Sorrow and Bliss(26)

*

Outside, on my way to the bus, I walked past a rubbish bin and tossed the papers in without stopping, unable to imagine a situation that would require me to present a hard copy record of my abortive marriage or where I would keep them in my bedroom at Goldhawk Road unless I dragged one of my father’s filing cabinets upstairs and put them under A for Agonising Fuck Ups ’03 – ’04.

At a set of lights, I got off the bus and walked half a mile back to the rubbish bin. The papers were still there, under a McDonald’s cup that had been tossed in full and split its lid. Without them I had no proof that I wasn’t married to a man who, Ingrid told me while evacuating me from his apartment, scored nine out of ten on an online questionnaire she had done on his behalf called Are You a Sociopath?. I lifted them out, the pages now a single clod, and carried them by one corner to find another bus, dripping Fanta down the side of my leg.

For half an hour, the bus crawled along Shepherd’s Bush Road. Traffic lights changed, and changed again, without admitting any cars to intersections already jammed. There was no one else on the upper deck and I sat with my forehead against the glass, looking down at the footpath and then, as it came into view, through the wide front window of a café where a woman was breastfeeding a baby and reading. To turn the page, she had to put the book on the table and keep it open with the heel of her hand while swiping her fingers right to left. Before she began reading again, she would drop her face enough to kiss the baby’s hand that had got a tiny grip on the edge of her shirt. After a few minutes, I saw a pregnant woman get up from another table and go over. They started talking to each other, the one touching her stomach and laughing, the other patting her baby’s back. I could not tell if they were friends, or like-strangers compelled to acknowledge their shared fecundity. I did not want to be either of them.

I told Ingrid that I had let Jonathan change my mind. As she understood it, it was a brief reversal of a life-choice.

I had never been able to tell her about my terror of pregnancy at the time I acquired it or as I got older and, instead of diminishing, my teenage fear intensified until I was a woman not just afraid of being pregnant, a damaged foetus, a damaged baby, but of babies in general, mothers and the concept of motherhood itself – one person charged with creating and keeping safe an entire human being. Ingrid would declare my fear irrational, illegitimate as the basis of an adult decision. And now, I did not want her to know that, so afraid, I’d still let Jonathan’s assured way of being and his propulsive energy overwhelm me and make me think I wasn’t scared at all. So quickly and so easily, I’d let him convince me I was someone else or that I could be simply by choosing and that I wanted a baby.

But I couldn’t compel myself into becoming someone without tendencies. Circumstances had no bearing, time wasn’t progressing me towards any other way of being. I was already at my final state. I was childless. I didn’t want children. I said, ‘So that’s good’ aloud, to no one. The women in the café were still talking when the traffic suddenly dissipated and the bus drove on.

*

At home, Oliver and Patrick were in the living room with Nicholas, watching television. Although it had been their practice for months and I’d had enough incidental conversations with Patrick to no longer feel awkward, I still didn’t join them and hadn’t meant to then. But as I passed the open door on my way to the stairs and saw them, shoulder to shoulder on the too-small sofa, loneliness collected me with such force I felt like I had been winded. I just stood there with my bag on my shoulder and my papers still in my hand, feeling the fast up and down of my chest, the in and out of my ribcage, until Oliver noticed me and said that, as I could see, they were watching competition darts and since it was the penultimate round, I needed to come in and sit down properly or continue on my way.

I saw myself, in a minute, sitting on my bed scrolling through listings for share houses in suburbs of London I only recognised as terminating destinations of various Tube lines, pretending I was still on the cusp of moving out.

I let my bag slide off my shoulder and went in. Patrick acknowledged me with a silent wave and Nicholas with the observation that I looked like shit. He asked me where I had been.

‘Town.’

‘Doing what?’

‘Divorcing.’

He said, ‘Shame’ and turned back to watch a man with a stomach that hung over his trousers aiming a dart at a red circle and punching the air when it struck the centre. After that, Nicholas got up, stretched, and told me I could have his spot because he just remembered a girl he needed to make amends with because his final act before rehab was putting a nine iron through her windscreen after taking more than his recommended daily intake of methamphetamine. ‘Which I discover is none. Back shortly.’

Patrick made a gesture of moving along to make more room, although there was none. Sitting between Patrick and Oliver, my arms pressed against theirs, all I wanted to do was stay there and watch competition darts while my cold empty body absorbed their warmth. The only thing Patrick said, turning his head but avoiding my eye, was, ‘I hope you’re okay.’

I pretended not to hear him because there was no way to bear the kindness of it, and instead asked Oliver why the men needed to wear moisture-wicking polos and sporty trousers to play a game that fat men play in pubs. He said, ‘It’s a sport, not a game,’ and we were all silent until its protracted finish and the presentation of a trophy that was so modest, I had to look away when the winner lifted it above his head with both hands as if its weight demanded it.