Sorrow and Bliss(62)

Patrick kept asking me if I was alright. He kept telling me I seemed a bit preoccupied. A bit stressed. He wondered if something had happened. But my mother left no room for Patrick – his failure to notice there was something wrong with me was so much less than her effort to pretend there wasn’t, her decades-long devotion to not noticing.

I told him to stop asking and he did, leaving me free to think about my mother to the exclusion of everything else, awake and in dreaming. Patrick and telling Patrick and Patrick’s possible reaction to my —— had become irrelevant to me. All I wanted was to hate my mother, and punish her and expose what she’d done. I said yes to lunch.

*

My father was in the kitchen buttering sandwiches when I arrived. We took them up to his study and sat on the sofa under the window, with our plates on our laps. He asked me what I’d been reading. I had been reading nothing and said Jane Eyre. He told me he ought to pick it up again as well, then after a brief hesitation, ‘Do you know, your mother hasn’t had anything to drink this week. Nearly six days.’

Tensing, I said, ‘Really. Well, did you know my mother has …’ and then I stopped. His face was so open. He looked so certain that I would be gladdened by the fact. That he even thought it was worth reporting. ‘Did you know she –’

He waited and in another moment, my reply still half-said, he picked up his sandwich. A little piece of cucumber slid out. He said whoops. It was unbearable. I did not want to hurt him, I wanted to hurt her. In some direct way, not through him. I just said, ‘Six days isn’t even her personal best.’

My father peeled back a corner of bread and put the cucumber back in. ‘I suppose not, no.’

‘Do you want to talk about the —— though?’

‘The what?’

‘My diagnosis. The new doctor.’

He apologised. He said he was drawing a bit of a blank.

My mother hadn’t told him. I assumed, for a second, in deference to my text. But then, of course not. I felt so tired.

My father said, ‘You’ll have to give me a bit of a clue.’

I began to tell him what Robert had said.

The interest on his face became concern and then total grief as I kept going. He said goodness. ‘Goodness me.’ Over and over. I could tell he wanted to believe me when I said, as some sort of conclusion, that it is good because it means I’m not insane.

He said yes, okay. ‘I can see that and, supposedly, it does favour the brilliant. In fact –’ he put his plate aside and stood up, going over to his computer which was enormous and old, purchased with the money from Jonathan’s engagement ring ‘– let’s have a look.’

He poked at the keyboard with his index fingers, saying slowly out loud, ‘Famous … people … with … ——.’ He pressed one more key and looked up at the screen, squinting at the slideshow he was being offered. I watched him try, with some effort, to guide the mouse towards its target. And I felt happy, unaccountably, except that I was with him, in this room where we had spent so much time and where I had always felt alright, if it was just us.

He clicked and said, ‘Look, here we go. Right off the bat,’ reading out the name of the famous artist who appeared first. I looked at his black and white photograph and said it was a curious choice – the artist sitting on the edge of a bed, holding a rifle. ‘Didn’t he shoot himself in the head?’

My father seized the mouse. Another dead artist appeared, then a dead composer and two dead writers as he kept clicking, faster and faster, in search of a better example. A dead politician and a dead television presenter. I watched, aware that I should have been upset by an online roster of suicides, but I wasn’t. For everything it had done to me, I had outrun it. More brilliant people, famous and unknown, had not been able to although they would have done so much to save themselves and I had done so little. I did not deserve to be alive instead of them. They had suffered, and lost. I had been told by a doctor that I had managed very well. I should not have been so lucky.

After a series of dead actors, my father glanced over his shoulder and in a desperate voice said, ‘Who is that?’

‘He is a comedian who used to be addicted to painkillers. But he is still alive so that’s good.’

‘Yes.’ My father smiled feebly before turning back to the screen and skipping past a picture of a pop star he didn’t recognise either, in despair until finally he dropped back in his chair. He pronounced the name of an American poet, who was dead but of natural causes. Exhausted, but gratified. He said, ‘Well, I did not know that.’

I laughed and said, ‘Amazing.’

‘It is amazing. My daughter and the architect of postmodernism!’

I asked him if he thought we should go and make coffee and he leapt out of his chair and went ahead of me to the kitchen.

*

Late in the afternoon, at the front door about to leave, I hugged my father and with my cheek still pressed into his chest, the familiar feel and wool smell of his cardigan, I said, ‘Please don’t tell anyone about the ——. Ingrid or anyone. I haven’t told Patrick yet.’

He stepped back. ‘Why not?’

I looked down and smoothed out a kink in the carpet runner with my foot.

‘Martha?’

‘Because. I have been busy.’