Sorrow and Bliss(64)

I said no and made up some reason why not, but Patrick’s attention had shifted to whatever it was he’d just noticed on the side of my head.

‘What happened to your face?’

‘I don’t know.’

He reached out to touch it. I batted his hand away and started laughing.

‘Martha, what is happening?’ In frustration, he said for goodness sake, which made me laugh more.

‘Stop it. Martha, seriously. Stop. I’ve had enough.’

‘Of what? Of me?’

‘No. Damn it.’

That was very funny as well.

He was angry then and he said, ‘I’m going away, I’m not going to see you for two weeks. Why can’t you just be normal?’

I was overtaken with laughter then. I said, ‘I don’t know, Patrick. I don’t know! Do you know? I don’t know. It’s a mystery. A complete mystery!’ and I walked into the house, sufficiently enlarged by the exchange that I could hate my mother and my husband at the same time as I did, from then on. Intentionally and unintentionally, they had both ruined my life.

That night, I took my pink pill even though it didn’t really matter if I got better any more.





31

PATRICK WAS GONE for ten days. He texted. I did not reply except to tell him I was going to stay with Ingrid for the week, to which he said, ‘Great, have fun.’

I said to her, a few days. I said, to help you out. And although it was unbelievable, she was too desperate for help to query it. And she was perpetually tired, often in tears because of the children, otherwise shouting at Hamish. The house was untidy and always loud with appliances and television and her friends and their children coming and going all day, the crying and door-slamming in the night, and I was perfectly invisible. Even when I could not contain my grief to my room, nobody noticed. I did not go home after a few days. I was still there when Patrick got back. He texted me. I said Ingrid wanted me to stay another week.

Only once, in what became two weeks and then three, did my sister ask me how I was, and she did not query it either when I said I was amazing, or request information beyond that. I said nothing about Robert or Patrick. I told her I was not speaking to our mother and she was not interested in the specifics of why since she had been not-speaking to our mother at so many points, for so many reasons, in her own life.

By the time he drove to the house, it had been a month since Patrick and I had seen each other. He walked in the open front door and came to the kitchen. Ingrid and I were at the table, helping the boys with their tea.

He said, ‘It’s time to come home, Martha.’

I did not intend to go with him but Ingrid leapt up and said yes, yes definitely, and started making a lap of the kitchen, collecting up anything that was mine. I put down the fork I was holding, a little ring of sausage on the end of it that I had been trying to coax into her middle son’s mouth. I thought I had been very helpful. My sister’s relief was so plain and she was so insistent that I could just go now and Hamish could bring all my stuff later that I stood up and followed Patrick out to our car, both of us carrying the various possessions she’d put in our arms.

*

My anger towards him did not diminish in the weeks after that. When I was with him, it was acute, fed by the way he drank from a cup, his teeth-brushing, his work bag, his ringtone, his laundry at the bottom of the basket, the hair on the back of his neck, his effort to be normal, his buying batteries and mouthwash, saying you seem unhappy Martha. It made me mean and baiting in conversation, dismissive or contemptuous. I was ashamed afterwards, but I could not resist my anger in the moment. Even when I resolved to be better, to talk to him, a sentence that started well ended hatefully. And that was why, mostly, I avoided being in the same room, or home at all if he was there.

Alone, I felt grief. It was intense but not constant, and in between I felt an unnatural serenity that I had not experienced before. It was, I decided, the serenity of a cancer patient who has been fighting for so long, they are relieved by the discovery it is terminal, because they can stop now and just do what they like until the end.

The only thing Patrick said in reference to the new way of things was that it had occurred to him, the other day, that it had been a long time since he had seen me cry. He said, ‘I guess you’ve finally worn out the mechanism’ and ‘ha-ha’, the words not the sound.

That was his way of asking me to tell him what had happened. I said, ‘Can you start sleeping in a different room?’

*

My editor sent me an email about a column I had written. It was a Monday afternoon. I counted later, in my diary, six weeks since I saw Robert.

The subject was Feedback. My stomach didn’t plummet when I read it, or the first sentence of his many mistyped paragraphs. ‘Hey, apols it’s taken me ages to get back to you.’ Things, he said, had been insane. ‘Anywya,’ he went on, ‘some pretty gnarly issues with this one, think you’ve missed the mark, over all too harsh/judgy.’ He wanted me to start again. ‘Something funnier & more first person. Taek your time.’

I looked out the window, at the leaves of the plane tree, enormous and iridescent under the sun. On their passage back to the screen, my eyes stopped at a pattern of deep triangular dents in the wall above my computer. I wondered how the last email my editor had sent me like this had made me feel so humiliated and scared and hot and nauseated that I had risen out of the chair I was sitting in now, crossed to the cupboard and returned with the iron and, holding it over my head, driven it nose first into the wall over and over and over. This time I just felt very still. I said oh. That was when I knew I was better, the pills Robert gave me had worked.