Sorrow and Bliss(51)

Later, at the door, she asked if I thought she was going to be able to do it, the house, the village. ‘You like it don’t you?’ Her son was on her hip, trying to make her look at a plastic car he was holding by putting it in front of her face. She kept moving his hand away. ‘As in, you’ve made it work. It was the right thing to do, because you’ve been good, and you and Patrick are good.’ Her voice went up at the end; they were all questions. She needed me to say yes.

On her son’s next attempt, Ingrid took the car off him. He started crying and tried, with his tiny hand, to hit her in the face. She caught his wrist and held it. Her son started writhing and kicking his legs, holding the back of her hair with his free hand. Ingrid continued, undeterred. ‘So definitely, Oxford is better. Different-better but fundamentally – you like it.’

I said yes. ‘You’ll be fine. It was a good idea.’

‘And you’re fine?’

I said totally.

‘So no bathroom floor topics.’ It was another question. Or an instruction, a caution, or my sister’s hope.

I said no so that I could leave and Ingrid could convey her son, still flailing, to the bad-choices chair.

*

Was it different-better. Fundamentally. In the car on the way home, I thought about our life in Oxford, with its walks and weekends, its dinners and author talks, minibreaks and exhibitions, Patrick’s important work and my very small work. I liked it no more or less than our life in London. It had been nearly two years. In the only way that mattered Oxford wasn’t different or better. There were still bathroom floor topics – Ingrid meant, the times I was so scared or leaden or in another way consumed by depression that I couldn’t move from whichever corner it had driven me into, until Patrick came, and put his hand out and pulled me up. Then, as always, in a day, a week, however long, I could go into the bathroom and think nothing about the corner where I’d previously trembled, cried, bit my lip, begged, except the whole floor could do with a mop.

There was a prescription sticking out of a compartment under the radio. I’d put it there before so I would see it and remember to stop and have it filled on the way home. At a set of lights, I took it out. For some reason, the pharmaceutical company had opted to make their most potent antidepressant a chewable – designed to disintegrate on first contact with the tongues of suffering adults, coating it with a long-lasting taste of pineapple, then collecting as sand-like granules in the pockets of the mouth, ulcerating the gums, before reforming into a clag that burned on the way down. I had been taking it for so long. I was taking it before Patrick and I got married. I was taking it when I started throwing things and when I went to hospital. I was on it now. I wasn’t different or better.

That night, I told Patrick I was going to stop taking it because it didn’t do anything. I said, ‘I don’t see the point. I’m exactly the same.’ I was watching him make dinner.

He said, ‘Do you want me to make you a doctor’s appointment so she can tell you how to come off it?’

‘No. You just come off it by not taking it.’

Patrick stopped his knife halfway through an onion and put it down next to the board.

I said it’s fine. ‘I’ve done it millions of times. And I don’t want to see any more doctors either. I just want to be. I’m so tired Patrick. I was seventeen.’ I pressed my eyes so I wouldn’t cry. ‘I’m thirty-four.’

He said he got it, it had been quite a while, and came over, letting me stand in his arms for a long time. My face into his shoulder, I said, ‘I don’t even want to take the pill any more either. I can’t swallow another tablet.’ I don’t know why I said please.

Patrick put his hand on the back of my head. He said of course, it was totally fine. He’d rather I came off antidepressants under supervision but he could see how I’d just want to be off everything really, if I didn’t think it helped. He said, who knows. ‘Maybe this is just you.’

*

I asked Ingrid what to use instead of the pill. She said the implant thing. If I touched the inside of my arm, I could feel it under my skin.

*

The year that followed was indistinct from any before it. Near the end of it Ingrid called and said, ‘Literally, why do I always do pregnancy tests in Starbucks toilets?’ And this time, she told me, it was a Swindon Starbucks which made it even worse.

‘Are you pregnant?’

‘Of course I am.’

‘Don’t you have the implant thing?’

‘I didn’t get around to it.’ Her bursting into tears made a noise like static in my ear and then I heard her say, ‘Three under fucking five, Martha.’





26

HAMISH’S FAMILY HAS a house in Wales. Once she had three under fucking five, Ingrid started making me go there with her whenever Hamish went away for work, even though it depressed us both. There was nothing to do at the house. The nearest town has a Morrisons, a leisure centre and a slag heap.

The baby was a month old the first time we went. Because all three were asleep in the back as we drove into the town, we were not allowed to stop. Ingrid said we would be circumnavigating the slag heap until this lovely micro-holiday was over. ‘Don’t you think –’ she put an indicator on ‘– you can’t make a joke about a slag heap that’s funnier than just saying slag heap?’