Sorrow and Bliss(58)

The waiting room was dark and felt too warm because I had run most of the way from Paddington in a coat that was too heavy for May. The same receptionist said that ordinarily I could expect a long wait but the doctor would only be a minute. Also, she said, very rare. I stayed standing and played a game that my father invented for me at the beginning: how would I improve this room, if I was only allowed to remove one thing? I chose the visible price tag on the cyclamen, then turned at the sound of a heavy door opening across thick carpet. A man wearing moleskin trousers, a white shirt and knitted tie came out and said, ‘Hello Martha, I’m Robert.’ He shook my hand, firmly, as though he hadn’t presumed it would be limp.

In his office he told me to sit wherever I liked, establishing himself in an ergonomic chair that had a wider armrest on one side to accommodate his notebook, open to a page that was empty except for my name. I sat and waited while he underlined it. Then with the other hand he smoothed his tie and I saw that his index finger was wrapped in a very white, professional dressing. It remained straight, separate from his other fingers, exempted from use.

He looked up and asked me to start from the beginning. Why had I come to see him? And to my reply, which felt uninteresting as I delivered it, could I remember the first time I felt like this?

Cyclonic, becoming rough or very rough. Occasionally good.

I started with the day of my last A level, and I stopped at half past nine that morning, when I had gone outside with a bag of rubbish and a woman walking past holding the hands of two toddlers smiled at me and said I looked as tired as she felt. I stood still until she had gone, then went back inside with the rubbish bag and flung it down the hallway. It hit the wall and burst. I told him that Patrick would be the one to find it because I was here, and he would just clean it up, the spaghetti and the eggshells and still, after so much time, pretend that was a normal thing that wives did.

Robert asked me if I threw things a lot or did anything else that I wouldn’t consider, ‘in your word, normal’.

I told him about the time I had lifted a terracotta pot and shattered it against the garden wall. I told him about smashing my phone so many times against the kitchen tiles that pieces of glass got in my hand, about throwing the hairdryer at Patrick, the bruise it left, about driving my car on purpose into a metal guard rail in a car park, about standing with my back to the wall and banging my head over and over because it felt better than I did, about the days I could not get up, the nights I couldn’t go to sleep, the books I’d ripped up and clothes I had torn apart by their seams. With exception of the hairdryer, none were unrecent.

I apologised to him and said it was completely fine if he couldn’t think of anything, in terms of helping me. As an afterthought I said, ‘The funny thing, not funny ha-ha but as in funny terrible, is that once it finishes and I feel normal, I see the leftovers, smashed bits of plate in the bin or whatever, and I think, who did that? I truly can’t believe it was me.’ I told him about Ingrid’s fashion crises. That he continued taking notes was peculiarly affecting to me. The grace of it, I think, his acting as though it was something worthy of his writing down.

He turned the page in his notebook and asked me what diagnoses I’d been given by previous doctors. I said, ‘Glandular fever, clinical depression, then – this is in order –’ and proceeded to list them, one after the other until I was being boring and did a little laugh. ‘Most of the index of the DSM, really.’

I looked around for the dictionary of mental illnesses that was always somewhere on display in the office of the kind of doctors I saw. It had become a dismal kind of Where’s Wally – trying to pick its blood-red spine out of the shelves of psychiatric textbooks with titles that seemed intentionally menacing. But it wasn’t anywhere. I felt another surge of gratitude as I turned back and saw that he was waiting for me.

‘What I’m most interested to know is what diagnosis you’ve given yourself, Martha.’

I paused as if I had to think about it. ‘That I’m not good at being a person. I seem to find it more difficult to be alive than other people.’

He said that was interesting. ‘But based on the fact you’ve come here today, you must also think there’s a medical explanation.’

I nodded.

‘What would you say it was, in that case?’

I said, ‘Depression probably, except it’s not constant. It just starts for no reason or a reason that seems too small.’ I braced myself for him to take the laminated list out of his drawer, turn it towards me and make me do my Always, Sometimes, Seldom, Nevers.

Toujours, parfois, rarement, jamais.

Instead, he took a moment to recap his pen, laid it on the notebook and said, ‘Perhaps you can tell me what it feels like when you suddenly find yourself in the trenches, as it were.’

I described it in the ways I had to Patrick, after his first exposure to it – that day in summer when we weren’t yet together – and so many times since. I said, ‘It’s like going into the cinema when it’s light and when you come out you’re shocked because you didn’t expect it to be dark, but it is.

‘It’s like being on a bus and strangers on either side of you suddenly start screaming at each other, fighting over your head and you can’t get out.

‘You are standing still and then you’re falling down a flight of stairs, but you don’t know who pushed you. There is no one behind you.