Sorrow and Bliss(53)

I said okay.

‘You can’t just say okay. Okay what? Okay you don’t feel like that?’

‘No – okay you don’t have to believe me.’

She pushed all the cushions that were between us onto the floor and made me shift my legs so she could sit right next to me. She said if that was true, we had to talk about it. I said we didn’t.

‘But I want to understand what it’s like for you. Feeling like that.’

I tried to. For the first time, I told her about the night on the balcony at Goldhawk Road. The way I felt when I was standing out there, staring down at the dark garden, then stopped because she looked so upset. Her eyes were enormous and glassy.

I said it’s not something you can really explain to someone who hasn’t experienced it.

She cried, a single, aching sob, then said sorry and tried to smile. ‘I suppose it’s the ultimate had-to-be-there.’

For a while we sat like that, my sister holding my wrist, until I said she needed to go to bed.

*

I heard her get up in the night and went into her room. She was sitting up in bed feeding the baby, beatific in the half-light of a lamp she had dimmed with a towel that was still damp from the leisure centre floor.

She said, ‘Come and keep me awake.’ I got into bed next to her. ‘Tell me something funny.’

I told her about the time when we were teenagers, that our house – for no reason and as if by some force outside the four of us – began to fill with African tribal art, masks, juju hats, in such quantity that the downstairs of Goldhawk Road started to look like the gift shop at Nairobi international airport. I told her the only piece I could remember exactly was a bronze fertility sculpture that was in the hallway for a while, directly inside the front door, and only because its phallus was so pronounced that, as she said at the time, when it inadvertently got turned ninety degrees it was like a fucking boom gate.

Ingrid said she remembered it as well. ‘I started hanging my PE bag on it.’

Neither of us knew when and how it disappeared. Just that, one day it was all gone. The baby hiccoughed. My sister laughed.

I said, ‘What’s the best thing about it?’

Without taking her eyes off her son, Ingrid said, ‘This. All of it. I mean, it’s shit, but all of it. Especially,’ she yawned, ‘the time between finding out you are pregnant and telling anyone, including your husband. Even if it’s just a week or one minute in my case. No one talks about that part.’

She went on to describe a sense of privacy so singular and ecstatic that, as desperate as she felt to tell someone, it was still painful to give up. She said, ‘You feel the most intense inner superiority because everyone is oblivious to the fact you have gold inside you. For however long, you get to walk around knowing you’re better than everyone else.’ She yawned again and handed me the baby while she put her top back on. ‘Did you know that’s why the Mona Lisa is smiling like that? As in, so smugly. Because she’d just done a test or whatever in the studio loo and got the two lines right before she sat down and he’s studying her for ten hours a day and the whole time she’s like, he doesn’t even know I’m pregnant.’

I asked her how they knew that but she said she couldn’t remember, something to do with a shadow he put on her neck, to do with some gland that only sticks out when you’re pregnant, and I should just Google it later.

Cross-legged then, Ingrid spread a muslin square out in front of her and took the baby back, laid him down and wrapped him in a tight swaddle. She didn’t pick him up, instead, gazed down at him and smoothed out a fold in the fabric, then said, ‘Sometimes, I wish you did want children. I just think it would have been fun, having babies at the same time.’

I said maybe I would have but I hated leisure centres and they seemed mandatory to the task.

Ingrid picked the baby up and held him out. ‘Can you put him back in the thing?’

I got up and carried him against my shoulder. I felt like she was watching me as I set him down on the little mattress and slid my hands out from underneath him.

She said, Martha? ‘I hope it’s not because you really think you’re a monster.’

I put a blanket over him, tucked both sides and asked my sister not to talk about it any more.

*

In the morning I got up and made the older boys breakfast so that she could keep sleeping. The eldest one asked me to make him boiled eggs.

The middle one said, I don’t want boiled eggs and started crying. He said he wanted a pancake.

I told him they could have different things.

‘No we can’t.’

I asked him why not.

He said because this isn’t a restaurant.

While he was waiting for his pancake, he recounted a dream he had had when he was much younger, about a bad man who was trying to drink him. He said he didn’t find it scary any more. Only sometimes, when he remembered it.





27

NEAR THE STEPS of St Mark’s Basilica, I threw up into a cigarette bin. Patrick and I were in Venice for our fifth wedding anniversary. For the previous two weeks, he’d kept asking me if I wanted to cancel because I was obviously sick. I said, ‘Refreshingly of body not of mind though, so it’s fine.’

I was desperate to cancel. But he had bought a Lonely Planet. He had been reading it in bed every night and as ill and scared as I was, I couldn’t bear to disappoint someone whose desires were so modest they could be circled in pencil.