Sorrow and Bliss Read online

  *

  I began to spend every day in there. After a while, I stopped lying down on the sofa and would sit and look out at the street instead. One day I found a pen between the seat cushions, and when my father noticed me drawing indifferently on my arm he got up and came over with some paper and a Shorter Oxford Dictionary. Perching next to me for a second, he wrote the alphabet down the left margin and told me to write a story in one sentence, using each letter in order. He said the dictionary was just to press on and went back to his desk.

  I wrote hundreds of them. They are still somewhere in a box but I only remember one from that time because when I had finished it my father said it would one day be recognised as the high point of the oeuvre.

  After

  Barbara’s

  Contentious

  Divorce,

  Everyone

  Felt

  Genuinely

  Hurt,

  Including

  Justifiably

  Kin

  Left

  Melancholically

  Noting

  Or

  Perhaps

  Questioning

  Rumours

  Suggesting

  That,

  Unannounced,

  Vincent’d

  Wed an

  uXorious

  Young

  Zimbabwean.

  Sometimes still, when I can’t sleep, I make them up in my mind. K is the hardest.

  *

  A friend of Ingrid’s, who came over once when I was there, told me that the Headspace app had changed her life. I wanted to ask what her life had been like before and what it was like now.

  *

  I felt alright in September. My father and I decided I should start university. But I was only alright when I was in that room, with him. From the beginning, I couldn’t last through an entire lecture. I missed whole days and then whole weeks. I began going back under my desk when I was at home. Towards the end of the term the dean put me on academic probation. He gave me a pamphlet on stress management and told me that I would need to make a good show in my exams if I decided to come back in January. I should use the holidays to have a serious think. Seeing me out of his office he said, ‘There’s one of you in every cohort,’ and wished me a Merry Christmas.

  *

  On the highest floor of the Goldhawk Road house there is an iron balcony that we did not go onto because it was rusted out and coming loose from the wall. One night, in the holidays, I went out and stood on the grille floor in bare feet, staring over the rail to the long black rectangle of garden four storeys below.

  Everything hurt. The soles of my feet, my chest, my heart, my lungs, my scalp, my knuckles, my cheekbones. It hurt to talk, to breathe, to cry, to eat, to read, to hear music, to be in a room with other people and to be by myself. I stayed there for a long time, feeling the balcony move sometimes according to the wind.

  Normal people say, I can’t imagine feeling so bad I’d genuinely want to die. I do not try and explain that it isn’t that you want to die. It is that you know you are not supposed to be alive, feeling a tiredness that powders your bones, a tiredness with so much fear. The unnatural fact of living is something you must eventually fix.

  *

  This is the worst thing Patrick has ever said to me: ‘Sometimes I wonder if you actually like being like this.’

  *

  Here are the reasons I went back inside. Because I did not want people to think my father was not a good parent. I did not want Ingrid to fail her exams. I did not want my mother to one day make art out of it.

  But Patrick is the only person who knows the main reason because it is the worst thing I have ever thought. I went back inside because, even as I was then, I thought I was too clever and special, better than anyone who would do what I had come out to do, I was not the one in every cohort. I went back inside because I was too proud.

  Once, in my funny food column, I said that Parma ham had become pedestrian. After the magazine came out, a reader emailed me to say I came across as unpleasantly superior and she for one would continue to enjoy Parma ham. I printed it out and showed Patrick. He stood reading it with his arm around my shoulder, then pulled me in and said, his face turned down to the top of my head, ‘I’m glad.’

  I said, ‘That she’s not going to give up ham?’

  ‘That you’re unpleasantly superior.’ He meant, since it is why you are still alive.

  Probably, it is not the worst thing I have ever thought. But is in the top one hundred.

  *

  This is the worst thing Ingrid has ever said to me: ‘You’ve basically turned into Mum.’

  *

  A few months ago, Ingrid called and told me about a kind of fade cream she had started using to get rid of a brown spot that had appeared on her face. On the back of the tube it said that it was suitable for most problem areas.

  I asked her if she thought it would work on my personality.

  She said maybe. ‘But it’s not going to make it go away completely.’

  *

  After that night on the balcony, I asked my father if I could see a different doctor. I told him what had happened. He was in the kitchen eating a boiled egg and stood up so quickly that his chair tipped over backwards. I let him hug me for what felt like a long time. Then he told me to wait while he found the list of other doctors he’d written on a pad that was somewhere in his study.

  The doctor we chose from the list, because she was the only woman, slid a laminated questionnaire out of a standing file and started reading from it with a red whiteboard marker in her hand. The card was vaguely pink, from the marking and erasing of other people’s answers. ‘How often do you feel sad for no reason, Martha? Always, sometimes, seldom, never?’ She said, ‘Right, always,’ then said as I answered each question after that, ‘Okay, always again; always for that one too; let me guess, always?’

  She said at the end, ‘Well there’s no need to score it then is there, I think we can safely assume …’ and wrote a prescription for an antidepressant that was, she went on to say, ‘specially formulated for teenagers’ as if it was a kind of acne cream.

  My father asked her to elaborate as to how exactly this one differed from one formulated for adults. The doctor rolled her office chair towards him with a series of seated steps and dropped her voice. ‘It has a lesser effect on the libido.’

  My father looked pained and said, ‘Ah.’

  Still to him, the doctor said, ‘And I assume she is sexually active.’

  I wanted to run out of the room when she went on to explain, as quietly, that while the aforementioned libido would not be affected, I needed to take greater than usual precautions re accidental pregnancy because the medication was not safe for a developing foetus. She wished to be absolutely explicit on that point.

  My father nodded and the doctor said, ‘Excellent,’ then walked her chair towards me and started speaking at a louder than normal volume, to reinforce the pretence that I wouldn’t have been able to hear what she’d been saying. She told me I was going to have a headache for two weeks, and possibly a dry mouth, but in a few weeks I would feel like the old Martha again.

  She handed the prescription to my father and as we got up she asked if we had done all our Christmas shopping. She hadn’t even started hers. It seems to come around faster every year.

  Driving home, my father asked me if I was just crying in the usual way or for a specific reason.

  I said, ‘The word foetus.’

  ‘Should I ask,’ his knuckles were white, gripping the wheel, ‘if she was right in assuming you are, in fact –’

  ‘I’m not.’

  Parking in front of the chemist, he told me I didn’t have to get out because he would be a mere moment.

  *

  The capsules were light brown and dark brown and because they were low dose, it was necessary for me to take six a day but essential that I built up to that number slowly, over the course of a fortnight;
the doctor had wished to be absolutely explicit on that point too. Nevertheless, I decided to just start there and went into the bathroom as soon as we got home. Ingrid was already in there giving herself a fringe. She paused and watched me try to put six tablets in my mouth at once. When they all fell out again, she said, ‘Hey, it’s your old pal Cookie Monster,’ and mimed shoving them back in, saying ‘Me Cookie’ over and over.

  They felt like plastic in my mouth and left behind the taste of shampoo. I spat into the sink and went to leave but Ingrid asked me to stay for a bit. We climbed into the empty bath and lay at opposite ends with our legs pressed along each other’s sides. She talked about normal things and did impressions of our mother. I wished I could laugh because she looked so sad when I didn’t. Eventually she got out because she needed to check her fringe work in the mirror and said, ‘Oh my God, I’m already growing this out.’

  Still, every time I have to swallow a tablet, I think Me Cookie.

  *

  Out of Ingrid’s sons, the middle one is my favourite because he is shy and anxious and ever since he could walk, a constant holder-on to things – handfuls of her skirt, his older brother’s leg, the edge of tables. I have seen him reach up and hook the tips of his fingers into Hamish’s pocket while they are walking next to each other, taking two steps to every one of his father’s.

  Putting him to bed once, I asked him why he liked having something in his hand. At the time he was holding the strip of flannel he slept with.

  He said, ‘I don’t like it.’

  I asked him why he did it then.

  ‘So I don’t sink.’ He looked at me nervously, as if I might laugh at him. ‘My mum wouldn’t be able to find me.’

  I told him I knew what that felt like, not wanting to sink. He held up the piece of flannel and asked me if I needed it; he would give it to me.

  ‘I know you would but it’s okay. Thank you. It’s your lovely thing.’

  With the flannel still in his hand, he reached up gently, tugged the end of my hair until my face was very close to his and whispered, ‘I actually have two the same.’ If I changed my mind, I could tell him. He rolled onto his side and went to sleep with the fingers of his other hand curled around my thumb.

  5

  I HAD A headache for two weeks, and possibly a dry mouth. I still had the headache on Christmas Eve and told my mother that I didn’t feel well enough to stay the night at Belgravia and I did not want to go the next day either.

  The four of us were in the kitchen. We were already late, which was why my father was spreading pages of the Times Literary Supplement on the floor so he could polish his shoes, not the ones he was going to wear – all of his shoes – and my mother had just decided to have a bath, which was loudly filling next door. She was wearing a worn silk kimono that kept undoing itself. Each time, Ingrid, who was standing at the table wrapping presents quickly and badly, stopped and put her hands over her eyes, silently screaming like she had just been blinded in a factory explosion. I wasn’t doing anything except sitting on a stepladder in the corner watching them all.

  My mother went into the bathroom and came back with a laundry basket. I watched as she began packing the presents into it and vaguely heard her say that if we only went to Belgravia when we felt like it, she would have been there a total of once. I was distracted by the laundry basket because it was the one my father used when he moved to the Hotel Olympia.

  I glanced at him, wiping brown polish off a black shoe with kitchen roll. He had started to leave the house so rarely it was strange to see him making any kind of preparation to go out. Even when my mother told him to, or Ingrid begged him to drive her somewhere, he wouldn’t. His reasons for refusing – that he was expecting a call from an editor, that he’d forgotten where he’d put his licence, a thousand variations on recorded mail – my mother found so specious, it was obvious he was trying to get out of helping her with us.

  She said Martha. I blinked back at her. ‘Did you hear what I said?’

  ‘I can just stay home by myself.’

  ‘Oh we’d all love to stay home by ourselves.’ She said she’d been denied that pleasure for months, with the briefest look at my father, and I wondered how it hadn’t occurred to me until just then that since the night on the balcony, he had been making sure I was never, ever alone.

  He looked extremely tired. My mother uncorked a bottle of wine and took it into the bathroom with her, flipping on the radio as she passed it.

  *

  Hours later, we got into the car and drove to Belgravia, the laundry basket full of presents on Ingrid’s lap and my head on her shoulder. Winsome was the only one who had waited up for us. She was too furious to acknowledge my mother and only managed a crisp nod to my father. She kissed me and Ingrid, then told me that she’d made up a little bed on the sofa in the snug, which was what my cousins were required to call the TV room on the basement level, near the kitchen. She said, ‘Your father rang up this morning and said you’ve been poorly and wouldn’t want to bunk in with the others,’ and now she’d seen me, I did look quite drawn.

  I didn’t come out in the morning. Nobody tried to make me. Ingrid brought me breakfast even though she knew I wouldn’t eat it. She said I had to drink the tea.

  I had been awake for hours, not feeling the sense of dread that seemed to precede consciousness or the consuming sadness that had accompanied it for so many months. In the dark, lying still, waiting for it, I had wondered if it was waking up in a different room.

  After Ingrid went out I sat up and listened to the sound of voices from the kitchen and radio carols and my cousins thundering up the stairs and back down, Rowland’s vibrato whistling as he passed the door and instead of terror, I felt reassured by the noise, even the sharp, isolated sounds of doors being closed too hard overhead and Wagner’s demented barking. I wondered if I was better. I drank the tea.

  Towards nine, the noise concentrated itself in the foyer, the shouting peaked and then the house fell into almost perfect silence. The only other person who hadn’t gone to church, I knew when I heard the radio switch over from carols to a man’s voice doing some sort of dramatic reading, was my father.

  *

  Jessamine knocked on the door soon after I heard them all come back. She was ten and dressed like one of the Queen’s grandchildren. She was supposed to tell me lunch was ready and also supposed to tell me I didn’t have to come and have any.

  ‘Or –’ she itched her tights ‘– if you want to eat in here, you are allowed and someone can bring it.’

  I said I didn’t want anything. She went cross-eyed to indicate that I was insane and went out, leaving the door open.

  I got up to close it. Patrick was hovering just outside. He was a foot taller than he had been the year before and said hello in a voice so unlike the one I was expecting, I laughed.

  Embarrassed, he lowered his eyes. I was wearing the tracksuit bottoms and sweatshirt I had arrived in but I had taken my bra off and felt suddenly aware of it. I crossed my arms over my chest and asked him what he was doing. He said, fiddling with one cuff and then the other, that he was meant to be calling his father and Rowland had told him to use the phone in the snug but then Jessamine had just told him I was already in here.

  ‘I can go out.’

  Patrick said it was fine, he could just go and find another one, then looked quickly in either direction as though my uncle was about to appear from one of them. I took a half-step to the side and he rushed in.

  For a minute or two, he spoke to his father, in monosyllables. I waited outside the door until I heard him say goodbye. He was standing next to the phone table, staring blankly at a painting above it of a lion attacking a horse. A moment passed before he noticed me, apologising for taking so long when he did. I thought he would leave then but he just stood there while I walked back to the sofa and sat down on the covers, crossed-legged, hugging a cushion in front of my chest and silently wishing for him to go so I could lie down again. Patrick staye
d where he was. Because I could not think of another question I said, ‘How is school?’

  ‘Good.’ He turned around, paused, then said, ‘Sorry you’re sick.’

  I shrugged and pulled a thread out of the cushion zip. Although it was his third year with us, I could not remember talking to Patrick individually about something other than what time it was or where to put the plates he had brought down to the kitchen. But after another moment of him not leaving, I said, ‘You must miss your dad.’

  He smiled and nodded in a way that made it clear he didn’t.

  ‘Do you miss your mum?’ As soon as I said it, his face changed, not towards an emotion I could name, more the absence of any. He moved over to the window, stood with his back turned and his hands by his sides, not speaking for such a long time that when he eventually said yeah it felt like it wasn’t in reference to anything. His shoulders rose and fell with a heavy breath and I felt guilty that I had never considered how lonely he must be as the only unrelated person in the house, that having Christmas with someone else’s family every year was less likely his preference than a source of shame.

  I shifted a bit and said, ‘What was she like?’

  He stayed at the window. ‘She was really nice.’

  ‘Do you remember specific things about her? If you were seven.’

  ‘Not really.’

  I pulled another thread out of the cushion. ‘That’s sad.’

  Patrick finally turned around and said, quietly, that the only thing he did remember, which wasn’t from a photo, was one time in the kitchen of the house they lived in before she died, he asked for an apple and as she was handing it to him she said do you need me to start it for you?

  ‘I don’t know why.’

  ‘How old were you?’

  ‘Five or something.’

  I said, ‘You probably didn’t have front teeth.’

  There isn’t a name for the emotion that registered on his face then. It was all of them. Patrick left after that.