Sorrow and Bliss(11)

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.’