Sorrow and Bliss

by Meg Mason

  There was too much noise, heat, too many people coming towards me and buses thundering past me so near the curb, I went home again. Patrick called, I cried on the phone. He said his plane was leaving in an hour, he would be back so soon.

  I asked him to stay on the phone and talk to me and I could just listen. I told him I was very scared.

  ‘Of what?’

  ‘Me.’

  He said, ‘You won’t do anything, will you?’ He wanted me to promise. I said I couldn’t. He said in that case, Martha, please go to the hospital straight away.

  I knew that I wouldn’t. But as it got dark again, I began to feel scared of the flat, its ringing silence, the dead air. Patrick was out of reach on the plane by then. I crawled on my hands and knees to the door and waited outside for a taxi with my back pressed against a brick wall. My brain laughed at me, look at how stupid you are, crawling across the floor, look at you being scared to go outside.

  *

  The doctor in emergency said, ‘Why have you brought yourself here today?’ He didn’t sit down.

  My hair was in my eyes and sticking to my wet face and the stream running from my nose but I didn’t have the energy to lift my arm and push it away. I told him it was because I was so tired. He said I needed to speak up, and asked if I was having thoughts about hurting myself. I said no, I said I just wanted to not exist any more and asked if there was something he could give me that would make me go away, but in a way that wouldn’t hurt anyone or make a mess. Then I stopped talking because he said I seemed more intelligent than that, sounding frustrated.

  Although I didn’t look up from the spot of floor I had been staring at since I was put into the room, I sensed him looking at my notes, then heard the door open, suck across the lino and click shut. He was gone for so long that I began to believe the hospital had closed and I was alone, locked in. I scratched my wrists and stared at the floor. He came back, it felt like hours later. Patrick was with him. I didn’t know how he knew where I was, and I was filled with shame because he had to come home for me, his miserable wife slumped in a plastic hospital chair, too stupid even to raise her head.

  They talked about me between themselves. I heard the doctor say, ‘Listen, I can find her a bed but it would be an NHS facility and,’ more quietly, ‘you’ll know that public psych wards are not nice places.’ I didn’t interrupt. ‘In my opinion, she’s better off going home.’ He said, ‘I can give her something that will calm her down and we can touch base in the morning.’

  Patrick crouched beside my chair, holding the armrest, and moved my hair. He asked me if I felt like I should go in, just for a bit. He said it was up to me. I said no thank you. I had always been too afraid to be among those people in case they didn’t think it was weird I was there. In case the doctors wouldn’t let me go. I wanted Patrick to grab me by the wrists and drag me there so that I did not have to decide. I wanted him not to believe me when I said it was fine.

  ‘Are you sure?’

  I said yes, and pushed my hair off my face properly as I stood up. I said he didn’t have to worry, I just needed some sleep.

  The doctor said, ‘There we go, she’s already perking up.’

  Patrick drove us back without speaking. His expression was blank. At home, he could not get his key in the lock and, just once, he kicked the base of the door. It was the most violent thing I have ever seen him do.

  In the bathroom I took all of what the doctor had given me without reading the dose, took off my clothes and the swimsuit, which had left red lines all over my body, and slept for twenty-three hours. In brief moments of consciousness, I would open my eyes and see Patrick sitting in a chair in the corner of our room. I saw that he had put a plate of toast on the bedside table. Later, that he’d taken it away again. I said sorry, but I’m not sure it was ever out loud.

  He was in the living room when I finally woke up and went out to find him. It was dark outside. He said, ‘I was going to get pizza.’

  ‘Okay.’

  I sat down on the sofa. Patrick moved his arm so that I could be against his side, facing into him, with my knees up so that I was a ball. I never wanted to be anywhere except for there. Patrick, working around me, called the delivery place.

  I ate. It made me feel better. We watched a movie. I told him I was sorry for what had happened. He said it was fine … everyone has etc.

  *

  I met Ingrid for lunch in Primrose Hill. It was the first time she had left the baby, even though he was eight months old. I asked her if she missed him. She said she felt like she had just got out of high security prison.

  We had manicures, went to a film and talked through it until a man in the next row asked us to please put a sock in it. We walked to the Heath, looked at the Ladies’ Pond, swam in our knickers. We laughed our heads off.

  As we walked back through the park, a teenage boy approached us and said, ‘Are you the sisters from that band?’ Ingrid said we were. He said, ‘Go on then, sing us something.’ She told him we were on vocal rest.

  I felt intensely good. I didn’t tell Ingrid that a week ago, the same day, I was in hospital because I had forgotten.

  Patrick never mentioned it again but a short time later he said maybe we should leave London, in case London was the problem. At the beginning of winter, tenants took over our flat and we moved to the Executive Home.

  24

  AS WE WERE driving out of London, following our removal truck, Patrick asked me if I would consider making friends in Oxford. Even if I didn’t want to and I was only doing it for him, he didn’t mind. He just didn’t want me to start hating it too soon. He said, at least until we’ve unloaded the car.

  I was in the passenger seat looking for pictures of Drunk Kate Moss on my phone to send to Ingrid because at the time we were communicating primarily by that means. She was four weeks pregnant, not intentionally, and she said seeing seeing pap shots of Kate Moss falling out of Annabel’s with her eyes a bit shut was the only way she was getting through the day at this point.

  I told Patrick I would, although I didn’t know how.

  ‘Maybe, not a book club obviously but like a book club.’ He said, ‘You don’t have to get a job straightaway either if –’

  I said there weren’t any jobs anyway, I had already looked.

  ‘Well in that case, it makes sense to focus on the friends thing. And maybe you could think about doing something else workwise, if you wanted to. Or, I don’t know, do a masters.’

  ‘In what?’

  ‘In something.’

  I screen-shotted a picture of Kate Moss in a fur coat ashing a cigarette into a hotel topiary, and said, ‘I’m thinking about retraining as a prostitute.’

  In the middle of overtaking a van, Patrick shot me a look. ‘Okay. First, that term isn’t used any more. Second, you know this house is in a cul-de-sac. There won’t be the foot traffic.’

  I went back to my phone.

  Nearing Oxford he asked me if I wanted to drive past the allotment he had put his name down for. I said that unfortunately I didn’t since it was winter and presumably it was a square of black mud at the present time. He told me to wait – by summer we would be entirely self-sufficient, in the area of lettuce.

  That night we slept on our mattress in the living room surrounded by boxes, which I had opened one by one and become overwhelmed by when none of them were all just towels. The heating was too high and I lay awake thinking through the catalogue of terrible things I have done and said, and the much worse things I have thought.

  I woke Patrick up and gave him one or two examples. That I sometimes wished my parents had never met each other. That I wished Ingrid didn’t get pregnant so easily and that everyone we knew had less money. He listened without opening his eyes, then said, ‘Martha, you can’t honestly think you’re the only one who thinks things like that. Everyone has terrible thoughts.’

  ‘You don’t.’

  ‘Yes I do.’

  He rolled away from me, and sta
rted to fall asleep again. I got up and turned the ceiling light on. Back beside him I said, ‘Tell me the worst thing you’ve ever thought. I bet it’s not even remotely shocking.’

  Patrick moved onto his back and bent his arm over his eyes. ‘Fine. At work a while ago they brought in a man who was in his nineties. He was brain dead from a stroke and when his family got there I explained that there was no chance he was going to recover and that it was a question of how long they wanted to keep him on the ventilator. His wife and son said, essentially, to go ahead but his daughter refused and said they should wait in case of a miracle. She was incredibly upset but it was midnight, and I’d been there since five o’clock in the morning and all I could think was hurry up and sign the jolly thing so I can go home.’

  ‘Gosh. That is quite bad.’

  He said, ‘I know.’

  ‘Did you actually say the jolly thing to their faces?’

  He said okay shut up, and felt on the floor for his phone. He started streaming Radio Four. It was the Shipping News. ‘You will be asleep by the time he gets to the Scilly Isles, I promise. Please can you turn off the light.’

  I did, and lay looking at the unfamiliar ceiling, listening to the man say, Fisher, Dogger, Cromaty. Fine, becoming poor.

  He said, Fair Isle, Faeoro, the Hebrides. Cyclonic, becoming rough or very rough. Occasionally good.

  I turned my pillow over and asked Patrick if he thought the forecast for the Hebrides was really a metaphor for my interior state but he was already asleep. I closed my eyes and listened until God Save the Queen and the end of transmission.

  The next morning, in the kitchen while he looked for the kettle, I said, ‘What did you do about the man in the end?’

  ‘I stayed for another six hours until the daughter changed her mind, then I managed his death. Martha, why did you label every single box Miscellaneous?’

  *

  There was a gate at the bottom of the Executive Development which gave access to the towpath. We walked along it in the afternoon. On the other side of the canal, Port Meadow was a flat, silver expanse stretching towards a low black line of trees and behind them the outline of spires. Horses were grazing half-hidden in the mist. I did not know who they belonged to.

  At its end, the towpath joined a street into town and we kept going. Patrick showed some sort of card to the man inside the gatehouse of Magdalen College and took me in. He promised me close-up deer but they were standing together, in a distant corner of the park, and the only thing roaming freely on the grass were young, vital people, students who called out to each other, broke into little sprints for no reason, existed as though nothing bad had ever or would ever happen to them.

  *

  I found a book club and went to it. It was at someone’s house. The women all had doctorates and did not know what to say when I told them I didn’t, as if I had just confessed to having no living relatives or an illness with a residual stigma.

  I found a different book club, in a library. The women all had doctorates. I said mine was on the Lancashire Cotton Panic of 1861 because I had listened to an In Our Time about it while I walked there. A woman I talked to afterwards said she would love to hear more about it next week, but I had already told her all the things I could remember. I left knowing I could not go back because I would have to listen to the episode again, and one of the three male experts on the panel had been a compulsive throat clearer, and only ever interrupted its sole female.

  *

  Sometimes, during the day, I sat in the front window of the Executive Home and stared at the facing Executive Home, trying to imagine myself inside it, living a mirror image version of my exact life.

  The actual woman who lived there at the time had boy-girl twins and a husband who was, according to the magnetic signs that he pressed onto his car doors in the morning and peeled off at night, The Chiropractor Who Comes To You.

  One day she knocked on the door and apologised for not coming over sooner. We were wearing the same top and when she noticed and laughed, I saw she had adult braces. While she was talking, I imagined what it would be like to be her friend. If we would visit each other without texting, if we would drink wine in each other’s kitchens or outside in our gardens, if I would tell her about my life and she would be forthcoming about a childhood in which braces were not possible.

  She said she hadn’t noticed any children and asked what I did. I told her I was a writer. She said she actually had a blog, and blushed telling me the name of it. It was mostly funny observations about life, and recipes, and she said I obviously didn’t need to read it.

  The main thing: what did I think of the house? I said oh my gosh, like we were friends who have been talking for an hour and have finally got to the good part. ‘I feel like I’ve been in a dissociative fugue since we drove in the gates.’ I told her I had only lived in London and Paris and wasn’t sure I’d known places like this really existed. ‘Are we supposed to believe it’s Regency Bath, despite the satellite dishes?’ I was talking too fast by then because Patrick was the only person I had spoken to for a period of days but I thought I was being interesting and funny from the way she was smiling and furiously nodding. ‘I’ve come home about ten times and not been able to get the door open and then I realise I’m standing in front of the wrong house.’ I made a joke about the enervating nature of taupe carpet and said finally, on the positive side, if she happened to own fifteen thousand appliances with unusual plugs and ever wanted to use them all at once, she was welcome to run an extension cord over the pretend-cobbled street. Her smile was suddenly gone. She did a little cough and said it was probably good we were just renting and went back to her own house.

  I didn’t understand why she went to extreme lengths to avoid eye contact with me after that, until I recounted the conversation to Patrick who pointed out that if she owned her house and loved it, she might have been a bit upset to hear an identical house described as soul-crushing.

  I found her blog. It was called Living the Cul-De-Sac Life and there was a picture of our house or hers at the top. Since we were not going to be friends, I was disappointed that she was a good writer and that her funny observations were funny. I began reading it every day. To begin with, in search of references to myself and then, because she was writing the mirror-image version of my life, the one where my vacuum cleaner cupboard is on the left, and I have boy-girl twins and a husband who gets home around eight most nights, so I generally eat at five with the kids and I swear, this is the conversation we have every. single. night.

  *Looks at plate of dinner on top of microwave*

  Post-it stuck on it says ‘your dinner’

  Him: Is this my dinner?

  Me: Yes

  Should I heat it up?

  Yes

  *Long pause*

  How long for?

  When did he stop being an adult with life skills?!

  *

  I got a letter from the library, forwarded by our tenants. It asked me for the Ian McEwan back and £92.90 in compound fines. Because there was no money in Martha’s Unexpecteds at the time, I rang up and told them that unfortunately Martha Friel was a registered missing person, but if she was ever found, I would ask her about the book.

  *

  I started going to the allotment with Patrick sometimes on weekends, on the proviso that I didn’t have to help. I said, ‘aka, she died doing what he loved.’ He bought a folding chair and a shed to keep it in so I could sit, reading or watching him, with my feet on a dead tree trunk that demarcated our failing carrots from the thriving carrots of our neighbour. Once, while he was doing something with a hoe that still had the cardboard tag around the handle, I lowered my book and said that I knew it would be expensive if they charged by the word but this is what I would like on my headstone: ‘It’s Cold Comfort Farm. Someone has just asked the main girl what she likes and she says: I wasn’t quite sure, but on the whole I thought I liked having everything very tidy and calm all around me, and not being bothere
d to do things, and laughing at the kind of joke other people didn’t think at all funny, and going for country walks and not being asked to express opinions about things like love, and isn’t so-and-so peculiar.’

  He said, ‘Martha, expressing opinions about peculiar people is the only thing you care about. And you never ever need to be asked.’

  *

  In December, I got a part-time job at the Bodleian Library gift shop selling mugs and keyrings and branded tote bags to tourists because it meant I could spend eight hours sitting on a stool mostly not talking.

  A woman wearing a souvenir sweatshirt came in and I watched her put a gift pack of pencils up her sleeve. When she came up to the counter to pay for something else, I asked if she’d like the pencils gift-wrapped as well. I told her it was complimentary. She turned red and said she didn’t know what I was talking about. She said she no longer wanted what she had put on the counter. As she turned to walk away I said, ‘Only five shoplifting days left ’til Christmas,’ and stayed sitting on my stool.

  I told Patrick, who said retail may not be my thing. After Christmas, they replaced me with an older lady who was amenable to standing up.

  A short time later I got an email from somebody I didn’t know. He said we had crossed over at World of Interiors. ‘You were really funny. I think you had just got married or you were about to get married? I was doing work experience.’ Now, he said, he was the editor of Waitrose magazine and he had an idea.

  *

  I started seeing a psychologist because London wasn’t the problem. Being sad is, like writing a funny food column, something I can do anywhere. I found her on findatherapist.co.uk. On the first page of the website there was a button that said What’s Worrying You? in white letters on a sky-blue background. Clicking on it produced a drop-down menu. I selected Other.

  The title of her listing was Julie Female. I chose her because she was < 5 miles from town centre and because I found her headshot compelling. She was wearing a hat. I took a photo of the screen with my phone and texted it to Ingrid. She said, ‘Headshot hat one hundred per cent alarm bells.’