Sorrow and Bliss(15)

Here lies Martha Juliet Russell

25 November 1977 – TBC

She chewed more than she bit off

*

The pills did not make me feel like the old Martha when they took effect a month after I started them. I was not depressed any more. I was euphoric, all the time. Nothing scared me. Everything was funny. I started second semester and made friends, by force, with everyone in my classes. A girl said, ‘It’s weird, you’re so fun. We all thought you were a bitch.’ The boy with her said, ‘They thought that – we just thought you were cold.’ ‘The point is,’ the girl said, ‘you didn’t speak to a single person for like, the whole start of the year.’ Ingrid said I was less weird when I was under my desk.

*

I lost my virginity to a doctoral student assigned when my probation was lifted, the dean said, ‘to find any gaps and fill them in’. I left his flat as soon as it was over. It was the afternoon but still winter and already dark. On the street I only saw mothers with prams. It felt like a parade, converging from multiple directions. Passing under streetlights, their babies’ faces looked pale and moonlike, tinged with orange. They cried and twisted uselessly against the straps that held them in. I went into a Boots and was told by the disapproving chemist that I needed a prescription for the morning-after pill, he couldn’t just sell it to me like headache tablets. There was a clinic down the road that did walk-ins; if he was me, he’d go straight there.

I waited for hours to be seen and reassured by a doctor who did not seem much older than me that I was well within my window of opportunity – she said, ‘So to speak’ and giggled.

That night, I did not take my medication. I did not take it the next day or the next, until I was not taking it at all. The doctor who had given it to me was non-specific about the harm it would cause, she could not tell me how long it ‘lingered in the system’. But all I could think about was the way she had whispered the word foetus.

And so, I did a pregnancy test, every day until I got my period, convinced despite the precautions I had taken during and afterwards, despite the fact that every test was negative, that I was carrying a writhing, moon-faced baby. The morning my period came, I sat on the edge of the bath and felt sick with relief.

Without my medication, I was not euphoric any more. I was not depressed, the old me or a new me. I just was.

*

I told Ingrid that I had slept with the student, none of what had followed for me in case she laughed and told me I was paranoid. She said wow. ‘Consider your gaps found and filled in.’ When she asked me what it was like, the first time, I made it sound brilliant because she was actively looking, she said, to have her own gaps filled in.

*

After I graduated, late, I got a job at Vogue because they were starting a website and I said, in my application, that as well as being a qualified philosopher, I was au fait with the internet. Ingrid said I got the job because I am tall.

The day before I started, I went to the Waterstones on Kensington High Street and found a book about HTML, which I stood reading in the aisle because the cover was such an aggressive shade of yellow, I couldn’t bear the idea of owning it. It was so confusing, I got angry and left.

We – me and the one other girl who did the website – sat far away from the magazine people but unnaturally close to each other in a cubicle made out of shelving units. We were both, it transpired, anxious not to annoy the other, which was why I worked out how to eat an apple in absolute silence – by cutting it into sixteenths and holding each piece in my mouth until it dissolved like a wafer – and why, whenever her phone rang, she would lunge for the receiver, lift it an inch out of the cradle and put it straight back down to stop it ringing. The calls could not have been for us since no one knew we were there. We started calling it the veal crate.

In my first six months I lost two stone. Ingrid said I looked amazing in a gross way and could I try and get her a job there too. It wasn’t on purpose – I was told it happened to everyone as though subconsciously, we were all preparing ourselves for the day we’d come in and find that the doors had been modified in such a way that only girls with approved dimensions could pass through them. Like the baggage-sizers at airports; hand luggage must be able to fit in here.

I loved it there. I stayed until they found out I was not au fait with the internet and arranged for me to move downstairs to World of Interiors where I wrote exquisitely about chairs and said very little. Ingrid says it’s thanks to hard work and determination that I have been steadily descending the career ladder ever since.

After her A levels, Ingrid did the first year of a marketing degree at a regional university, which she said left her dumber than she was to start with, then moved back to London and became a model agent. She resigned as soon as she got pregnant and never returned because, she says, she has no interest in paying a nanny so she can spend nine hours a day looking at Eastern European sixteen-year-olds with negative BMIs.

*

On holiday one year, I read Money, thirty pages of it until I remembered that I do not understand Martin Amis. The main character in the book is a dedicated smoker. He says, ‘I started smoking another cigarette. Unless I specifically inform you otherwise, I am always smoking another cigarette.’

Unless I inform you otherwise, at intervals throughout my twenties and most of my thirties, I was depressed, mildly, moderately, severely, for a week, two weeks, half a year, all of one.