Sorrow and Bliss(52)

I told her it was the best objective correlative I’d ever heard.

She glanced across from the wheel and looked annoyed. ‘Can you please not say things that you know I don’t understand because my brain is a solid wad of wet wipes at this point.’

‘Two things that when you put them together in a poem make the reader feel whatever emotion you want them to so you don’t have to expressly name it. As in, if you write slag heap it saves you the job of typing morbid existential despair.’

‘I didn’t ask you to explain it but that’s fine.’ She tugged out her ponytail with one hand. ‘Does Dad know about it though? Maybe that’s where the money is.’ One of the children made a noise and Ingrid lowered her voice. ‘If you can get the words slag heap into Waitrose magazine, I will give you one thousand pounds.’

‘Do they have to be next to each other?’

‘If they are, I will give you a thousand pounds and a child of your choice. But not the baby because he can’t talk and ask me for things.’

The eldest one woke up as we were passing the leisure centre again and started crying, louder and louder, because he wanted to go swimming. Ingrid started crying because she was too tired to say no a second time. Pulling into the car park, she said, ‘And this is where MRSA was invented.’

I started breathing through my mouth as soon as we were inside.

In the change rooms, three little girls were crouched in the middle of the flooded floor trying to get back into their school uniforms. They could not get their tights on by themselves and were taking turns to point out that they were going to get in so much trouble if they didn’t hurry up. I watched them while I was holding things for Ingrid and saw the smallest one give up and drop her head into her hands.

I wanted to go over and help her but Ingrid said talking to a child in the context of a swimming pool changing room was basically asking to be put on the sex offenders’ register. ‘Also, can you please help me? Take this.’ She handed me some kind of special nappy and told me to put it on the baby.

A moment later, a teacher appeared and stood in the entrance with her hands on her hips. She was incongruously dressed, in a clingy wrap dress and high heels protected from pool water by the supermarket bags she had put on each foot and knotted around her ankles. Ingrid and I both stopped what we were doing when she started shouting. The little girls froze until she was gone, then became more frenzied in their efforts to get dressed, saying we’re going to get left behind, we’re going to get left behind. The smallest one burst into tears.

I put the baby back in his pram. Ingrid said seriously don’t as I went over and, crouching down, asked the girl if she would like me to help her with her laces. She raised her head and nodded slowly. The laces were wet and grey. I told her it was difficult, getting dressed in a hurry and she said, especially because the pool made her legs go sticky. Her ankles were impossibly thin; she seemed too fragile to be in the world. Once I was finished, she sprang up and ran after her friends.

I went back over to Ingrid, who was shoving things under the pram. She said, ‘I guess you won’t be coming to playgrounds with me any more now you’re on the register,’ but she was smiling. She kicked the brake off. ‘Gosh they were sweet though.’

The sun was sinking on the other side of the slag heap as we drove past it again on the way home. Ingrid, gazing out the window, said, ‘Boys, no matter what befalls us as a family, I will never let your father move us to Merthyr Tydfil.’

*

Later, her children in bed, my sister and I sat on the sofa drinking canned gin and tonic and watching the fire, which had been dying since the second we lit it.

I said, ‘When you have a baby, do you automatically turn into someone who can cope with seeing a woman with bags on her feet scream at a child who isn’t hers? You’re suddenly just strong enough to be in a world where that happens?’

Ingrid swallowed and said no. ‘It makes it worse because as soon as you’re a mother, you realise every child was a baby five seconds ago, and how could anyone shout at a baby? But then, you shout at your own and if you can do that, you must be a terrible person. Before you had kids, you were allowed to think you were a good person so then you secretly resent them for making you realise you’re actually a monster.’

‘I already know I’m a monster.’ I wanted her to tell me I wasn’t.

She turned on the television. ‘I guess you’ve saved yourself a job then.’

It was a movie we had both seen before with an actress who was, in the present scene, trying to force all her shopping bags into the back of a yellow cab. In real life, she had just leapt off a roof. During the advertisements, Ingrid said the thing everybody says. She couldn’t understand how anyone could feel so bad they’d want to do that. I was scratching something off my jeans, not really listening, and said without thinking that I obviously could.

‘No but like, not that bad, that you’d genuinely want to die.’

I laughed, then glanced up to see why she had suddenly turned off the television. Ingrid was just looking at me.

‘What?’

‘When you’re depressed, you don’t genuinely want to die. When have you ever felt like that?’

I asked her if she was being serious. ‘Every time, I feel like that.’

Ingrid said, ‘Martha! You do not!’