life is available to a woman my –’
‘Don’t say my age.’
‘– a woman who was born at roughly the same time as me, who is single and doesn’t have children or any particular ambition, and a CV that,’ I wanted to say ‘is shit’ but there was so much concern on my sister’s face, I said, ‘that lacks an obvious through-line.’
‘It doesn’t have to be miserable though. Like, don’t automatically assume it has to be –’
I said, ‘I’m not. I want it not to be miserable. I just don’t know what non-miserable options exist if you don’t like animals or helping people. If you’ve wanted the things women are supposed to want, babies, husband, friends, house –’
‘– successful Etsy business.’
‘Successful Etsy business, envy, fulfilment, whatever, and you didn’t get them, what are you supposed to want instead? I don’t know how to want something that isn’t a baby. I can’t just think of something else and decide to want that instead.’
Ingrid said yes you can. ‘Even the women who get those things lose them again. Husbands die and children grow up and marry someone you hate and use the law degree you bought them to start an Etsy business. Everything goes away eventually, and women are always the last ones standing so we just make up something else to want.’
‘I don’t want it to be an invented thing.’
‘Everything is invented. Life is invented. Everything you see anyone doing is something they made up. I invented Swindon for fuck’s sake, and made myself want it and now I do.’
‘Do you really?’
‘Well, I don’t not want it.’
‘How did you?’
‘I don’t know,’ she said. ‘Just by focusing on – or doing practical things and pretending to enjoy them until I sort of do enjoy them or can’t remember what I enjoyed before.’
I bit my lip and she went on. ‘Like, maybe sort your clothes out or do stupid yoga, and it will probably come to you or you’ll come up with it. You’re so clever, Martha, the most creative person I know.’ She hit me because I rolled my eyes. ‘You are, and I need to go home so can you please pull me up?’
I did and my sister kept hold of my hands for a second, standing in the middle of her bedroom, and said, ‘Little daily miracles, illuminations, something-something, Woolf matches. Do that. Do what Virginia says.’
I went downstairs with her and promised, because she made me, that I would do something practical, but not a gratitude journal because, she said, it would freak her out.
‘Or like, a vision board. Unless it is just pictures of an over-forty Kate Moss on a superyacht.’
‘Bikini askew.’
‘Always.’
‘I love you Ingrid.’
She said I know and went home.
*
My father had left the study light on and the book open and face down on his desk. I went in and picked it up but couldn’t find the bit he had read. Trying to wedge it into a non-existent space on his shelves, I thought of him saying once – the summer I spent in this room – ‘all of life on one wall Martha. Every kind of life, real or made up.’
I stayed there and read so many spines, then one by one I started taking books off, building a pile in my left arm. My selection criteria was threefold. Books by women or suitably sensitive/depressive men who had made up their own lives. Any book I had lied about reading, except Proust because even with everything I had done I did not deserve to suffer that much. Books with promising titles, that I could reach without having to stand on a chair.
They were old. The covers made my fingers feel chalky, and the pages smelled like the boredom of waiting for my father to finish in a secondhand shop when I was young. But they would tell me how to be or what to want and they would save me from a gratitude journal and it was the only thing I could think of.
38
I STARTED WITH Woolf, her entire back catalogue, reading all day, in a room of my parents’ own, and sometimes when I began to worry I was going mad from so much time doing only that and conceived the thought in Woolfian language, I went out and read somewhere else. At night I read until I fell asleep and wherever I was, every time somebody in a book wanted something, I wrote down what it was. Once I had finished them all, I had so many torn-off bits of paper, collected in a jar on Ingrid’s dresser. But they all said, a person, a family, a home, money, to not be alone. That is all anybody wants.
*
I tried to go running. It is as awful as it looks. At the Westfield, 0.7 miles from my parents’ house, I gave up and went in to buy water. Because it was a Monday morning, shortly after nine a.m., and I was a woman over forty wearing athletic clothing, I did not arouse attention as I made circuits of the ground floor trying to find somewhere.
There was a Smiths. The only route from the front door to the fridge cabinet was an aisle with a sign above it that said Gifts/Inspiration/Assorted Planners and yet it it was, singularly, row on row of gratitude journals. I stopped and looked at them in search of the worst one to buy and send to my sister. Although there were so many individual injunctions on their mint and glittery lilac and butter yellow covers – to live and love and laugh and shine and thrive and breathe – considered together, it seemed like humanity’s highest imperative is to follow its dreams.
I chose one that was inexplicably thick, with twice as many pages as its shelf mates, because it said, on the cover, You Should Just Go For It. It was meant to sound carefree and motivating but for want of an exclamation mark, it came across as weary and resigned. You Should Just Go For It. Everyone Is Sick Of Hearing You Talk About It. Follow Your Dreams. The Stakes Could Not Be Lower.
It was my day, the woman on the till told me. ‘Free pen with every journal.’ She was so old to be working there and breathed heavily from the exer
tion of crouching down to retrieve the box from under the counter. ‘Whichever one you want.’ The pens were also inspirational. I took one that had a phrase on it misappropriated from third-wave feminism, thanked her and walked to a café kiosk in the centre of the mall that was pumping synthetic bread fragrance into the air.
I ordered toast. It took a long time to come and I reached the bottom of my Instagram feed while I was still waiting for it. The final post was a picture of F. Scott Fitzgerald, @author_quotes_daily. The caption said, ‘What people are ashamed of usually makes a good story.’
My toast had still not appeared. I slid Ingrid’s journal out of the bag and wrote the caption out on the first page, then glanced quickly over my shoulder in case I had been seen. But I was the only person who would judge a woman who was sitting by herself in a shopping centre bakery on a weekday morning, when her running clothes and her gratitude journal testified to an effort to improve herself on two fronts. I shifted in my chair. It was in a spirit of repentance probably that I turned to another page, somewhere near the middle because I did not know where to start. I just did. You Should Just Go For It. Seriously, Nobody Cares.
39
IT WAS THE first week of March. I was sitting on the back doorstep of my parents’ house, barefoot, tugging weeds out of cracks in the concrete, noticing how bright amber my tea looked with the cold sun on it, talking to Ingrid’s eldest son on the phone. They had started ringing me again.
He was explaining the chapter series he was reading, with unsparing detail and, intermittently, a full mouth.
I asked him what he was eating.
‘Grapes and a slavery roll.’
I heard Ingrid ask him for the phone.
‘He means savoury. Sorry, God, there are seven million of those books. I swear they’ve got children writing them in a sweatshop somewhere. How are you?’
I told her about the job I had got. A guidance and careers counsellor at a girls’ school. She did not find it ironic that I’d been offered the position, as I did. ‘You’ve literally had all the jobs.’ She said shit. She had to go. ‘Someone’s playing with doors.’
I went to hang up and saw a text from Patrick. We had not spoken since he left.
It said, ‘Hi Martha, I’m moving back into the flat tomorrow and need some of our furniture etc. Where is everything?’
I hesitated over it for a moment, trying to assimilate the new and extraordinary pain of a message that begins with hi and your name, when it comes from somebody you used to be married to. I rubbed my eye and under my nose and then replied, asking if we could do it tomorrow instead.
He said he couldn’t. He was working.
I replied with the address of the storage unit, wondering as I typed it if Patrick realised it was our wedding anniversary. And then, as I sent it, if you have given up on being married, whether it isn’t wedding anniversary any more.
Patrick wrote back, asking if I could meet him there in two hours. My desire not to was so acute that I could barely induce myself to get up and go inside, after I replied to say yes.
*
He was going to be late. I was already there when he texted to say so, waiting outside the locker, at the very end of a corridor so dark and desolate it felt post-apocalyptic.
Probably, he was still an hour away – he said sorry and something to do with a truck and the North Circular. I could go if I needed to. I said I didn’t mind and got the journal out of my bag. It was stained, coming apart, a now ludicrous thickness from getting wet and being dried on the radiator so many times.
I sat down on the floor and wrote for a long time until I realised, turning over, that I had reached the last page. I did not know how to finish it. When, after minutes of thought, no suitable ending had presented itself, I went back to the beginning and started reading. I hadn’t until then, knowing that whatever I’d find in my writing – self-fascination, banality, descriptions of things – would make me go outside and set it on fire.
It wasn’t that or, at least, I saw shame and hope and grief, guilt and love, sorrow and bliss, kitchens, sisters and mothers, joy, fear, rain, Christmas, gardens, sex and sleep and presence and absence, the parties. Patrick’s goodness. My striking unlikeability and attention-seeking punctuation.
I could see what I’d had now. Everything people want in books, a home, money, to not be alone, all there in the shadow of the one thing I didn’t have. Even the person, a man who wrote speeches about me, and gave things up for me, who sat beside the bed for hours while I was crying or unconscious, who said he’d never change his mind about me and stayed even after he knew I was lying to him, who only hurt me as much as I deserved, who put oil in the car and would never have left me if I hadn’t told him to.
It wasn’t my final revelation. That I desperately wanted him back wasn’t a revelation at all by the time I reached the last page. It was the small, awful reason why I had lost him. It wasn’t my illness; it was nothing I had said or done. I wrote it down and closed the journal, finished, although most of the page was still blank because the reason our marriage had ended didn’t fill a whole line.
At the far end of the corridor, the lift opened.
I got up off the ground and put the journal on top of my bag.
Patrick walked towards me, so slowly, or it was such a long way, that before he was half way I could not remember how people stand. When someone you know beyond all being, who you have loved and hated and have not seen for months, is coming towards you, avoiding your eye until the last minute, then smiling at you like he’s not sure when or if you’ve met, what are you meant to do with your hands?
*
Our conversation was two minutes long, a confusion of sorrys and hellos and thank yous, unnecessary questions and even more unnecessary instructions about locks and how they’re opened. It seemed like a joke. A game to see who could last the longest pretending to be other people. Neither of us gave in and the conversation ended with a slew of okay greats. Patrick took the key and I left.
40
I WAS NOT conscious of the wrong weight of my bag until two stops were left on the long trip home. I looked inside, as though it could possibly be in there when the bag felt empty on my shoulder. It was not on the seat beside me. It had not slipped out onto the floor. I made a scene. I tried to wrench the carriage doors open before the train had come to a full stop at the next station, then shouldered through the packed crowd on the platform and forced my way into the carriage of a train about to leave on the other side. It would have been too full with half the number of people already in it. A man shook his head at me. I didn’t care.
On the way back, it kept being held in the tunnel – I stayed standing, as if doing so would make the journey faster, imagining the journal lying on the footpath somewhere between the station and the storage facility, a passer-by picking it up, checking for a name inside, seeing there wasn’t one, walking off with it anyway, tossing it in the first bin they came to. Or taking it home. The idea was so much worse – what felt like my singular possession being put next to the pile of takeaway menus and mail to be dealt with in their kitchen, it being read in front of the television, ‘another funny bit’ out loud to an uninterested husband during the advertisements.
*
I was told by a station attendant when I finally arrived that nothing like a diary had been handed in but if I wanted an umbrella I could take my pick. I went out and walked back to the storage centre the way I had come, crossing in the same places I had an hour and a half earlier, still empty-handed at the end of it.
As I entered, the clerk pointed out that I was back again. Evidently I couldn’t get enough of the place. He was sitting behind his desk, as before, leaning back with hands laced behind his head, watching his CCTV screens like there was more to see than deserted corridors from a host of angles. I signed his stupid entry book again and as I got into the lift I heard him saying, ‘Your boyfriend is still up there. He’s going to regret pulling the lot out at once.’
&nb
sp; *
All our furniture was in the corridor, removed a piece at a time by Patrick and arranged by accident in the simulacrum of a room. An armchair, a television, a standard lamp. He was sitting on our sofa. His elbow on the armrest, reading.
He glanced up and seeing me said hi like I’d just got home, then went back to his book. There was no point in asking for it back. If he’d read from the beginning, he was now almost finished. I sat on the sofa, at the opposite end, and waited.
Patrick turned a page. Had it been anyone else – if it had been Jonathan, it would have been an act of rare and ingenious cruelty, reading my diary in front of me. Jonathan would have pretended he was too deep in concentration to brook an interruption – he would have put one finger up if I’d tried to speak, shifting his expression from sadness to amusement, intrigue, a little shock, devastation, in the course of a single page, and making intermittent comments on my portrayal of things.
But it was Patrick. He was concentrating. His expression was earnest and his reactions were slight, a small frown, an occasional almost imperceptible smile. He didn’t say anything until the end. And then, only, ‘I can’t read your writing. I never what?’
‘Oh.’ I looked upside down at the last thing I had written. ‘It says I never asked what it was like for him.’
He said, ‘The ——?’
‘No, all of it. Our marriage. Being my husband. I never asked you what any of it was like for you.’
‘Right.’ He closed the journal.
‘It’s the thing I’m most ashamed of now, I think.’ I stood up and put my hand out for it. ‘Out of, obviously, an array of options.’
Instead of getting up, Patrick stayed seated and briefly scratched the back of his head. I waited. He kept the book in his hand. ‘Do you want to know?’
I said no and forced myself to sit down again, ‘I don’t.’ I was not as brave as that. ‘What was it like for you, Patrick?’ My bag was on my shoulder. I didn’t take it off.
